Addiction Recovery — The Gift of Rigidity

I recently heard a woman talk about AA failing because of its rigidity... but the rigidity of AA is a feature, not a bug. You have to submit your personal desires to something beyond you to curb addictive cycles, because they're driven by pain. Following a set of clearly defined rules of what’s good and bad keeps the addiction in check long enough to face the pain and work with it. In other words, I see getting out of (any) addiction as a movement of integrating unowned “RED” (egocentric, might-makes-right drives inside of us) into “AMBER” (Socialized, right/wrong, conventional drives to belong to something bigger than our individuality). But I think the speaker also had a point, in that AA often focuses so much on the Red to Amber transition, that it fails to account for (a) people evolving beyond that once they’re established, and (b) huge chunks of a person’s experience are far more evolved than their shadows and struggles, and these chunks mostly do not get served by the groups.

With love, Jordan