Musings on recovery, missing meetings, and being in the messy middle

One of the great sorrows of this chapter of my life is that recovery meetings no longer feel like home. 

I got sober when I was 22 and spent many a joyful hour sitting in an uncomfortable chair, listening to people around me pour their hearts out.

Recovery meetings are almost always an hour long and they usually have loose rules. There’s a topic or a theme, and there are codes of conduct. You share no more than once per meeting. You listen respectfully while others are speaking.

You tell the truth.

I love recovery meetings because I love sitting in a circle with people who have plunged the depths of the human experience. The woman next to me with the $5,000 handbag and $150,000 car could have been a prostitute, living on the streets and selling her body for crack.

The guy chairing the meeting could have been an intensely violent drug dealer. He may be living with the knowledge that he mixed things into his drugs that killed someone and now, on a daily basis, he tries to make amends for that.

The woman in my chair could have come out of a blackout in a jail cell, vaguely remembering driving and wondering if she, in the depths of addicted poor judgment, ruined someone else’s life.

Of course, not everyone in meetings is like that. When you participate in recovery meetings, there’s usually a single requirement for membership: the desire to stop drinking or using.

Sometimes people have high bottoms, sometimes people have low bottoms.

But, when you sit in a recovery meeting, you are all but guaranteed to be surrounded by fascinating people.

Even more astonishingly, you are all but guaranteed to be surrounded by people who believe that telling the truth about their insides is what keeps them alive.

Not what keeps them healthy.

Not what Brené Brown says they should do.

Not what’s trendy or hip since Untamed has been published.

But what’s keeping them alive.

In recovery (at least the kind that I’m familiar with), people who want to break free of crippling addictions are taught that your secrets keep you sick. Then they sit in circles and tell the truth about their lives.

They talk about their shame.

They talk about their despair.

They talk about their wins.

They talk about their losses.

They tell funny stories about the crazy stuff their ego tells them.

They tell tender stories about a stranger who sat with them for 6 hours when they were on the edge of throwing years of sobriety away to escape into a heroin-fueled state of worry-free bliss.

Basically what I’m saying is that they talk about things that aren’t the weather.

Or what’s for dinner.

Or how much laundry detergent currently costs (can you believe inflation?!).

They talk about deep, deeeep, DEEEEEEEP things.

They embody the Anais Nin quote, "I must be a mermaid, I have no fear of depth and a great fear of shallow living."

And I love them. I love in-person recovery meetings to a degree that can’t be overstated. (Online ones, however, don’t do it for me.)

Yet, as much as I love them, I feel out of integrity when I attend. I still technically meet the membership requirements, as I’m a person with a history of addiction and I don’t (yet?) recreationally drink or use, but I no longer believe several core tenants. I don’t believe that addiction is a lifelong disease. I don’t believe it’s incurable. I don’t think it’s necessary to stay away from all mood- and mind-altering substances (like, for instance, ayahuasca).

Please don’t misunderstand–I don’t feel like people with a history of addiction can safely throw psychedelics down the hatchet and expect there to be no consequences. I would NEVER advise that. Addiction is about a desire to escape your reality. If you still find reality painful and crave an escape, it’s very easy to lose yourself to any substance, psychedelics included (just like sex, the gym, gambling or obsessive dieting are included). There are very good reasons to stay away from substances, even for people who don’t have a history of addiction. Sometimes that reason is as simple as giving the middle finger to “Big Alcohol,” which is as good a reason as any in my book.

But, the same way I believe that you can heal the root cause of depression, I believe you can heal the root cause of addiction.

And that makes it a little challenging to sit in meetings where that idea is almost heretical. Not because I want anyone to come around to my way of thinking. I believe that there are very good reasons to maintain the belief that the majority of people with a history of addiction can never safely use again.

But because it’s hard to sit in truth-telling circles and not tell the truth. The idea of sharing my views in recovery meetings is morally repugnant to me. I would be, in no uncertain terms, a jackass if I did that. People seeking recovery deserve a safe space to heal, not a confusing space where a privileged woman who’s been able to spend a gobsmacking amount of time (not to mention money) pursuing root cause resolution throws around her cute little theories.

But, here on my blog, where I muse about what’s going on in my inner world, where I recreate a one-woman truth-telling circle, I can write about it. I can talk about the grief that comes with missing meetings and not yet having a replacement for them. I can talk about how challenging it is to grow in a different direction, to no longer feel a part of communities you cherish.

I can talk about anything I want, so long as it’s true, since that’s the bar I’ve set for myself.

That’s my musing for today. I don’t have a solution for this, but I’d love to hear suggestions. People who don’t belong to the exclusive “I’ve driven my life into the ground and now I’ve earned a seat in recovery meetings” crew – where do you go to get what I used to get from in-person meetings?

Love,

Keely

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