At the Bridgewater Addiction Center, part of Southeastern County Correctional Center in Bridgewater, Mass., they kept the 12-step meetings pretty simple. “My name is Michael, I’m an addict,” I would say. “And that’s why I’m in this stinking joint.” To me, that simple statement served as the guts of my recovery program. In a nutshell, I’d identified my problem-addiction-and recognized a strong incentive for solving it: getting out of jail. Did I really need much beyond that rock-bottom knowledge to stop taking drugs?
According to the growing number of “recovery experts,” the answer is a definite yes. A glance at any self-help section in the neighborhood bookstore will reveal dozens of recovery books that bear a remarkably similar theory, one that many Americans would probably find quite baffling as they looked back on their own uneventful childhoods. This theory holds that virtually everyone in this country is a product of a “dysfunctional family” (a whopping 96 percent of us, according to John Bradshaw, a leading author and lecturer in the recovery movement), and that we have all experienced some form of traumatic abuse as children. In turn, this childhood “abuse” inevitably results in some form of adult dysfunctional behavior–often some form of addiction-the solution for which is a concerted effort to “heal the inner child” through 12-step programs, daylong seminars and workshops, extended psychotherapy or a variety of psychological exercises. That this ill-defined childhood abuse can be something as nebulous as “a lack of a nurturing environment” ensures that we can all get on the victim bandwagon. It also depreciates those cases of genuine physical, sexual and psychological abuse.
At Bridgewater, I never spent much time “getting in touch with my inner child” or exploring my “codependency” or my “adult child” status. It must have been the milieu that prevented us from using that kind of language. When you’re in a place with bars on the windows and concertina wire capping the wall, buzzwords and pop psychology can seem mightily irrelevant.
So I stuck to what I knew, namely that drugs were killing me and I had to stop using them if I wanted to live. I deduced this by looking at where I was and where I’d been. I started smoking pot when I was 13, and by 16 I was fooling with harder drugs. At 17 1 was involved in an armed robbery and wound up graduating from jail before I graduated from high school. From there the process simply repeated itself for the next 13 years, until I woke up in Bridgewater in May 1990, 30 years old and fading fast.
By the time I was released I still hadn’t discovered my inner child or found anyone in my family to blame for my predicament. Instead I kept at the forefront of my mind that drugs were the cause of my problems and the way to quit was just to quit-that simple. I decided the best way was to cut ties with my hometown and try a new start in Boston. I chose Boston for no better reason than that there was a bus running from Bridgewater to the Fort Point Shelter, where, since I had no money, no job and no place to stay, I could have a roof over my head. Not much of a plan, but I knew if I kept clean then the rest would probably fall into place.
And it did. I found work moving furniture for $5 an hour, and stuck to it. After work I would write, trying to develop a talent in which I’d shown promise in high school. After being homeless for six months, I sold an account of my experiences to the Boston Phoenix. I was ecstatic. The money allowed me to get off the streets and into an apartment, and seeing my work in print encouraged me to continue writing.
I probably couldn’t have made it without the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program. My quarrel is not with the basic philosophy behind the 12 steps, and certainly not with the mutual support that such networks as AA offer. But what was once a fairly simple program has been co-opted by the burgeoning recovery movement. The basic issue-for me, substance abuse-is now obscured by an endless supply of tangential issues. I remember walking out of an AA meeting when a woman began her introduction with a heavy sigh, saying, “My name is Jane, and it’s hard enough being an alcoholic, but to be a codependent, adult child, radical feminist lesbian trying to gain tenure at a patriarchal institution like Harvard… " She said it with a self-deprecating laugh, but still, her obsession with labels struck me as more neurotic than whatever those labels signified. At the time I was sleeping in Harvard Square’s Old Burying Ground graveyard because it was closer to my job than Fort Point Shelter, and every morning I would wake up next to two hard-core alcoholics who shared the ground with me. Some days, between the loneliness and the grungy day’s work that lay ahead, it was all I could do to keep from joining them for a morning jolt.
If I’d accepted the notion that my past was the determining factor in my present, or that I was saddled with a half dozen “codependencies” and addictions, I probably would have. But I had my doubts about how much of this psychoanalysis was a genuine effort to grow and how much was simply indulgence. Perhaps if one has $200 to spend on a daylong seminar with John Bradshaw-almost a year’s wage for a Chinese peasant-things aren’t really so bad.
There are millions of people in this world who every day face a real-life litany of brutalities and obscenities: war, disease, poverty, hunger and crime to name but a few. Surely our notion of a recoverable childhood would seem useless to them as they attempt to meet their daily exigencies, and surely they know better than we that life is rarely fair and that there is sometimes nothing to be done about that. It makes me wonder what advice they would have for this lost tribe of inner children that have so recently taken up residence in the psyches of the American adult. The answer, I think, would be the same as I told myself after 15 years of looking for easy answers to life’s pain: “Grow up.”
