I have much to say/add/supplement on/to your fine essay and will end up leaving a few comments or this one may be long. We'll see. I suspect it will be a long comment about the dark side and then maybe one or two separate comments about the bright sides, and the dark side includes this darkness--the sermonizing and shaming that goes on in the rooms of 12-step programs.
"Is substance abuse a personal failure of willpower or a disease that deserves medical treatment — the answer does not matter. The problem affects all of society so society must stop the binary assignment-of-blame-approach and simply accept that the problem affects millions of people touching the lives of all and costs society hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Substance abusers have the ultimate accountability for their actions and a duty to do what they can to recover. Society needs to do its part to understand addiction, remove the stigma, and make proper care affordable not only for addiction but for mental health generally. 12-step programs and rehabs are salves between relapses. A new paradigm is required. Until we destigmatize substance abuse, the cycle of failure will never end."
That is a short form post I wrote back in February 2021 as a teaser to promote my https://medium.com/illumination/drilling-down-to-the-root-cause-of-addiction-7c57c5a3fd6c.
That essay germinated from my reading an article about the shockingly low rates of success from the gold standard of treatment, 12-step programs, in which I have participated. I will get back to the programs in a moment. As for drilling down to the root cause of substance abuse, many believe the root cause of addiction is attachment trauma that disconnected one from their first core relationships and their authentic self. I wrote that the root cause is what I termed "alignment disorder"--life out of alignment with one’s core purpose. The root cause of addiction is an intense conflict between one’s conscious mind and one’s subconscious — if you believe in souls, between one’s human side and one’s spirit. A reader commented that the root cause of substance abuse is disconnection between people and he referred me to this short and great YouTube video that brought me to tears then and still does. https://youtu.be/_Y51YETlzgU I concluded in my follow up essay that disconnection and lack of alignment are two sides of the same coin.https://medium.com/recovery-cultures/drilling-further-down-into-the-root-cause-of-addiction-d8fe84143905
One slide in the video is captioned "we accept them without judgment whether they are using or not." This brings me back to what I have since written is a huge issue in 12-step programs and ties back to your lines about sermonizing and termperance campaigners feelings of superiority. I write in https://medium.com/@marcus17043/efficacy-of-12-step-programs-for-addiction-treatment-c111fbffc10a that the total abstinence requirement, which does not appear anywhere in AA literature but has become the dogma in the rooms, is a deep flaw. I do not mean that one should not seek to reach abstinence. That’s up to the individual. I mean the insistence that members must immediately practice abstinence in order to fully avail themselves of the program leads to the cycles of endless relapses or giving up entirely.
12-step programs say let us love you until you can love yourself. However, those words are empty, and very cult-like, https://medium.com/know-thyself-heal-thyself/let-us-love-you-until-you-can-love-yourself-16d000fbf23d, when in practice the culture that has arisen in the programs promotes shame. Shame is the most counterproductive emotion one can feel.
We love you now shut up, sit down, count days like a newcomer, and start working the steps again from the beginning and all your sponsees must now be sponsored by others until you earn that right again, as my friend Holly Kellums has written, is deeply shaming.
The bleeding deacons say one needs the gift of desperation, and then they beat the person down even further. Well, no wonder then success rates are so low. They should be showing the person how to build oneself up — not tearing them apart — but then again, that is how power structures survive and regardless of what the Traditions say, cult-leader-like power structures have taken hold of 12-Step programs.
Holly notes that Bill Wilson wrote that the bleeding deacon is the one who remains convinced that the group cannot get along without him, who constantly connives for re-election to office, and who continues to be consumed with self-pity.
Bleeding deacons of AA and the termperance camaigners of yore have in common the need to feel superior and that they don't solve problems.
