Brave New Kitty

I’ve spent the last five days saying good-bye to a dear, dear friend with cancer. She isn’t the first person I’ve known to die of this awful disease, but she was the closest. I got to be with her and hold her hand and see her frighteningly rapid decline and feel her fear and suffering. I saw the long, vacant gaze she tried valiantly to hide from her visitors until she hadn’t the strength left to do so, during which she could only be contemplating her terrible, imminent fate. I watched her breathing become more and more labored as the tumors in her lungs grew. I watched her, on that last day, struggle to recognize people as the tumors in her brain took charge. Each day the sharp, sickly sweet smell of death in the room grew, and I had to choke down my instinctive aversion to it when I entered; but almost as quickly, I got used to it, and didn’t notice it again until I’d left and come back, shocked at how it intensified each time. I felt the aching, morose compassion of wanting it to be over, for her to be at peace. Then, when it finally was, that odd mixture of grief and relief that I just don’t quite know how to process.

Peggy was a sweet, happy person with a big heart and a radiant smile. Like so many of us, she’d grown up in difficult circumstances, but made a good life for herself anyway. She was wise enough to figure out that you can choose the people you want in your life, and she did so with discernment. The number who cared surprised her; she’d had no idea so many people loved her. Most of us had to travel more than a thousand miles to say goodbye; we did so without a second thought. Her room was overflowing with well-wishers much of the day. Mike, her husband, had to have the nurse put a sign on her door requesting only two visitors at a time. Not to say she was a “popular” person; she was actually a fairly shy, watchful person who didn’t make friendships casually. But those who did love her loved her very, very much.

I was lucky enough to be one of those she chose. Peggy was my partner Jim’s aunt, and I met her, somewhat ironically, at her father’s funeral two years ago. I loved her almost immediately. She was friendly, but careful; warm, but reserved; kind, but honest. If she didn’t have something good to say, she’d keep silent, but you could tell she was thinking something behind those blazing brown eyes. She adored Mike and Mike adored her; they’d built a solid, happy life for themselves and had no need of false friends or unsupportive relatives. In a way, they had stripped life down to its essentials. The lived in a beautiful place in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They had their work, each other, and the circle of people they chose to share themselves with; they enjoyed life. I admired both of them greatly for that.

When Peggy got sick earlier this year, I drove down and spent a week helping the two of them out. I felt honored and privileged that they accepted my offer and allowed me into their lives; both very private people, I know it must have been hard for them to do that. I got a warm tingle thinking that they trusted me enough and felt safe enough with me to let me be a part of their private struggle.

The week I was down there was just after surgery and before chemotherapy and radiation. Peggy had a long, question-mark shaped scar winding around her left ear down into her chest. She was in a lot of pain and couldn’t drive, and she had several doctors’ appointments in prep for the next phase of treatment. So mostly, I drove Peggy to the appointments so Mike could go to work. But I also kept her company, made sure she remembered to take her pain meds, and helped around the house in any way I could. After she went to bed, which was early, Mike and I would talk, usually chit-chat, but occasionally stray into more serious and personal topics. Mostly, I think having me there relieved some of the psychological and emotional pressure they were both feeling. I was happy to do it, and only wish I could have done more.

Peggy was completely consumed with her illness, which made perfect sense to me. Her way of dealing with it was to try to feel some control over it, which she did by spending all her waking time focused on it. She’d sit at the kitchen table and pore over the pamphlets, leaflets, doctor’s notes, medication indications, and whatever other literature she’d been given. No television, no radio, no other reading, and almost no talking. After a couple of days of this, I began to notice that she was reading the same things over and over, and then I noticed that much of the time, she wasn’t actually reading; she was staring down at the same page, eyes fixed, until jarred back into awareness by Mike or me or the phone ringing, when she’d then turn a page and do it all over again. This wasn’t for our benefit; it was an effort at her own well-being.

This was how I came to understand how terrified she actually was. And how little there was I, or anybody else, could actually do for her. Grief, I realized, is an intensely private affair.

When I went home after the end of that week, I felt drained and worried and hopeless. I was relieved to be going, although I would have stayed for as long as she wanted me to be there. But Peggy was, perhaps more than anything else, stoic. She was proud and tough too, and she wanted to handle the cancer on her own terms. As much as I wanted to stay in touch with her, I kept my distance. I sensed her embarrassment at having let me in, her shame at showing vulnerability. Jim and I both kept a respectful distance, thinking that they would let us know if they needed anything and that we had lots of years ahead of us to build the relationship we both wanted with Peggy and Mike. That I handled it this way is one of my biggest regrets, although I’m not sure it would have gone any differently if I’d pushed her more.

We didn’t hear anything until the seven-week treatment regimen was over and the PET scan came back clear. That was about a month and a half ago. Two more scans came back clean. Then, two weeks ago, Mike brought Peggy to emergency with pain. The cancer had come back with a vengeance. The doctors gave her 1-6 weeks. “I don’t want to linger,” she’d told Mike. Thankfully, she went out on the bottom end of that range.

Perhaps the greatest lesson in this experience is to truly understand our own ultimate powerlessness. One of the things that makes it so awful to watch someone suffer is to know that we are, all of us, in for a similar fate, and there is absolutely nothing to be done about that. I’ve found myself thinking about my own aches and pains in a fresh way, fingering lumps and bumps with alarm, obsessing over my family history of disease. I keep coming back to the truth, so powerful it’s become a cliché, that we must appreciate the time we have.

We have power over the choices we make in life and power over our short-term fate, but that’s it. And even though it isn’t enough, even though it feels at times like these, when omnipotent death pokes his face into the circle to remind us that he’s waiting, that consciousness is a cruel joke, it’s critical that we use the power of choice we do have to the best of our ability. Make the most of life. Live every moment as fully as possible. Be happy. Pursue our dreams. Let the people we love know that we love them.

All that. But even more importantly, perhaps, is living authentically. Jim and I have been walking around each other in a daze for over a week now, not knowing what to say or how to be with each other, feeling empty and flailing and unsettled and not knowing how to get past it. We desperately wanted things to be different, but they weren’t. We wanted to feel happy and grateful for our health and our lives and being together, but all we could feel was sad and scared and angry and numb. There was a sense of urgency underlying it all, too, that made it even more unbearable, like we have to get on with living our lives not only because that’s what’s important, but because Peggy would have wanted it that way. Somehow, we’re letting her down by not having this all figured out.

I finally realized, though, that this, too, is part of life. Grief, sadness, pain, fear: all are part of our human condition, and to move on from that without processing it does us no good. Surrendering to it, no matter how much we would prefer to avoid it, is the only authentic way to deal with it. So I decided to just let myself feel sad, and scared, and empty, and worried, and unsettled, and numb. This will pass, even though it feels like it won’t, and even though it feels like nothing will ever be okay. I have to have my feelings anyway and trust that life will sort itself out, as it always does, one way or the other, and all we can do is go on living to the best of our ability until it’s our time to stop, and accept how unfinished and imperfect we will inevitably be when that time comes. In order to experience the light, we must know what darkness is, and that’s just the way it is. But we don’t have to dwell on it; if we’re wise, knowing is enough.

Peggy died yesterday morning around 10 a.m. She was 54.

No comments

Many people find AA’s ideologies of powerlessness, ego deflation, and humility make them feel worse, not better. They try AA, but stay away from it because they don’t want to attend meetings in which they feel judged or shamed. Devout AA members often describe such people as “not having hit bottom yet” or “not being willing to stay sober.” This is certainly true for some people who don’t stick around. But it is not true for all of them, and believing it is does a grave disservice to people who want and need help overcoming their addiction but can’t stomach the ego deflation message. In these cases, AA itself, by being blind to one of its own major shortcomings, assumes at least partial responsibility for these addicts not getting help.

The particular shortcoming I refer to is that the 12 Steps are a masculine approach to problem solving. Powerlessness and ego deflation are distinctly masculine ways to view the need for help with a problem: one does not seek help until he is broken, battered, and beyond all use of his own resources. AA literature, philosophy and mentality are shot through with this idea.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a masculine approach to problem solving; it’s merely a way to classify behavior. But when it is not balanced out by the feminine, and particularly when it is unaware of this imbalance, it can be unhealthy. This, I believe, is the case with 12 Step programs.

To make this case, I’ll begin by defining what I mean by masculine and feminine personality types. I use these terms psychologically, as described by Ken Wilber in numerous books on human development. From Wilber’s Integral Spirituality: “Male logic…tends to be based on terms of autonomy, justice, and rights; female logic tends to be based on terms of relationship, care, and responsibility. Men tend toward agency; women tend toward communion. Men follow rules; women follow connections. Men look; women touch. Men tend toward individualism, women toward relationship” (p.12).

In other words, the masculine type seeks agency, the feminine, communion. These types typically split along gender lines, but not always; some women are more autonomous and some men are more communicative. We all contain elements of both, and if we’re lucky, we someday reach the point of integrating both voices: “…at the highest stage of moral development, the masculine and feminine voices in each of us tend to become integrated…individuals start to befriend both the masculine and feminine modes in themselves, even if they characteristically act predominantly from one or the other” (p. 13).

None of this is a surprise; we all know in some measure the difference between masculine and feminine energy. The really interesting thing about these types is that you can have healthy and unhealthy versions of them: “If the healthy masculine principle tends toward autonomy, strength, independence, and freedom, when that principle becomes unhealthy or pathological, all of those positive virtues either over- or underfire. There is not just autonomy, but alienation; not just strength, but domination; not just independence, but morbid fear of relationship and commitment; not just a drive toward freedom, but a drive to destroy…If the healthy feminine principle tends toward flowing, relationship, care, and compassion, the unhealthy feminine flounders in each of those. Instead of being in relationship, she becomes lost in relationship. Instead of a healthy self in communion with others, she loses her self altogether and is dominated by the relationships she is in. Not a connection, but a fusion; not a flow state, but a panic state; not a communion, but a meltdown. The unhealthy feminine principle does not find fullness in connection, but chaos in confusion” (p. 15).

Bill Wilson’s description of his struggle with addiction is, I believe, a classic version of the pathologically masculine. He was completely alienated and morbidly afraid to ask for help or surrender himself to any authority. For him to get help, he had to be literally at death’s door, literally at the point of choosing death or change. He chose change, and wonderful things began to happen. He knew he needed to share this “psychic change” he’d undergone with the world, not only for its sake, but for his own, for only by sharing what he’d discovered was he able to maintain the humility required to keep himself sober. Is it any surprise that a man with this personality, having the experiences he’d had, would insist that untreated addiction leads only to jails, institutions, or death?

This is an oversimplification, perhaps, but it’s the basic gist of Bill’s story. He had, as do many addicts (including all the founding members of AA, for they were the “hopeless” cases Bill sought out to try his cure on), the pathologically masculine traits that kept him alienated, isolated, and unable to seek help until he was so far gone it was his only option. In a very real sense, he had to develop his feminine side to get sober: he had to submit, connect, commune, and relate. In doing so, he integrated his feminine and masculine voices and became a more whole person, one able to transcend his addiction. Bill had no awareness of this, I don’t think; he just discovered what worked for him and created a systematic approach in hopes that it would work for other people. And for many, it did and does. When you hear a “tough guy” in an AA meeting talk about his feelings, owning his feminine side, relating and communing, it’s impossible not to be moved by this. It’s a transformation of character that can only have a positive outcome. Not wrong by any means.

Not wrong, but certainly incomplete, because many people don’t have the same pathologies as Bill did that prevent them from seeking help. Addicts with a more feminine personality type not only seek help more readily, but they also have a different set of issues to deal with once they do. They don’t feel alienated from other people, but lost in them; they need not to be become more communicative, but rather, to become more autonomous; they need to build walls, not tear them down; they need ego fortification, not ego deflation. They need, in other words, the opposite of what the 12 Steps offers. Not because the 12 Steps are bad or wrong, but because the 12 Steps offer a masculine approach to solving the problem of addiction that simply doesn’t work very well for people with a predominantly feminine personality.

Often when feminine types do get sober in a 12 Step group, they thrive on the group communion aspect but fail to develop autonomy, which is what they most need to do in their quest for wholeness. As a result, they can stay stuck for a long time, sober perhaps, but not really growing.

Or, as was the case with me, some feminine personalities who get sober in AA are able to see the ego deflation message as pertaining to their narcissism, not their self-esteem. As addiction is a manifestation of narcissism (or, as the Big Book puts it, “self-will run riot”), it makes sense that it is our narcissism that needs deflating, not our self-esteem, what little of it we may have!

As logical as this sounds, it is not readily apparent to many feminine-type addicts. They often experience 12 Step groups as judgmental and even damaging. In her book How Alcoholics Anonymous Failed Me, Marianne Gilliam says, “What I really needed was not a systematic deflation of my practically nonexistent self-esteem…I needed some positive reinforcement that I was a worthwhile person…If low self-esteem and unworthiness have plagued us all of our lives, or for those people wrestling with issues of co-dependency, we need to build up our self-esteem through positive, loving reinforcement, not continue to humble ourselves at the feet of other people, groups, or institutions. In fact, learning a bit of healthy self-centeredness, in the form of stopping doing for others what they need to do for themselves, may be our first step toward freedom” (p. 108-109).

What Ms. Gilliam describes here is the classic version of feminine pathology and her frustration with an approach that intensified that pathology rather than helping it. While I think she’s a little hard on AA (because she isn’t clear enough on the “type” issue not to be), her frustration is understandable. Bravo to her for being courageous enough to forge her own path and seek the help she intuitively knew she needed elsewhere—and succeeding!

The point is, the AA/12 Step approach doesn’t work for everybody. Trying to fit all addictive personality types into a 12 Step program is like trying to see every problem as a nail because the only tool you have is a hammer. To label all people who find the 12 Step approach ineffective as “in denial” or “not willing enough” or any other of the myriad terms 12 Steppers apply to those who don’t find it a good fit actually is shaming and judgmental (as is, in fact, applying any label to any person without making an effort to understand them), which is why I began this by saying that AA itself assumes partial responsibility for these people not getting the help they need.

Two things make this a serious problem. One is the solid entrenchment of the 12 Step methodology in the medical and legal establishments, with over 90% of the treatment programs in this country being 12-Step-based and virtually all court-ordered treatments involving attendance in a 12-Step program. Apparently, most legal and medical authorities also believe that if it doesn’t work, it’s the addict’s fault!

And for many, many people, it does not work. The other serious problem with 12 Step groups is their dismally low cure rate, with an overall effectiveness—meaning that people attain long term sobriety—of somewhere around 10 percent. This rate is an estimate, because it is incredibly difficult to find reliable statistics. Some believe it to be much lower, around 3-5 percent. But no one, including AA itself, places that number any higher than 20 percent. By this most generous number, four out of five addicts who seek help in AA will not get it. Certainly, this low number bears some closer examination, and is reason enough to make room for other approaches. Yet such change has been glacially slow to come to the addiction treatment world.

Back when I was attending AA meetings regularly, I was told by many that the number was one in ten. The attitude was kind of that those of us who stuck around were an elite group who’d “beaten the disease” and that the other 90 percent were doomed to insanity and death. Or, if I heard of someone who’d gotten sober some other way, say through church or merely by abstention, I was told they were “white-knuckling it” or were on a “dry drunk,” meaning that they might not be using, but they weren’t advancing in their serenity any, either; because they weren’t working a “program of recovery,” they were destined to relapse, and also doomed to insanity and death.

Whether or not these judgments were sometimes true (which they were—sometimes) is irrelevant. The point is that there is a closed-mindedness about them and an unwillingness to see other paths to recovery as valid. And this too is a distinctly masculine view of the world, one that sees anything that challenges beliefs as a threat.

“Working the Steps” is merely one approach to addiction, geared toward masculine personality types, and it cannot possibly help all addicts. Believing that it can and should is limiting, both to the authorities who believe it and the addicts who need help.

It’s likely that there are many other ways to define personality types besides masculine and feminine that would be helpful to addiction treatment; research and open dialogue are needed. If people were more open to that truth, then perhaps legal, medical, treatment, and 12-Step authorities might stop blaming addicts for failing and look for more effective ways to help all kinds of addicts, not just those who fit into the established system.

No comments

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. –Step One, Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

“Powerlessness” has probably caused more confusion than any other idea in the 12 Step program. The word itself can evoke a knee-jerk negative reaction, no matter what the context. 12 Steppers will likely tell you such an aversion is rooted in your lack of humility and unwillingness to surrender yourself to a Higher Power; psychologists will probably say such an aversion is a natural and even healthy response when confronted with a threat to one’s personal autonomy.

Both views are correct, but applicable in different circumstances. For example, it is healthy to ask for help when you are unable to solve a problem by yourself; this is common sense. But it is also healthy to try to solve a problem before giving up on it and seeking help. We must know how to do both, and in what situations, in order to make smart choices. “Powerless” is mostly just another way of saying “asking for help.”

Is this what “powerless” means in the First Step, asking for help? And if so, why is asking for help framed in such an emotionally charged way, a way that seems meant to evoke strong reactions?

Well, let’s look at this.

Many believe the idea of powerlessness comes from the disease model of addiction or, as stated in AA literature, “an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind” that, once set in motion (by imbibing in your poison), the addict has no control over.

It does not. And let’s dispense with this idea right away.

In “The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions,” Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA, starts the chapter on the First Step with the question, “Who cares to admit complete defeat?”  A few paragraphs later, he says, “…only through utter defeat are we able to take our first steps toward liberation and strength.” The entire chapter goes like that, focused on the desperation of the alcoholic mired in his addiction and the admission of defeat as the first step in climbing out. The only concession to the disease model is one sentence: “…our sponsors pointed out our increasing sensitivity to alcohol—an allergy, they called it.” In the Big Book, “Alcoholics Anonymous,” the Doctor’s Opinion describes the allergy and obsession of alcoholism, but the rest of the book focuses on the spiritual, emotional, and psychological problems of addiction, and on the “psychic change” necessary to overcome them. You can look at this as treating the “obsession of the mind,” but even if you do, you can’t call that a medical problem or a medical solution.

Thus, whether or not the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous believed addiction was a disease seems largely irrelevant, because the solution they offer is in no way a medical one. Therefore, the powerlessness in Step One is not about having a disease, or at least, not one that can be cured by a medical approach. (If you extend the idea of physical powerlessness to non-chemical addictions like shopping and gambling, you can clearly see its absurdity.)

No, the powerlessness Bill writes about in Step One is psychological and spiritual, and it is a direct result of his personal experience. When Bill W. was at the lowest point of his life, his old drinking buddy Ebby paid him a visit, clear-eyed and cleaned up, to share the story of his salvation. Bill was an atheist and not at all interested in being saved. But he was intrigued by how serene his friend seemed, and after he left, Bill had a profound unity experience that changed his life. His obsession vanished and he never drank another drop. When he adapted the principles of Ebby’s Christian organization to help alcoholics, Alcoholics Anonymous was born.

All the early AA members were desperate cases, found through hospitals and institutions, who, after a lifetime of compulsive drinking, were able to quit, many of them for good, with the help of AA. So it made sense to them that their salvation (that is, sobriety) sprouted from abject hopelessness and desperation, that only from this state of mind would a person be willing to change. This is why powerlessness plays such a strong role, and it is laid out clearly in the last two paragraphs on Step One: “Why all this insistence that every AA must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the AA program unless they have hit bottom…then, and only then, do we become as open-minded to conviction and willing to listen as the dying can be.” This explains the provocative use of “powerlessness”—Bill believed it was literally a life and death prospect! (This passage also puts to rest any lingering notions that the powerlessness rhetoric has anything whatsoever to do with disease.)

It’s easy to see here that First Step powerlessness is a direct descendant of the Christian idea of salvation.  It’s no coincidence that many addicts find religion directly and achieve sobriety in a church rather than in AA: it’s the same basic process, that of tearing down the ego so it can be rebuilt anew, or, in religious terminology, being reborn. Addicts are some of the best candidates for this process because they have such deep feelings of guilt, remorse, and shame.

And, just as Christian salvation externalizes a process that really occurs in a person’s psyche, so does First-Step powerlessness. The focus on powerlessness removes personal choice and places it firmly in an external location, whether one believes that place is God, an AA group, or one’s own biology (and as far as working the Steps is concerned, it doesn’t matter). This can alleviate an addict’s shame and make it easier for him to seek help, but it also misses the point of the Step, and can do him an extreme disservice by teaching him, if he is not absolutely clear about what the powerlessness refers to, to believe that he is unable to make his own choices. (More about that in a moment.)

Sure, addicts are largely incapable of making good choices where their addiction is concerned, and this often has devastating consequences. But to see this as an external problem (and in this sense, “external” means “beyond one’s control,” and includes biology) with an external solution is not rational. Think about any addict you know, including yourself (if applicable), and you will realize immediately that there are always underlying reasons for the addiction, that it doesn’t just occur spontaneously, in a vacuum, without psychological causes. And AA literature confirms this, calling alcoholics “problem people,” “self-centered in the extreme,” and even “outright mental defectives.” The inability to make good choices about one’s addiction is a sort of powerlessness, but more to the point, it confirms the need to seek help.

Thus all the emphasis on powerlessness in the First Step is misdirected. Bill believed an admission of powerlessness was necessary for change because of his own experience, and the disease model fit nicely with this, sort of driving home the “obsession” point for any who might remain unconvinced. But the magic—the power—of Step One is in the admission of needing help, not in accepting one’s powerlessness.

I once heard a highly respected AA speaker, who’d been sober for decades and was a serious student of spirituality through AA, talk about the principles of the Steps: each Step, I learned, has an underlying principle. I was surprised to hear him say that the principle underlying Step One was honesty, not powerlessness. This is because the admission of needing help is the turning point, the point at which we take a good hard look at ourselves and admit that we need to make some changes. Once we’re honest with ourselves, change can occur. But not before. This is because our main problem is self-deception—not powerlessness.

Self-deception is alluring. It allows us to take the easy path, to look without when we should be looking within, to continue partaking of “that which we really do not want” because it’s easier than personal change. More pain and misery is caused by the demon self-delusion than any other. Therefore, the magic of the First Step is in the acknowledgement of the problem, not in our powerlessness over it.

So to answer the question I posed at the beginning, yes, the meaning of powerlessness in the First Step is “asking for help,” because admitting you need help is the key to changing your life. Here’s an analogy. Say you’re lost. You’ve tried and tried to find your way out of a strange neighborhood but just can’t do it, so finally, you stop and ask for directions. By asking for directions, you’ve admitted that you need help getting un-lost; you were powerless to find your way without it. But the solution wasn’t declaring your powerlessness over being lost, it was admitting you needed directions and asking for them. Dwelling on your powerlessness over being lost just seems silly, as does dwelling on the fact that help came from an external source. Neither is relevant. You had a problem, you tried to solve it, and when you couldn’t, you asked for help to do so.

Common sense!

It’s the same with the First Step, except focusing on powerlessness can be more than silly, it can be detrimental, as I stated above. This is so for a number of reasons:

• Believing that powerlessness is necessary in order to change encourages people to go to the extreme limits of their endurance before they consider a different path.
• Believing in personal powerlessness keeps people dependent on external entities to maintain the change they’ve achieved.
• Believing in powerlessness is not conducive to developing autonomy or a sense of personal choice, both of which are necessary for continued growth; this may be a good explanation for the low percentage of long-term sobriety and high percentage of relapse in AA.

Furthermore, these common misperceptions about powerlessness have resulted in a culture of victims, a “therapeutic state” in which we are far too quick to look for external causes and solutions for our problems and exonerate ourselves from looking inward. Because of this focus on being powerless, rather than on acknowledgement of the problem, these misperceptions have gotten so twisted up and confused with the idea of disease that we now see disease in everything from shopping to eating to playing video games. This is ironic, because it is absolutely not what the founding members of AA had in mind. Everywhere in AA literature, personal responsibility, willingness, and effort are emphasized as essential to maintaining one’s serenity. Nowadays, that part of the 12 Step message is largely overlooked in favor of seeing oneself as having no control over one’s behavior. This is a serious, serious problem. You need only look around to see the results of this mentality: people suing MacDonald’s for being overweight—and winning; people suing tobacco companies for their nicotine addiction—and winning; people getting in trouble because of their irresponsible behavior, then claiming innocence due to a “disease”; and the ever-increasing “diseasing” of all irresponsible, self-indulgent behavior to the point that “disease” has become an accepted excuse for almost anything. All are part of the culture of powerlessness. All are, I believe, outgrowths of the disease model of personal behavior, and none are what First Step powerlessness is actually about. In this culture of powerlessness and the absurdly irrational disease model of addiction, we have become largely unable to make the common sense distinction between when to ask for help and when to go it alone, or for what reasons. In such an environment, only those wishing to escape responsibility can benefit. Everyone else loses.

It is unfortunate that Bill W. chose the word “powerless” to describe the need to ask for help. If he could have foreseen where society would go with it, he surely would have used different phrasing. Because regardless of common misperceptions about First Step powerlessness, the individual is solely responsible for the changes he makes in his life, regardless of any external help he receives, or where that help comes from. It is only on the basis of personal responsibility that lasting personal change can occur. Without acceptance of one’s own role and responsibility in his circumstances, behavioral change is likely to be just another form of addiction.

2 comments

A friend of mine just had his 20-year high school reunion. He didn’t go, having no interest in seeing people he never talked to in high school to begin with, but one of his friends did. The report on it was less than stellar, and the guy who went seemed kind of sad and lost around the whole thing, like whatever he’d wanted to happen didn’t, but he didn’t know what that would have been in the first place.

According to my friend’s friend, the group of “popular” guys—the jocks, in my high school nomenclature—showed up together in a rented limo, sans wives and already thoroughly drunk. They hung together all night, maintaining their adolescent clique, and essentially proving their persistent immaturity. As repugnant as all that is to me, mostly I just find it sad and empty.

Like all nostalgia.

Nostalgia has been huge in recent years. Oh, nostalgia has always had a certain appeal, but lately, in the past decade or so, that appeal seems to have been tweaked up a notch or two. It’s become an extremely effective marketing tool: New cars that look like old cars, new movies re-made from old movies, new versions of old songs, TV shows set in the seventies, as well as clothing styles, hair styles, and accessories reminiscent of styles from two to four decades ago. This increased interest in the recent past might be due to middle-aged baby boomers who want to relive their youth and now have the purchasing power to buy items they couldn’t afford as young adults. While I think that’s valid, I also think there’s more to it. Nostalgia has become a cultural zeitgeist, and I think one important to understand, because the pressure to succumb to it can be enormous, and doing so can be a way to avoid dealing with the present.

Let’s look at how that could be the case.

Nostalgia is more than having fond memories about the past. It’s about longing for a simpler, more vivid, or happier time. According to Dictionary.com, the etymology of the word comes from “severe homesickness.” Homesickness is a feeling of being scared and overwhelmed by one’s environment, or at the very least, of wanting one’s environment to be different. Nostalgia, then, is homesickness applied to the timeline of one’s life: a longing for the present to feel as good as the memories of the past.

But that past did not exist, and therein lies the problem: nostalgia is a fundamentally dishonest way to view history, one that can hamper our ability to deal effectively with the present. Our past, you see, was just as full of existential problems as our present is, and we need only spend a few minutes thinking about it logically to realize this. While today we may be worried about paying a mortgage and saving for retirement, twenty years ago we were worried about paying rent and launching a career. Today, we worry about our spouse and kids; twenty years ago, we worried about the stress and humiliations of dating and the possibility of being single forever. In hindsight, the problems of youth may seem simple compared to the problems of middle age, but if you’re honest with yourself, it’s just hindsight. You had just as much anxiety about your problems then as you do about your current ones. Maybe even more, as you had fewer coping skills to draw on then, which is itself another source of stress for a young adult. We may wish we were younger, but only until we remember how foolish and naïve we actually were in our twenties!

Nostalgia is a sort of projection, in the Freudian sense, of our present anxieties into our past. That is, we avoid dealing with what we long for in the present—deeper connections, a greater sense of power over our fate, or simply that some of our psychological troubles would go away—by escaping into an idealized past. In this past, we were beautiful, popular, and powerful. Our friends were better, our jobs were better, our parties were better. Even our cars, clothes, and movies were better. We felt excited and hopeful about life. In this past (which is actually just a present thought about the past), we are free to feel euphoric without reality stomping its ugly footprint onto the scene and requiring us to take action. In a very real way, nostalgia is much like the altered state induced by drugs or alcohol.

The extent to which we indulge in nostalgic longing is largely the extent to which we avoid dealing with our current psychological and emotional issues. I am not talking about meeting obligations and responsibilities; I am talking about how effective we feel, really feel, in matters of autonomy, self-expression, emotional fulfillment, and the like. It can be extremely difficult to consider, or even to be aware of the necessity to consider, these internal states when living in a culture that actively discourages such consideration. Both self-awareness and cultural awareness are necessary to do so.

If an entire culture partakes in nostalgia, what does that say about that culture? Perhaps that its primary emotional undercurrents consist of anxiety and fear, and its best attempts at dealing with them have been escape, denial, projection, and intellectual dishonesty; perhaps that these undercurrents reflect the sentiments of a majority of its individuals. Probably both, although I am not a sociologist and this is only a theory.

A culture of nostalgia occurs, I think, in times of rapid change or political upheaval that can leave people feeling overwhelmed, anxious, alienated, and powerless. The entire twentieth century had plenty of both, but no decade more so than its last, with the post-Soviet global regrouping, the rise of terrorism, rampant new technologies, and the advent of the Information Age (the Internet, to be precise, which has changed the world landscape on a scale not seen since the printing press, or perhaps nuclear weapons). Add to this the anxiety about entering a new millennium (historically, turns of centuries have always evoked a milieu of unrest), along with all the ongoing problems of the modern world, and you have a culture ripe for nostalgic yearnings. It is not a coincidence that fundamentalist Christianity and the New Age movement (in all their iterations) have experienced huge growth in recent years. Both offer escapist, anti-rational approaches to solving life’s existential problems, and both are, without exception, part of the problem and not part of the solution. Like all forms of nostalgia, they serve only to distract us from the real issues in our lives and the resources best called upon to deal with them.

What are those resources? In essence, self-awareness, honesty, and the willingness to deal with life on life’s terms (to steal a phrase from the friends of Bill W.), all of which can be more difficult to come by than we care to admit. Multitudes have been written elsewhere about all of these, including this blog, so I won’t go into the hows and whys of them now. Suffice to say that these are the traits that will get you where you want to be in life, and the more earnestly you practice them, the more success you will have.

One more thing, and it is an important one: You must come to realize that the present is the best time of your life, period. Now, and now, and now. No matter what you’re going through, no matter how you’re feeling, no matter what unfulfilled dreams weigh you down. The present is the only moment in which you can make choices and changes and fully experience all the aspects of being alive. Now, and now, and now. The present, with all its demands and sorrows and possibilities, is the only game in town.

It may all sound cold and logical, and I know human existence demands more; I am not ignoring that or belittling it. Myths and dreams, pleasure and play are all essentials of existence, too. But they can all be experienced fully without sacrificing self-awareness. More so, actually. There is no dichotomy between logic and myth, logic and dreams, or logic and pleasure. They can—and should—all exist simultaneously, harmoniously, enjoying and nourishing each other in an upward spiral of growth and creativity. Nostalgia detracts from this vision of life by making dreams and pleasures an unattainable part of a nonexistent past. Don’t do that to yourself.

It’s probably a good thing that the human memory tends to romanticize the past rather than the other way around, but it’s also something we need to be aware of. If you’re lucky you had a good youth, but dwelling on it won’t make your life better today. I think that’s what my friend’s friend discovered when he felt so let down after his high school reunion. His unmet expectations were probably more about some emptiness in his life today, emptiness that cannot be filled by trying to re-live an idealized past.

The only question now is, what will he do about it?

No comments