AA Circle
My friend Canela Lopez recently co-authored an article in the Tulane Hullabaloo about the out-of-control drinking culture at Tulane, which has drawn attention due to the Princeton Review’s ranking of Tulane as the #1 party school in the nation. The article described Tulane’s response to the drinking culture as being defined by a search for “new ways of educating students about the effects of risky consumption.”
Seeing alcoholism as the product of a lack of education is about as psychologically astute as understanding depression to be a lack of willpower or schizophrenia to be a childish preoccupation with one’s imagination. Addiction is not ignorance; it is an illness. And it’s a very particular form of mental illness that cannot be resolved by medication or talk therapy because part of how addiction perpetuates itself is through the sense of being a helpless patient under the care of a network of co-dependents and/or professional caregivers. Likewise I don’t think that addiction can be conquered through cognitive behavioral therapy because there’s something about the nature of taboo that inherently undermines self-willful attempts to control our compulsive behavior.
Addiction recovery is a form of collective spiritual empowerment in which the willpower of the individual addict is derived in the higher power of the recovery community. What addicts need is the solidarity of other addicts who are pursuing recovery. Though I’ve talked about solidarity for decades as a social justice activist, I did not truly understand what solidarity meant until I became a recovering alcoholic. I still don’t understand what it means. But the power that I have comes from being in a community of people who consider themselves to be powerless vessels of a power greater than themselves. Somehow sitting in a room where I’m forced to listen empathetically to somebody else’s story for at least 55 out of 60 minutes keeps me sober. And it makes God real in a way that most Christian worship services by themselves did not, because I’m being saturated in testimonies of God’s miraculous deliverance.
Being in recovery is like being in an ocean in the middle of a category five hurricane locking arms with a giant island of people holding onto each other for dear life who collectively rise and fall with the thirty foot waves and survive because they are all linked. It is the form of community which church seeks to be but can never become without what alcoholics call the Gift Of Desperation.
Brene Brown drew from a pertinent Teddy Roosevelt speech for the title of her book Daring Greatly. Roosevelt said:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds… and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Solidarity can only happen between people who are standing “in the arena” together. The expert who sits in the bleachers wearing his lab coat and Ph.D. badge cannot show solidarity no matter how much he oozes unconditional positive regard. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in therapy. Some of it was good. But there is nothing like sitting in a circle with people whose sobriety and survival depends on my being there with them. The person who comes to AA for the first time is just as important as the person who has been in the program forty years.
There is no hierarchy within the solidarity of addiction recovery. The newcomer has fresh wisdom to share with the old-timer; the old-timer’s wisdom is often obnoxiously humble and simple. But the true wisdom is not in the words of advice, but the modeled grace and humility. Every time I go to a meeting, I learn how to be a well-adjusted, grateful, compassionate human being again from people who would never say they’re teaching me but insist that I’m the one teaching them.
AA works because it’s a community of amateurs whose credentials are their common disease. I’m sure there are aspects of changing Tulane’s drinking culture that I don’t have the training to understand, particularly on the systemic, macroscopic “population” level. I do hope that Tulane administrators will find ways to incentivize students who are addicts to seek the solidarity of recovering addicts. In my eighteen months of recovery, I have encountered only two undergraduate Tulane students among the hundreds of people involved in New Orleans recovery community.
Morgan Guyton Photo
Small NOLA Wesley
The Rev. Morgan Guyton, with his wife the Rev. Cheryl Guyton, serves as co-director of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, the United Methodist campus ministry to Tulane and Loyola universities in New Orleans, La. He is the author of How Jesus Saves the World From Us.