Addiction, Power, and Powerlessness, Part 3

Bridges to Recovery
by Jo-Ann Krestan

(Page 5 of 5)

Vicious Cycles

Addiction is a specialized example of power gone awry. Indeed, "power over" can never be sustained. When one's power is threatened, one must exert more energy to acquire and maintain it. Similarly, addiction to alcohol or other drugs requires more alcohol or drugs to sustain the same level of euphoria, or freedom from discomfort. Addiction and "power over" create a vicious cycle in which the individual first insists on absolute "power over" and then recognizes and fears limitation or powerlessness.

For example, the alcoholic with false pride in his heart and a drink in his hand asserts that he is master of his fate and captain of his soul. He will not hear the word no to himself. He cannot recognize his own weakness or limitations and cannot say, "I can't do this. I'm too tired, I'm too frightened. I don't know how."

In the film Clean and Sober, Michael Keaton plays a White, middle-class addict. While in a rehab center, he is told that he cannot make a phone call to his broker. Nonetheless, he uses his counselor's phone without permission to make the call. He is, after all, master of the universe. He is like the alcoholic described in the early alcoholism literature as "his majesty, the Baby" (Tiebout, 1954). When the counselor, who is Black, again tells Keaton that he cannot use the phone, Keaton rages at him, cursing him and mocking the amount of money he makes. Rendered powerless, Keaton reacts to his fear with rage-filled racism in an attempt to invoke power over the counselor. Pinderhughes (1989), in her understanding of power in all its complexity, would interpret this scene as portraying Keaton's use of the "stance, 'better than' to manage anxiety" (p. 120).

Anyone who works with addiction recognizes this scene, recognizes the rage of the powerless asserting power. In Clean and Sober the addict is one-down, with respect to the counselor. However, in the larger social context the counselor's skin color places him one-down with respect to the addict's privileged Whiteness. The struggle feels symmetrical to the character Keaton plays as he shouts that he is equal, or even one-up. Denial of his powerlessness manifests as a need to feel power over someone else. Shamed by his powerlessness over addiction, the addict tries to shame the other by resorting to classism and racism in an attempt to bolster his false pride in his superiority and independence.

Singer, Valentin, Baer, and Jia (1992) deconstructed the case of Juan, an alcoholic Puerto Rican immigrant, by placing his "disease" of alcohol dependence within the socioeconomic, sociocultural, and political contexts of his life. Citing research data on unemployment and alcohol consumption and on the sense of powerlessness as a correlate to drinking, they presented Juan as someone who, deprived of economic power, drank to assert his masculinity in other culturally prescribed ways. They cited other researchers who concluded that "increased drinking and rising rates of problem drinking were products of the consequent sense of worthlessness and failure in men geared to defining masculinity in terms of being un buen proveedor(Canino and Canino, in Singer et al., 1992, pp. 537-538).

Machismo is widely assumed to be integrally related to Latino definitions of masculinity. However, stereotypical machismo neglects broader meanings in favor of constricted negative ones. Bacigalupe (in press) discusses the distortion of the idea of machismo: "Machismo ideology spreads the belief that men are violent because they are 'crazy, alcoholic, uneducated, poor, or from under-developed countries.'" These expressions narrow the scope of the problem, so it is perceived as an issue that affects only some individuals and not others, thus making unequal gender arrangements invisible. When machismo is used to explain power dynamics, the original meaning of the term is distorted. Traditionally, machismo was utilized as a label to name the efforts that men make at being in charge of the well-being of their family. When addiction results from a failure at being un buen proveedor, it also prevents the man from being employable. — a vicious cycle.

In cultures where drinking is defined as a male prerogative, or a badge of masculinity, drinking and using drugs are ways to assert masculinity when other avenues of power are closed. This is as true in dominant cultures as in marginalized cultures. I am not aware of any culture that sanctions women's drinking more than men's. For many years I practiced family and marital therapy in an affluent suburb of Manhattan. Among my clients were men who held seats on the stock exchange. Following the market correction in 1987 called Black Monday, the number of marriages affected by addiction escalated sharply. (I also saw an increase in related problems, such as spouse abuse. I shall never forget one woman who, having gone to her doctor after being beaten by her alcoholic husband, also a physician, was told that she suffered from "husbanditis." I told her I guessed that meant "inflammation of the husband.")

Even where providing is not an issue, as for immigrant men who are well off, drinking is associated with status. Almeida (personal communication, 1998) points out that for affluent Asian Indian men "it's even more about their definition of capitalism and making it in the White world. If they drink Dewar's and make deals they have made it." In these examples the vicious cycle goes like this:

1. He feels/has power and is afraid of losing it. He is ashamed of his fear, or He feels powerless and is ashamed of his powerlessness: He engages in addictive behavior, i.e., drinking, drug abuse, violence, competitiveness: he gains illusory control over the fear and shame.

2. The control begins to slip, and he is more frightened, more ashamed.

3. He tries harder to regain control and power, but it now takes more of the drug, the drink, the power, to achieve the same effect.

4. He finally becomes totally powerless to stop the addiction.

5. Admitting powerlessness creates more fear and shame. He is again caught in the addiction.

The Pride Cycle: Replacing "Power Over" with "Power To"

Bateson (1972) viewed interactions as either symmetrical or complementary. Initially, addicts assert a symmetrical relationship with their drug, insisting that they are "equal to" it, that they can control themselves and it. As they become increasingly out of control, their relationship to the drug becomes complementary. The drug is one-up, and they are one-down. The struggle of addicts to continually prove mastery over their addiction is isomorphic with the dominant discourse of "power over" in the United States. Either power or addiction, when out of control, eventually establishes a complementary interaction wherein the greater the power of one side, the greater the powerlessness of the other. Alcoholics Anonymous provides a context for recovery from addiction that acknowledges the need to break the reciprocal cycle of power and powerlessness of the addiction. In breaking the denial of their powerlessness over the drug and the denial of their need for others, and in breaking the myth of self power when they feel temporarily powerful, addicts are restored to empowerment, or "power to." Bepko and Krestan have called this context of recovery the restoration of a "correct complementarity" with the world; it is an acknowledgment of Mitakuye Oyasin, which is Lakota for "all my relations" or interconnectedness.

The top of the pride cycle in Figure 1-1 depicts the addict as master of the universe. Aided by alcohol or other drugs, addicts maintain an image of being in control, needing no one, being all-powerful and unconstrained by limitation. In its publication Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions(1952) Alcoholics Anonymous describes this spiritual state as "self-will run riot." In this position, alcoholics are in the complementary, or one-up, position to others. They insist on "power over." This is very similar to the dominant discourse on power in the larger society.

Alcoholics cannot maintain this state, because they are not perfectible and are never really beyond needing others. They need a drug to bolster their illusions. The drug, which they use to maintain the illusion of remaining in control, then paradoxically renders them powerless and out of control. They topple from Olympus. At the bottom, they experience themselves as shame bound, as nothing, as inadequate. Here they have "hit bottom, surrendered" (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 19). Now they are teachable; they acknowledge their powerlessness, the unmanageability of their life. They accept help from others.

Paradoxically, once they admit powerlessness, addicts receive the power to rebuild their life. Berenson (1991) says, "Optimally powerlessness is a way-station between control and empowerment" (p. 75). The addict is now in what Figure 1-1 depicts as the middle zone of right relationship. Addicts at this point have an appropriate appreciation for their interconnectedness and interdependency with others. They accept limited control ("I cannot take the first drink"). They accept limited dependence on a community that acknowledges interconnectedness. The zone of right relationship is the zone of limitation, humility, moderation, balance, and mutuality. In terms of race and gender issues, it is a zone of sharing of power and psychological androgyny. This is "correct complementarity."

Addicts do not stay in this zone of right relationship for long before they tell themselves that they got sober because they were the chosen one, that they got sober because they were smart. They believe that they survived the earthquake not because they were lucky but because they were special. Before long, they begin to inch up to the top of the cycle again. They might not do this with alcohol, they might do it with sex, they might do it with cocaine. They might substitute working an eighty-hour week or gambling, or they might substitute power over others. Before long they are vulnerable again to toppling. If at the top they suffer from "self-will run riot," an excess of self, destruction of the self is inevitable and they are back down at the bottom of the cycle. Hubris calls forth nemesis. Grandiosity breeds self-destruction.

The Powerlessness over Addiction

Clearly, power and powerlessness are key ideas in the dominant paradigm for addiction treatment in the United States, which is based on the model of treatment promoted by AA. This organization maintains general service offices in more than forty-three countries, and there are meetings in more than one hundred.

Let's look at the first steps in the Twelve Step program of AA: "[We] admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that because of it our lives had become unmanageable." Whatever the language of surrender, it is through accepting powerlessness over addiction that the addict is empowered to resume a sober life. A context for recovery from addiction provides a space where the addict can replace false pride in "power over" with healthy pride in "power to." Such a context promotes interconnectedness and community, a recognition of one's interdependence with others. It is a corrective context, correcting for the false beliefs in absolute power and autonomy. This context need not be the twelve-step programs and their derivatives. However, the principles of the twelve-step programs — primarily, accepting that one is not God and accepting "limited control" and "limited dependence" (Kurtz, 1982) — are, I believe, fundamental to recovery from addiction.

The principles of a twelve-step program are actually more syntonic with the values of origin of marginalized groups than they are with the values of the culture's dominant group. Living in the zone of right relationship is fundamentally more in concert with the values of those whose values have traditionally fallen outside the dominant discourse of "power over." It is precisely the "power over" of the dominant discourse that requires the in-depth ego deflation of hitting bottom. Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans — all prescribe the humility, balance, moderation, mutuality and acceptance of limitation that characterize the zone of right relationship, which is inherent in the recovery process.

The Dominant Discourse On Difference

Despite a growing ethnic diversity in the U.S. population, it is still White male Euro-American ideas about power that prevail. Those ideas are refuted by a program of recovery that values "power to" and avoids "power over." Sixty-five years from now the White Euro-American majority will be in the minority in the United States. The continuing ethnic shift in our population will present rich and exciting opportunities for learning and experiencing different cultures. It will also necessitate a shift in the power structure at every level of society. When the present majority becomes the minority, White Euro-Americans will have to integrate a new reality about their power position: their dominance in the United States is eroding.

Asking the Culturally Powerless to Accept Powerlessness in Recovery

The dominant discourse tells us that everyone can attain "power to," but this is a falsehood in a society that still oppresses and marginalizes so many groups: women, people of color, the poor, the differently abled, and so on. Addiction helps those without power feel temporarily powerful. Although it can frequently substitute an illusory, distorted feeling of power for real empowerment, ultimately it robs the powerless of any chance to have "power to."

It is difficult to ask a person who is part of a powerless group to accept powerlessness. We need, then, to separate powerlessness due to oppression from powerlessness due to the addiction, which may have arisen to ease the pain of the original powerlessness. Only then can we ask members of already disempowered groups to accept powerlessness over their addiction. We cannot ask disempowered peoples to fight the "disease" of alcoholism without also locating this "disease" within a larger social system whose diseases include racism, sexism, classism, and oppression of all kinds.

Powerlessness, as Alcoholics Anonymous uses it, means relinquishing power over the addiction or relinguishing illusory power over one's self and others in exchange for the power to be in community and the power to direct one's own life. Such acceptance of powerlessness over the chemical (as opposed to "power over") is itself an empowering act.

White Bison, a Native American Indian consulting group, teaches a road to sobriety that integrates the medicine wheel with the twelve-step teachings of AA to adapt substance abuse recovery to Native American culture. In an ongoing dialogue with Richard Simonelli, a staff member of White Bison, I exchanged views on the pride cycle and its application to American Indian groups. In personal correspondence with me in 1997, Simonelli wrote the following:

What hit me immediately is that the band running through the middle of the pride cycle (the zone of right relationship) might be called the Red Road in the current Indian sobriety movement. The Red Road is free of harmful extremes and cultivates human decency. What also struck me is that the top of the pride cycle really characterizes most of our culture. The dominant culture plays God while those who are different are forced to the bottom of the pride cycle. Is it any wonder that there is so much addiction and hurt?

My other reflection is about powerlessness and surrender. Since the White male system is about dominance and power, it is natural that an alcoholic would finally feel humbled when he hits bottom. He finally meets something that is more powerful than he — alcohol, which is cunning, baffling, powerful. Since he's on a power trip, he calls it "powerlessness" when he finally meets something bigger than he is. He surrenders to something that has bested him. It's the language of dominance and challenge, win and lose. An Indian person who still lives in his or her culture might not use the same language. Power is not the issue. Rather, it's simple healing from misuse/abuse of a substance.... A traditional Indian lives in harmony with the forces of life. You might say he or she lives in surrender. But there is a language gap there. Surrender is harmony, but a person can have "power with" rather than "power over" while living in harmony. I think Indians see these distinctions intuitively.

This passage illustrates beautifully how even our language of recovery uses the language of the dominant discourse to explain what it is we are recovering from. Addicts in AA say, "[We] admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that because of it our lives had become unmanageable." In the dominant discourse, pride is in having power and in managing one's life. Addicts have to admit that addiction robs them of power and of the ability to manage. Other treatment groups may use language that is more meaningful to them. Many of these groups start by rewording the Twelve Steps. One Native American first step reads as follows: "We admit that because of our abuse of alcohol and other drugs, we have been unable to care for ourselves." In this example, one's recovery is from the inability to take responsibility for caring for oneself.

In Many Roads, One Journey, Charlotte Kasl offers sixteen steps for "discovery and empowerment." The first step reads as follows:

"We admit we were out of control with/powerless over — — , but have the power to take charge of our lives and stop being dependent on substances or other people for our self-esteem and security."

The universality is striking. Each version of the first step in an addiction treatment program requires that the addict realize that he or she is not the Higher Power. Each version of the program stresses balance, interconnectedness, "power to," and "power with." These are precisely those values that the dominant discourse has minimized. I am not implying that all addicts need to get clean and sober through a twelve-step program of recovery. I am suggesting that addicts recover in a context that stresses community, interconnectedness, deflation of false pride or ego, and acknowledgment and subsequent healing of shame. I am further suggesting that this context approximates the values of origin of many groups that are not White and Eurocentric.

The Shame of Difference and Empowerment Through Community

I have discussed here the vicious cycle of power and powerlessness, how power needs constant reinforcement to maintain itself and how any hint of powerlessness may give rise to attempts at "power over." Power and powerlessness are reciprocally related. They may be external or internal. Both may provoke shame.

There is a human hunger to belong. Our initial feelings of powerlessness and shame are often inseparable from experiences of difference. Difference, like power, is relational, interactional. It is a feeling that is experienced only in particular contexts. My ecology — that is, my race, gender ethnicity, religion, class, or sexual orientation — may make me feel a difference that is profoundly alienating, in either the context of my traditional culture of origin or in the context of the culture I am acculturating to. A Latina adolescent who wants the freedom to go out with her girlfriends and faces her mother's restrictions and anxieties about the threat to her virginity if she is given freedom may feel ashamed of being different (Garcia-Preto, 1998). A college-educated Anglo woman who has been sexually molested (as have many female addicts) may feel a shame she attributes to being different. An African American male who is lighter skinned than his siblings may be tormented for looking different. Shame frequently arises from feeling different whether or not that difference is discriminated against by society in a particular instance, and whether the shame is created by external or internal circumstances.

Finally, the shame that attends addiction can be a shame that robs the addict of all dignity, all hope. Since shame does not heal in isolation, some sort of healing group context is optimal for healing shame. As Kurtz (1982) points out, "The typical meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous is a model of the living out of the shared honesty of mutual vulnerability openly acknowledged that the historical narrative has pointed out to be the essential dynamic of AA therapy" (p. 75).

Lili

Lili, a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict is Chicano and Navaho. Lili learned at a tender age the price that is too frequently paid for being different:

"In public school all of us who spoke any language other than English were severely punished... my brother was three years older and I was six... I noticed that if any of us spoke our native language the White teachers, because that's all there was, would either smack us on the hand or hit us on the head. I was so tiny... would just observe, I remember once that my oldest sister disappeared from the classroom... they had locked her up in the cellar because she wouldn't speak English that day... and my brother had already been to the cellar; he had been whipped with paddles, and he had been whipped with horse harness straps, and his hands had bruises from rulers, his head had bumps... and he was a lot slower at learning... they threatened to take him to the outhouses and hang him upside down inside the toilet... he was bigger and stronger... he was bigger and they couldn't hit him so easily any more... he would take the paddles away... they dragged him out of the room..."

Through a blend of Alcoholics Anonymous and return to her cultural traditions, Lili experienced the liberation that comes from locating powerlessness in the addiction experience and then claiming the power of community.

Mike

Throughout this chapter I have inveighed against the White heterosexual male Euro-American dominant discourse. However, the White heterosexual male Euro-American often experiences himself as different and feels inadequate to embody dominant values.

Mike was the youngest child of seven and the only boy in an Irish Catholic family. His sisters dressed him in doll's clothes. His mother insisted that he quit the football squad after a high school injury. His father, however, shamed him for any indication that he was less than a 100 percent man. Mike enlisted in the Marines and saw action in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded and saw several of his buddies die. He came into therapy to explore his fears of weakness, fears that had made him increasingly vulnerable to drinking and using drugs. His greatest shame was that he remembered longing for his mother when he was wounded. He wondered whether that made him homosexual.

Larry

Larry, a recovering addict, tells the following story:

"In the spring of 1946 I was born an outcast on the Ki-on-twog-ky (Cornplatter) reservation in the state of Pennsylvania, the ancestral land of the Seneca Indian. Today it is the Kinzua Valley, now covered by water. Being born neither White nor o(h)n-weh-o(h)n-weh (of the real people), I wondered which race would claim me. To which culture did I belong? I soon lost any identity I may have had, resenting the Senecas, hating White society, and angry at both. I would get even! I would show them! Prejudice, racial slurs, hatred, and indifference were my life. I did not fit in the workplace, the social circle, even religion. So alcohol became my master and I turned my back on everything. My spirit was dead. My life of self-destruction had begun. For the next three decades I saw the edge of the world through the bottom of a whiskey, wine, or beer bottle." (Grapevine, October 1997, p. 34).

Marta and Rachel

I led a small group in an exploration of difference, using some questions about ethnicity from Pinderhughes' 1989 work, Understanding Race, Ethnicity, and Power. A woman in the group named Marta told us the following about herself: "I am Mexican American; I grew up on the border, on the southernmost tip of New Mexico, five miles from the Mexican border, but I am sixth generation here in the United States. My family does not remember when we came over... but to look at me people don't think that."

Marta's family had been in New Mexico for many generations before the United States, in the war with Mexico, annexed the lands in 1848. Respeto formed the basis of her interpersonal relationships with the Mexican American community, and she experienced little or no prejudice until she went to college and interacted with the dominant Anglo culture. Then her story changed. She experienced discrimination based on her skin color and she also experienced loneliness in her family of origin: "I am the first woman who is educated, and like many of you I feel different and not fully accepted... I mean my family is very proud of me but I am isolated." Marta experienced herself as different not only from her culture of origin, but also from the dominant culture. She experienced difference based on ethnicity, education, gender roles, and acculturation.

Of course, one need not turn to alcohol or drugs in an effort to cope with feelings of being different. One might, for example, seek empowerment through education. Education moves one to a less vulnerable place on the external hierarchy of oppression. However, the internal pain of shame may still be there. Rachel, another woman in the group who had not become addicted spoke: "I find this very difficult. My ethnic background is mixed. My father is Jewish and my mother is German. There was conflict in my family whenever the news came on television. At one point I thought I could have created a group around being Jewish, but I could not swallow the traditional Jewish upbringing because of my feminism. I did not know which of my identities to choose — Germany or Palestine." This woman's shame lay in having no reference group.

Neither Rachel nor Marta were addicts. Although they had to struggle with the pain of difference, they did not have the additional struggle of addiction. Lili, Mike, and Larry, on the other hand, felt the initial powerlessness over the shame of difference, but they had the secondary shame of the addiction, as well.

I remember hearing a television star talk at an AA meeting about the five words that changed his life, words that were spoken to him by his sponsor: "I know how you feel."

Ronald

The red sandstone cliffs of Canyon de Chelly rise two thousand feet from the valley floor. Ronald, my tour guide, and I stand before the petroglyphs, next to the dry wash and under the golding cottonwoods. We have just shared our personal histories of addiction and our roads to recovery. We are in awe at our commonality.

Ronald is Navaho. He had four brothers once. A drunk driver killed one, cirrhosis claimed another, a third hanged himself, and a fourth died in a bar fight. Now there is only Ronald. He hasn't had a drink in eight years. He is fifty-three now. When he was nine, he was sent off the reservation to boarding school. He can neither read nor write in his own language.

Ronald's Nation has the power to keep us Anglos from Canyon de Chelly unless we let them guide us. Ronald doesn't think about his power that way, however. He thinks in terms of protecting the land. I have the power of money to hire Ronald to give me a private tour. I have not always had power. I am a woman, never married, only child of a first-generation Bohemian father and a second-generation Irish English mother. Because of my white skin, I don't have trouble hailing a taxi in New York City. I was, however, paid less than a man for similar work for most of my career.

Ronald and I have each known the powerlessness of addiction, which nearly destroyed us. Now we share the power of the past in this sacred place, the power of the ancient ones who came before, the power of community, and the power of a belief system that transcends our differences of gender and class and ethnicity and our ideas of "race." We share the power of having embraced the powerlessness over addiction, thereby finding the liberating empowerment of connectedness and community. This kind of power and powerlessness each of us knows, despite our differences. This kind of power and powerlessness is in a language each of us speaks, a voice each of us owns.

To create a recovery context for others, we must understand the nature of power and powerlessness in different cultures. We must relanguage powerlessness to refer to the addiction and create other kinds of empowerment that do not include "power over" but liberate us to find "power to." We must understand the particulars of another's shame story. We must be able to say to one another, "I know how you feel."

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.