Comment:
My GF of 6 years is 26 years sober. Everything is about her, her needs, her spirituality, her recovery, her feelings. The selfishness continues throughout every facet of our lives as I am expected to provide and do so without gratitude. I also operate in our daily lives walking on egg shells. I rarely say the right thing. Almost everything I ask or say is met with rebuttal. I believe the selfishness of an alcoholic is a personality trait that contributes (among other factors) to uncontrolled drinking and addiction. I think the unselfish person is not driven to drink and does not become an addict.
Response:
Thank you for your honesty and for writing.
You are right – the result of progressive, liberal, faux “recovery” is to perpetuate narcissism… let alone self-hatred, low self-worth, laziness, dependency, fear and ignorance. This is what happens when you take the teeth out of recovery – there is no getting better. This is what happens when you take personal responsibility out of recovery – there is no getting better. This is what happens when you take God out of recovery – there is no getting better. There is no cessation to being a child. There is no growing up into a moral, decent, responsible adult. There is no accountability for mutating oneself into a drunken idiot or a useless drug addict, but rather, one is taught to blame others, blame the world, blame his or her genes or family or childhood as some sort of victim, which is of course delusional. Fake, liberal recovery instills a belief that the addict is somehow unique and special and different than the rest of the world and thus deserves special treatment. The belief that nobody understands what it’s like to be me, to feel the way I do, and blah, blah, blah… this is a losing approach and it is doomed to fail.
Let me reassure you, addicts and alcoholics are not special or different or unique. Everyone on Earth has the same struggles but they don’t act like whining infants and ply themselves with comfort 24/7 at the expense of everyone else, let alone their own lives and productivity. They are not selfish imbeciles. So yes, the “recovering” addict or alcoholic of today is not recovered at all. Sure they may have put down the drugs or the booze temporarily, but what they have done is carried their narcissism into sobriety.
It is the mind of the addict that needs to be fixed. Drugs and alcohol are just a sideshow. They are basically irrelevant. The addict must get better from the person they have become, the person who they are. They have a sickness of the soul – a spiritual problem.
Finally, you are also correct in asserting that the unselfish person does not become a drug addict or an alcoholic. People who understand that life is not about them… that it is not all about them feeling good and feeding their banal, immoral urges like an unevolved pig… that it is not about their feelings and their victimhood and that nobody understands… well, these people don’t turn themselves into junkies. They also have a conscience. They understand that using drugs and drinking alcohol is wrong. They understand that there are consequences to their actions. They also CARE about the consequences of their actions.
And when you care about the consequences of your actions, you don’t drink or use drugs because you understand that what you are doing is hurting self, and more importantly, hurting others.
These articles directly illustrate how drug treatment providers are often more dysfunctional than their patients. If you read these posts carefully, they are full of derogatory assumptions about addicted persons, their character, and values. Under this approach, addicts are selfish, narcissistic, “whining babies” and even “unevolved pigs” with a shared collection of character deficiencies. While this might be true for some addicts, it is also true for many who are not addicted (which, to be fair, the article acknowledges).
This thinking is utter nonsense, and it illuminates a central, ethical lapse in modern day treatment. There is absolutely no empirical evidence to support these derogatory assumptions, which only perpetuate the stigma surrounding addiction while conditioning the recovering addict to believe that he is inherently flawed and unstable.
These insulting assumptions also give counselors a flawed justification for treating their clients like idiots who cannot maker decisions for themselves. They embolden counselors to take over the client’s decision making process because of the reckless assumption that addicts are unable to make independent choices. In taking this approach, treatment providers violate fundamental ethical rights to autonomy, self-determination and informed consent that are essential for meaningful recovery. This is a clear ethical deficiency that exists throughout the treatment industry and it is shameful. Without meaningful oversight or internal controls, this problem will continue and many addicts will leave treatment convinced that they are inherently flawed and cannot make choices for themselves. Total nonsense, at least in most cases.
Please think about this and apply a rigorous level of self-reflection that you expect from your clients. You are hurting people by taking this approach, which is unethical and, in some cases, downright cruel.