Addiction, Power, and Powerlessness, Part 2

Bridges to Recovery
by Jo-Ann Krestan

(Page 4 of 5)

Sexual Orientation

Sexual orientation is another example of how the lens of the dominant discourse distorts our vision and privileges one group at the expense of another while allegedly creating static categories between people.

The lyrics of a song in Kiss of the Spider Woman(Ebb, McNally, & Kander, 1992), a musical that depicts two men, a political rebel and a gay drug addict, sharing a jail cell, express the divisiveness between categories of sexual orientation. Valentin, the Marxist revolutionary, angrily sings to Molina, the homosexual: You're making me sick, that prissy whine. Watch me now, I draw the line. So you stick to your side, and I'll stick to mine. Never, ever cross this line! The dominant discourse on individual sexual preference has drawn lines, and the assumptions both creating and deriving from those lines serve to perpetuate the discourse on sexual preference as clear, divisive, and necessary.

Class

The dominant discourse on class in America is that anyone with enough will can achieve the upward mobility of the American dream. Those who share this attitude about achieving "success" insidiously punish those who don't acquire, or aspire to acquire, it. People of color, women, the less educated, those for whom English is a second language, the differently abled — all are frequently prevented from acquiring "success" and are then shamed or held back because they are not "successful." McGoldrick and Giordano (1996) state, "Class increasingly organizes the United States in very insidious ways, including structuring the relationships among ethnic groups" (p. 16).

Of the relationships between class and other demographics, Kliman (1998) writes as follows:

Class involves multiple relationships to economic and other social structures: race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, physical and mental well-being, and geography. It also involves relationships between classes. One's economic and social circumstances exist in relation to those of others. (Pp. 50-51)

Definitions of class shift with context... as economic And other forms of domination operate together. (P. 51)

The media creates and promotes the language and images that support a dominant discourse on class.

The Broadway musical Miss Saigon depicts a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese orphan girl who falls in love with an American GI during the fall of Saigon in the Vietnam War. (This production created a huge controversy about casting when it was originally cast with mixed-race actors.) The "Engineer" is first her pimp and later her hope when he sees that her mixed race child, Tam, can be their ticket to America. This fictional love story accurately depicts how people from other cultures frequently view living in the United States. The pimp sings:

What's that I smell in the air,
the American dream?
Sweet as a new millionaire,
the American dream!
Luck by the tail! How can you fail?
And best of all, it's for sale!
The American Dream! (Boublil, Maltby, & Schönberg, 1990)

The American dream the Engineer sings about promises a life of freedom, freedom to own land, start a business. The American dream includes the promise that if you work hard enough, you can, with a little luck, succeed in the United States. It is the promise that has lured immigrants since the discovery of America. Hayton (1994) claims that the first people to come were "dissenters, misfits, criminals, adventurers, indentured servants, and other risk-takers... [they had] the characteristics that helped the settlers survive in the wilderness, and these are the characteristics that stimulated invention and creativity and accounted for material progress throughout American history" (p. 105). People come to America to find material wealth and freedom from a repressive government.

Differences Among Differences

One difficulty with understanding difference is the human predilection to promote personal differences as so unique that no one else can understand them. Kliman and others demonstrate that it is the intersections between class, race, gender, and other demographics that construct "hierarchies" of oppression and shape family life. Almeida's (1994) hierarchy of oppression is created by demographics that describe collective consciousness and the external experience of self-power. Shame, in contrast, is the internalized experience. For example, a White, middle-class lesbian who is not "out" may be externally located higher up on the hierarchy of oppression. Her internalized experience, however, may place her somewhere else. Although one may claim that one's oppression is worse than another's, no one totally knows another's shame. In the United States, African Americans as a group are more oppressed externally than are Jews. However, a Jew may be more oppressed or internally feel more shame than an African American.

Whether one tells Polish jokes or queer jokes, language creates difference, and the resulting relationships of equal or unequal power. The perceived right to use language to make a joke at the expense of another illustrates an attitude of "power over."

Values of Origin in Western Culture

In describing her concept of ecological niche, Falicov (1995) writes, "Multiple contexts and the borderlands that result from the overlapping of contexts call to mind ecological spaces where access is allowed or denied, locations of partial perspectives where views and values are shaped and where power or powerlessness are experienced" (pp. 377-378).

Whatever ecological niche describes a particular family at a particular point in time, it is the values that extend across the parameters of that niche, that are, in my view, most relevant as risk or protection factors for addiction.

I am indebted to a friend (Lacy, personal communication, Feb. 12, 1997) for first using the phrase values of origin to signify the range of values that relate to the other ecologies as class, religion, and education, among others, but that derive from one's country of birth or ancestry.

In the United States the values of origin derive from European colonization and prize "power over" in all spheres: individual, interpersonal, sociocultural, and spiritual. These values of origin assume superiority. The induction of immigrants into this dominant discourse is so thorough that it disrupts the original values of immigrant groups. In general, "power over" is a Western value. It is maintained by those in power to protect their power. The dominant discourse on values in the United States today promotes competition, individuality, mastery, youth, health, ability, and material success. It allows one person, or a few, to exert all four kinds of power.

A notable example of this is one man, Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, who allegedly has said, "There won't be anything we won't say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go."

Gates, who is, according to USA Today (Mar. 4, 1998, p. 1), "... the nation's richest, most powerful businessman," is also the first business leader to defend himself before Congress. Gates was testifying in response to charges from his business rivals that Microsoft competes unfairly. The Senate is investigating whether to create new anti-trust legislation. Microsoft is "accused by competitors of ruthlessness. It is generally getting a public image as a greedy company out to control the world (p. 2A)."

The natural way these power holders think about their world was created and is supported by our country's dominant discourse. Those who have "power over" may not be conscious of their position, because it is their context, their difference, that predominates. It is only natural that the corrective context for recovery from attitudes dominated by Eurocentric idealization of "power over" — of excess and exploitation — and from the addictions they spawn is one of "power with."

Values of Origin in Other Cultures

Other cultures, compared to our Euro-American culture, have a very different discourse on power. For example, American Indians do not believe in power over the natural world. They strive for harmony with the environment and with nature. "A traditional Indian lives in harmony with the forces of life." (Simonelli, personal correspondence, January 15, 1998). As Coyhis puts it in chapter 3, "Indians look at it differently: you work with nature or the situation you are in; you understand that everything is interconnected. One of our values is to 'share the deer.' This value is the opposite of control; it's about sharing, it's about flow, it's about balance, and it's about rhythm."

Hispanic cultures view competition very differently from Euro-American culture. "White middle-class Americans stress individualism and actually value the individual in terms of his ability to compete for higher social and economic status. The Hispanic culture values those inner qualities that constitute the uniqueness of the person and his goodness in himself. To the Hispanic, family (familism) is more important than the individual" (Ho, 1987, p. 125).

Spirituality and religion are central to African Americans. Pinderhughes, Knox, McAddoo, and Boyd-Franklin emphasize the role of spirituality in the lives of African American clients and their families. Concepts of alcoholism among Whites, Blacks and Hispanics in the United States show widespread support for the concept of alcoholism as a disease, independent of ethnicity (Caetano, 1989). However, Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to think that alcoholism results from a violation of spiritual values and that addiction represents moral weakness. "Hispanics value the spirit and soul as much more important than the body and worldly materialism. A Hispanic person tends to think in terms of transcendent qualities such as justice, loyalty, or love. He is not preoccupied with mastering the world" (Ho, 1987, p. 127).

Spirituality is also central to the many different Indian nations in this country. Although belief systems vary widely among the more than five hundred federally recognized tribes, there are commonalities. These include a desire for harmony, a belief in the unseen world, and a belief in the interconnectedness of all life (Fleming and Manson, 1990).

Asian American and Pacific Islander communities have their own view of spirituality, one that is based on a history influenced by Confucianism and Buddhism. The tenets of their belief system include moderation in behavior, self-discipline, and harmony in relationships, derived from mutual loyalty and respect (Ho, 1987).

Interestingly, one of the most significant predictors of addiction — religious affiliation — is less studied than other demographic variables. Yet religious proscriptions regarding drinking, gambling, and other potential addictions are often highly correlated with drinking patterns.

The dominant discourse in the United States overtly prescribes equality for men and women, but covert power relationships between men and women are far from equal. African Americans are more likely than Whites to practice interpersonal gender equality. In her review of the literature on power relationships between Black spouses of varying social classes, Boyd-Franklin (1989) concludes that Black families appear to be more egalitarian than White couples. However, a high incidence of domestic violence suggests that this claim may represent more of an ideal than a reality.

Other countries with majority White populations also have different values of origin on some parameters as compared to the dominant discourse in the United States. The United Nations Development Report(1994) states:

Traditionally, women in Europe have enjoyed greater equality with men than have women in any other region. For example, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and France top all other countries in having women's health, education and income levels approach those of men.... Today, however, the gaps between men and women in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States are widening as a result of recent changes that have taken place in these countries... i.e., the rapid transfer from centrally-controlled to market economies.

Power and Addiction

The dominant discourse on "power over" in the United States creates a context in which those with this power inevitably fear losing it and those without it experience shame for not having it. Fear and shame are extremely uncomfortable feelings. Most of us spend our lives trying to avoid them. They are the demons that make our knowledge and acceptance of human limitation so painful.

Pinderhughes (1989) has noted a paradox in relation to power and vulnerability: "Paradoxically then, power can create greater vulnerability to powerlessness.... Those in positions of power can also develop a tendency to deny their own personal pain and ignore their experiences of powerlessness" (pp. 122-123).

Different ecological contexts have different levels of significance in the evolution of, an individual's addiction and in his or her recovery from it. Different ecological contexts also produce differing experiences of power and powerlessness in people, experiences that may seemingly contradict one another. Someone with a strongly developed sense of spiritual "power to" may sustain relative powerlessness in the socio-cultural arena without feeling powerless, and one whose sense of power is diminished interpersonally within the family may invoke race, class, or heterosexual privilege in order to feel powerful. Almeida (1994) suggests that there are hierarchies of oppression, but a person seemingly high on the objective hierarchy (e.g., being male) may still feel oppressed if he is low on another (e.g., class) in a context where gender is less important than class.

Understanding addiction requires us to recognize power and powerlessness on all levels and in all their complexities. I have worked with clinicians who believed that "objective" powerlessness causes addiction and that recovery from addiction is irrelevant to those who are socially oppressed; these clinicians claim that their clients have "nothing to get clean and sober for." I have also worked with clinicians who failed to realize the ravages of addiction in families who appear to be powerful (e.g., White, materially successful, and well educated). Power can make one peculiarly vulnerable to feelings of powerlessness, and power comes with a high price (e.g., the price of power that is attached to male privilege).

Celia Falicov stresses the interactional nature of power and how supposed power forms a culture all its own (Falicov, personal communication, 1998). For example, White physicians in a setting where they are expected to help those who are culturally different often experience powerlessness.

If it were only the powerlessness of the oppressed that leads to addiction, we would expect higher than average rates of drinking and addiction in marginalized groups. However, most studies indicate that African Americans drink less than Whites and that Hispanics in the United States have rates of drinking that are lower than the national average. It seems that, with very few exceptions, acculturation to dominant White values produces more addiction problems. In many groups, adolescents, who acculturate more readily, have higher rates of drinking and drug use than adults.

Feelings of powerlessness are significant stressors in the development of addiction, whether or not those feelings are tied to actual powerlessness. The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous — two White, heterosexual men (one a Wall Street broker and the other a physician) — understandably based their beliefs about addiction and its relationship to power on the Western view of "power over." The program they founded provides a set of beliefs designed to be an antidote for this kind of power.

Addicts take false pride in an idealized image of self as "illimitable." They experience limitation as powerlessness (Bepko and Krestan, 1985). Since limitation is the human condition, the necessary and inevitable outcome for those who hold any belief system that insists on absolute power or control is intense shame. Addicts and cultures addicted to "power over" do not tolerate limitation easily. They both thrive on the denial of human limitation. Yet the intoxication of feeling invincible is necessarily compromised by reality.

Addiction can seem like a near-perfect defense against reality for a while, a seemingly effective denial of limitation. Heroin can anesthetize the despair of powerlessness. Cocaine can create an illusion of invincibility. Alcohol can do both. Gambling's illusion of limitlessness can be exciting. Addiction becomes a means of overcoming feelings of powerlessness and, temporarily at least, eliminating fear and shame.

At first, addiction feels like power over feelings, others, circumstances. Then it overpowers the addict. The addict gradually loses all feelings of power; fear and shame replace them. At that point, the addict's only defense against the feelings of fear, shame, and powerlessness is to increase the consumption of alcohol or drugs in an effort to retrieve the feelings of power. The greater the effort addicts make to have power over their addiction, the more the substance overpowers them. Ultimately and paradoxically, the addiction renders them totally powerless. Reduced to powerlessness, addicts lie to themselves about their need for the addiction. They must sustain this lie with more addictive behavior.

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.