This is an excerpt from William Cope Moyers’ latest book, “Broken Open: What Painkillers Taught Me About Life and Recovery“. The memoir will be available everywhere books are sold on 3rd September 2024.
I used to believe that abstinence and sobriety were achievements, the first to maintain and the second to safeguard. The programme of Steps and Traditions that comprised the curriculum in each of my stays in treatment defined abstinence, sobriety and recovery in stark and simple terms. The first priority was abstinence. It was the non-negotiable outer boundary that separated an active user from the realm of recovery. Continued abstinence from the substances that had captured and controlled me was critical to achieving sobriety, which was defined as the freedom from needing and wanting those things. Sobriety – alternately described as a divine gift or a self-disciplined duty –was offered as the only foundation strong enough to support the gift and burden of ongoing recovery.
When I asked my doctor who or what had failed when it came to my painkiller problem – me or the Twelve Steps – he declined to answer. Instead, he invited me to see the whole program of the Twelve Steps as a set of potentially useful tools rather than an inviolable system of solutions for every addiction. His invitation gave me permission to reimagine the uses of abstinence and the significance of sobriety. Once upon a time, I saw the Steps as a sacred program and the only way to recover from a substance use disorder. Today, I see them as tools that can help a person get well. But they’re not the only tools available or the only tools that are effective. Abstinence is about stopping. Sobriety is about learning to live well without the substances and what they did for you. Recovery is bigger than both.
I’m still exploring what all this means for me personally and for my more public work and advocacy. In this, my friend Susan Cheever has been a help. Her groundbreaking biography of Bill Wilson, My Name Is Bill, is a treasure for anyone interested in exploring the roots of the recovery movement he helped birth. In it, she identifies the paradoxes that so many of us grapple with after we have put down the drink or the drug that led us to ruin. She also notes how Bill himself made space for learning and change in the daily pursuit of wholeness and a more integrated life.
“In one way, an alcoholic who stops drinking is a walking miracle, a man or woman whose life has been so changed that the addiction that twined through all of his or her behavior has been removed. But what if this miraculously recovered alcoholic is a chain-smoking gambler who continues to snarl up the family finances and endanger his or her own health and the health of the family? There are no answers to these questions, of course, only paradoxes, balances, daily readjustments. In embracing the two sides of each of these questions in his writings, Bill Wilson left room for each alcoholic to find his or her own accommodation with recovery.”
As I approach the midpoint of my sixties as some version of the “walking miracle” that Susan describes, I marvel at the way my recovery has endured for the past thirty-five years. I also contemplate what it has meant for me, even during the periods when abstinence proved impossible or my sobriety stretched thin or my flaws caused me to founder.
I still believe in the promises that the AA founders wrote about in the Big Book almost a hundred years ago. But now I am reconciled to the truth that there is no predictable path to the newness and freedom and happiness that are among the gifts that come with recovering from addiction. That’s not to say I don’t recognise that we discover and claim these gifts by working toward them – the life we’re living is not a theory, of course; it requires action – it just means that there are as many ways to pursue these rich rewards as there are people who want to make them part of their lives.
My own children have faced challenges with substance use, and they have found pathways that continue to work for them. Each has a different approach, and all are different from my own. I am proud of my kids, and I celebrate their persistence and the solutions they’ve found for living life on life’s terms. There are many routes to well-being.
I find solace in the gracious idea that there is room enough in the great house of recovery for everybody who wants to claim it whenever and however they’re able to do so. I’m confident that we can work out the details and find language to helpfully describe our paths as we journey together.
As the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation’s public advocate, William C. Moyers carries the message about addiction, treatment, and recovery to audiences everywhere. Using his own story, Moyers highlights the power of addiction and the promise and possibility of recovery from it.
