My good friend Michael Scott recently told me about an article on The Tyee website, How Do People with Addictions Conceive of Their Recovery?, that involved an interview with one of our Recovery Voices, Professor Wendy Dossett from Wales. In this blog post, I focus on one aspect of this article, Wendy’s reflections on the 12-Step fellowship concept of ‘higher power’.
Andrea Bennett, a senior editor at The Tyee, initially asks Wendy to tell her more about her research on recovery and addiction. Wendy replies:
‘I’m a professor of religious studies who is basically an ethnographer interested in the kind of the narratives and experiences of people who primarily use the 12-step program that you find in Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Al-Anon and a number of other 12-step fellowships. I’m also interested in the use of ideas around spirituality, or a higher power, in the visible recovery movement and in Buddhist approaches to addiction recovery.
Very often, those Buddhist approaches wouldn’t be using the idea of a higher power. They’d be using other concepts that may or may not match the badge of “spiritual.” I’m interested in what people actually mean by these concepts and how these concepts actually operationalize in people’s recoveries.
I did a large qualitative project called the Higher Power Project where I interviewed 107 members of 12-step fellowships, including Al-Anon, which is the fellowship for friends and family of people suffering with addictions. I was particularly focused on people’s concept of a “higher power” and what that meant to them.
When the first 12-step fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous was created back in the 1930s, in a post-Prohibition, very conservative Christian kind of context, people had this idea of a higher power as the God of the Bible, the God of Christianity. But right from the beginning in AA’s history, there was debate. The main text of Alcoholics Anonymous — the Big Book, as fellowship members call it — is ambivalent about what a “higher power” is, and there’s room for interpretation.
I think if you were to try and understand 12-step culture just by looking at what was written in the 1930s, you’re not going to really understand what 12-step culture is. You need contemporary ethnographic data to understand how people take up ideas, reject ideas, interpret ideas. It might be very different things than you might think was possible from the way it’s written in that 1930s language.’
Andrea then asks the following question: ‘Could you give a couple of examples of what people mean these days when they are operationalizing that “higher power” language as part of recovery?’ Wendy responds:
It’s so diverse. There are, of course, very conservative Christians in the fellowships, but there are also lots of atheists, there’s lots of agnostics, there are pagans, there are Buddhists, there are people who are associated with Indigenous religious practices. There are people with shifting ideas about what a higher power might mean for them. Twelve-step fellowships are almost like workshops where people work out their idea of what the higher power is.
One of the things that is necessary to understand, that isn’t always appreciated, is why a higher power is necessary. The background to that really is the way that addiction is understood in 12-step culture as being a problem of power. A person might be powerful in all sorts of ways in their life, but against this substance that they’re struggling with, willpower is not effective.
Recovery in a 12-step program is not about strengthening willpower. It’s about abandoning willpower and relying on a higher power.
So then the question arises: What is that higher power? For the writers of the 12 steps, it certainly seemed like it was the God of Christianity.
For the people that I interviewed, that was true for some of them — a minority, a very small minority — but for a lot of people their higher power was the strength of the friendships that they built in those 12-step communities. It was the power of example, of other people who were living a day at a time and a sober life, not picking up a drink or a drug or a particular behaviour. It was a felt sense that the universe wanted them to have a good life and be sober, or not to be using drugs. Some people had a strong sense of a deceased relative taking care of them — or an ancestor, a great spirit, people used all of these different terms.
People even used very worldly ideas about higher power. One person I interviewed said that her partner was her higher power. That’s not an idea that would find widespread recognition within 12-step programs, but as an ethnographer I find it interesting.
Loads of people talked about a sense of nature as their higher power, a sense of belonging to the earth, belonging to the universe.
Quite a few people I interviewed who perhaps had a religious faith or religious commitment in the past would talk about the need to abandon their former sense of God. A judgmental God was making them feel ashamed, and they had amended their sense of God or a higher power as a force that wanted the best for them, and that was forgiving and merciful.’
In her Recovery Voices interview with Wulf Livingston, Wendy talks about addiction and powerlessness, and the concept of High Power. You can listen to her thoughts on these themes in the following two film clips:
The Nature of Addiction [2’23”]
Powerlessness [8’55”]
The Tyee article focused on Wendy Dossett is concerned with other questions relating to: Buddhist approaches to recovery; poverty and trauma; methadone substitution therapy; relapse, and the fact the 12-Step Fellowship is ‘free, and it’s all over the place.’ You can find the full article here.
One aspect relating to this article puzzles me, the use of an AI voice for the ‘Listening to this article’ section. Why use this artificial voice instead of the voices of the two people involved in the interview? I am tempted to tease my good friend Wendy about her new voice.