Addiction, Power, and Powerlessness

Bridges to Recovery
by Jo-Ann Krestan

(Page 3 of 5)

The ecology of addiction in a multicultural society requires us, as family therapists and addiction counselors, to re-examine two core ideas that have historically guided our treatment of addiction in the United States: power and powerlessness. Pride, false pride, and shame are closely related concepts and must also be viewed in a multicultural context.

Power and powerlessness are concepts laden with multiple meanings. Understanding the ecology of addiction as it relates to a particular individual or group requires us to first think about these concepts in a generic way and to then particularize them to the individual or group. The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous and family systems thinkers like Gregory Bateson based their beliefs about the nature of addiction on the Western European view, which is primarily "power over." I will address the concept of "power over" at some length, because traditional addiction treatment in the United States, often wedded to a twelve-step approach, evolved from this Western European view. It is in the context of this view that addicts are asked to embrace the idea of powerlessness over their addiction. Only then, we tell them, can they regain power over their life. The first step in recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous, the dominant paradigm for most addiction treatment in the United States, occurs when addicts recite, "[We] admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable." This admission of powerlessness that AA insists on is key to the shift in the addict's belief system and crucial to dismantling what Karen Horney (1937) calls "neurotic pride." In his concept of the symmetrical structure of "alcoholic pride" Gregory Bateson (1972) too recognized the necessity for addicts to shift their stance from one that asserts domination over the self, others, and the environment to one that accepts the reality of limitation, a concept that is foreign to our Western culture.

It is necessary to broaden our thinking about what it means to have power or to be powerless and examine what it is about these prevailing views of power that can set the stage for addiction.

Kinds of Power

In her book Understanding Race, Ethnicity, and Power, Pinderhughes(1989) wrote:

People experience the presence or absence of power in many areas of life. For power is a systemic phenomenon, a key factor in functioning.... Internal power is manifest in the individual's sense of mastery or competence. The power relationships between people determine whether their interactions are characterized by dominance-subordination or equality. These styles of interaction are, in turn, affected by the status and roles assigned within the group or the larger society.

There are four related kinds of power:

• Individual
• Interpersonal
• Socio/Cultural
• Spiritual

Let us first deconstruct these kinds of power and posit how addicts think of each of them. I believe that addicts, in their addiction, identify with the dominant discourse of "power over" and that they must learn to view this discourse as "power to" if they are to recover from their addictions.

Individual Power

Individual "power to" is synonymous with empowerment and includes feelings of self-control, subjectivity, and the ability to define one's own life. It is the power to choose. For example, although we have no say about the family of origin we are born to, we can learn to make choices about family relationships that empower rather than victimize us. For the addict, "power to" is the power to surrender, a paradox I examine later in this chapter.

Individual "power over" may extend to total control of one's feelings or to the illusion of total control over one's life. Gender-linked messages about the control of feelings, such as the suppression of male vulnerability or of female anger, teach people that they have individual power over their feelings, thereby constricting normal emotional behavior. Individual "power over" denies the need to act in a context with others. Those who insist on having this kind of power will have difficulty submitting to authority. Any absence of control is viewed by them as being controlled and therefore out of control. For example, being a member of the crew on a sailboat rather than the captain may be experienced as being powerless, rather than simply as being a team player. The individual who must have "power over" will have difficulty relinquishing control when cooperation is needed. For example, the addict says, "I can control my habit. I have power over my addiction."

Interpersonal Power

Interpersonal "power to" is the power to be heard in a group, perhaps to become the leader. It is the power to make choices and take positions about what one will or will not do, rather than just react to situations in relationships. For the addict, "power to" means the ability to leave bar friends and go to an AA meeting. It empowers addicts to exercise a healthy choice, such as to amend their relationships in sobriety.

However, interpersonal "power to" can lead to "power over." One's power to enlist in a cause may become institutionalized leadership, a legitimized form of "power over." Although "power over" may start benignly, it is vulnerable to becoming a power over others that denies equality and becomes exploitative, unjust, and even violent. There can be no "power over" without relative inequality (Sebastian, 1992). Our institutionalized "power over" that emanated from the Eurocentric subjugation of what became these United States is White, male, Protestant, and heterosexual.

The addict, desperate to hold on to "power over," says, "I will overpower your efforts to control my chemical use. I will control you." The addict's expression of "power over" might be annoying manipulative behavior or actual physical coercion.

Culture, like power, is a systemic rather than a static process. Falicov (conversation with author, 1998) points out that it is a dialogical process, with certain cultural attributes being highlighted in interaction with others.

Sociocultural Power

Sociocultural power is group power. For a group, "power to" may mean a centralized position (rather than marginalization), access to resources, or political power. That is, "power to" is the right to define the rules, control the discourse, select the language. For the addict, sociocultural "power to" means becoming part of a reference group that values sobriety.

Sociocultural "power over" is power that privileges certain groups at the expense of others, as demonstrated by race and class discrimination. A group that exerts "power over" creates inequality among groups. For example, immigrants come to the United States to find the "good life" portrayed in the media, but their success often depends on which race or class they belong to. It is clear that success and power in the United States are synonymous with material comfort. Immigrants of color are frequently denied access to the better-paying jobs. These people may be highly skilled, well-educated individuals who were relatively well compensated for their work in their country of origin. It is a shock for them to come in search of the "good life" only to experience a profound loss of status inflicted by a more powerful sociocultural group (Espiritu, 1997).

The original European colonists decimated the American Indians and warred with the Mexicans who once were in possession of much greater territory; their descendants interned the Japanese during World War II, despised the first Catholic Irish and Italian immigrants, and were, in general, intolerant of difference. Those addicts whose sociocultural reference group has "power over" feel more powerful than do those whose group lacks such power. This encourages the illusion in the former that they have power over their addiction.

Spiritual Power

Spiritual power comes from how we think about our relationship with the world around us. This larger picture includes self and others, spirit (in AA terms, "Higher Power"), the natural world, destiny or fate, the meaning of death. Spiritual "power to" is the ability to transform the self. It gives us courage and compassion when we meet our existential edges. spiritual "power to" is the power of Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. For the addict, it is the ability to, in the face of powerlessness, find the spiritual strength to exert power to obtain a whole, healthy, sober life.

Spiritual "power over" stems from the belief that one has a direct line to God, a relationship that ultimately privileges one to have power over others. Such a belief may be inflicted by a leader, doctrines of the church, laws of state, or cultural expectations. Spiritual "power over" is demonstrated by our efforts to control the natural world with technology. As I write this, there is a summit in Kyoto to address a result of power over nature — global warming. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dammed rivers and flooded whole towns, overgrazing has decimated vast grasslands, and altering the landscape has caused houses on hillsides in California to slide into mud. The Eurocentric values held by the early colonists in this country encouraged them to subdue the wilderness, tame the rivers, and conquer indigenous peoples. Man's persistent efforts to control nature are demonstrated everywhere.

For the addict, spiritual "power over" is invincibility, perfection. The addict says, "I am my own Higher Power. No God has power over me. I am the master of my fate. I can control my own destiny."

Whatever their "values of origin" on power, addicts entering the treatment system in the United States will be exposed to the hegemony of the twelve-step approach to recovery. This approach has created widespread belief that recovery begins with admission of powerlessness over a drug, but what powerlessness means to each of us is intimately tied to our ideas about power. We must understand the sometimes equivocal uses of power in our dominant discourse.

Power and the Dominant Discourse

A dominant discourse is the central story of a culture as it arises from assumptions about what is normative. It is sustained by language. Discourses are not equally privileged. According to Hare-Mustin (1994), "The dominant discourse is the one that supports and reflects the prevailing ideology of those in power" (p. 20).

The dominant discourse on power in the United States is "power over" as opposed to "power to." Hayton (1994) asserts that it evolved from European beliefs and traditions that came with the colonization of North America.

The traditions that Europeans brought to America were:

• an attitude of moral superiority,
• a belief that the universe was created to serve the needs of man,
• an intellectual and religious intolerance,
• advanced military equipment, and
• a natural inclination to be violent toward one another. (P. 105)

These beliefs and traditions became the framework for the dominant discourse on power, by those in power, in the United States today.

Language and Induction into the Dominant Discourse

Language constructs reality in ways that marginalize or centralize, because of the assumptions of power inherent in the dominant discourse. Social lines are often constructed between sexual orientations, races, classes, and genders. In the United States these lines translate to institutionalized "power over." Although we have supposedly shunned the assimilationist ideology of the melting pot, we still attempt to induct newcomers into our values.

Race

We use the word race as though it were an objective reality instead of a social construction. Race is historically a biological term referring to physical characteristics of different peoples. However, as Zack (1995) points out, "There are no genetic markers for race.... The ordinary concept of race has dialectically ridden on an assumption of racial purity that has been used to racialize dominated groups as it suited dominant interests" (p. xvi). Pinderhughes (1989) concurs: "Over time, race has acquired a social meaning in which these biological differences, via the mechanism of stereotyping, have become markers for status assignment within the social system... a status assignment based on skin color" (p. 71).

Historically, the dominant discourse on race in the United States placed "Whiteness" at the center, largely unexamined. Racism was studied for years in terms of its effects on Black identity rather than its effects on White identity; that is, the dominant discourse has portrayed racism as a problem for people of color rather than as a problem for all. Fine, Weiss, Powell, and Wong (1997) point out that "White standpoints, privileged standpoints, are still generally taken as the benign norm or, in some cases, the oppressive standard — either way escaping serious scrutiny" (p. viii). McIntosh (1998) examines the context that defines a White person's experience:

As a White person, without even consciously defining myself as White, there are dozens of ways in which my skin color privileges me in everyday life, and I may barely realize them.

• When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

• I can remain oblivious to the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

• I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race. (P. 149)

It is Whites, however, who are most often unconscious of race. People of color are always conscious of it. Toni Morrison (1997) says, "I have never lived, nor has any of us, in a world in which race did not matter" (p. 3).

Gender

Language creates gender as dichotomous: heterosexual or homosexual; male or female. The centrality of White male heterosexuality is at the center of our discourse on gender. Building on McIntosh's work, Crowfoot and Chesler (1996) built their own list of White male privileges and behaviors, which often remain just below our level of consciousness. Here are two examples:

• We [White males] feel and act freer than others to deviate from group ground rules, expectations, and "appropriate" group behavior (e.g., sitting outside a circle, coming late to a meeting, announcing alternative pressing tasks, etc.)

• We can afford to limit our efforts to talk with, seek out, and work with women and people of color to those with whom we agree or feel comfortable. (Pp. 210-211)

Although other cultures value power differently in some spheres, male heterosexual power is almost universally valued:

Our response to the idea of power cannot be separated from what women have known about power, not only from being powerless but from watching the powerful. As we explore the issue of power, we necessarily use language and concepts which contain the assumptions of a destructively power-using, power-seeking culture, and these are reflected in the choices we see for ourselves. (Goodrich, 1991a, p. 4)

The powerful who are being watched by Goodrich's women are those who enlist in the White, male, heterosexual Euro-American worldview of who has power and why. The women are watching, and so are the indigenous peoples in the United States, who have historically been overpowered, enslaved or colonized, and the immigrants, who have been pressured to assimilate, acculturate, abide by, and even emulate this Euro-American dominant discourse about power. When people from other cultures move to this country, they are expected to conform to the dominant discourse. Part of the acculturation process includes the gradual acquisition of views about what power is and who has it. Those who acquire these views of "power over" may soon despair of having it.

The results of women's socialization are pathologized. The inflammatory Moynihan Report in the 1960s pathologized female heads of household among African Americans, shifting, many scholars feel, the responsibility for Black poverty to the Black family rather than to the institutionalized structures of oppression. In the 1980s, the addiction recovery movement used language to define a whole syndrome, namely, codependency (Beattie, 1987); the idea subtly reconstructed women's experience (Krestan and Bepko, 1990).

It is significant that the universal risk factor for alcoholism, across all cultures, is gender. That is, men are more at risk for addiction than women. Women are at risk for addiction primarily consequent to their relationships with men.

Copyright © 2000 by Jo-Ann Krestan

About the Author

Jo-Ann Krestan is a leading marriage and family therapist and addiction counselor who has appeared on such shows as Oprah and 20/20 and is co-author of The Responsibility Trap: A Blueprint for Treating the Alcoholic Family. Her other books include Singing at the Top of Our Lungs and Too Good for Her Own Good. She lives in Surry, Maine, and Castle Valley, Utah.