Breaking the Outdated Paradigm of Treating Addiction

Breaking the Outdated Paradigm of Treating Addiction

I have visited many different meetings where recovering alcoholics and addicts meet to provide comradeship and support to each other. At those meetings, when the members take turns speaking to the group, I hear in their speeches and conversations the struggles of members who only have a year or two of sobriety. At one meeting I attended, a member was receiving his one-year chip for having maintained his sobriety for twelve months, and he gave a little speech to the hundred and fifty of us in attendance. His speech was filled with emotion and gratitude as he told us an impassioned story of how he was maintaining his sobriety each day.

“When I awaken each morning,” he said, “the first thing that happens is that my knees hit the floor and I’m begging God for another day of sobriety. The second thing I do is call my sponsor to get a program for that day’s activities. I call my sponsor for support five more times during that day, and after dinner I go to an AA meeting, and before I get into bed that night my last act is to drop to the floor and thank God for another day of sobriety. Staying sober is what I work at all day long.”

I was moved by his passion, by his sincerity, and by his powerful drive. I felt tremendous respect for that courageous young man who was winning his struggle to remain sober. However, I couldn’t help but think to myself, “That boy needs treatment!”

Was he living a relaxed, calm life, free of the fear of relapse? Every day, every hour of every day, he was struggling to remain sober, with the dark specter of relapse hovering over him.

In contrast to that young man’s condition, I thought of two graduates of Passages, the addiction cure center I founded with my son Pax—after helping him beat his dependency to heroin, cocaine and alcohol. Our philosophy here is that drug and alcohol abuse are not diseases, but responsive behaviors people use to cope with underlying problems.

One of those graduates had just completed four months of sobriety, while the other had completed two-and-a-half years and had recently married. Both had called to say hello and reconnect with us. Both were helping others become sober. Both reported that they were more productive in their line of work than ever before. Neither was struggling to stay sober. It was a natural part of their lives. They are the product of an entirely new point of view in treatment therapy, a new paradigm.

A paradigm is a belief system. In this case one that comprises everything generally held to be true, and one that you might believe to be true, about alcoholism and addiction.

In 1956, the American Medical Association (AMA) named alcoholism as a disease. Throughout the world today, the existing primary paradigm regarding alcoholism and addiction is not only that they are diseases, but also that they are incurable. We’re told that even if we were to stop abusing substances, the disease would continue and we would be addicts or alcoholics forever.
It is that belief that is primarily responsible for the stagnation that has existed for the past seventy years or so in the treatment of alcoholism and addiction. It is that paradigm that has given birth to those two terrible, and untrue, slogans “Once an alcoholic or addict, always an alcoholic or addict” and “Relapse is part of recovery.”

In the early part of the twentieth century, there was a paradigm regarding the four-minute mile. It was said, and almost everyone believed it, that it was impossible for a human to run a mile in under four minutes. Doctors of that era said that the human physiology would break down and kill a runner before that could be accomplished. Engineers said that the aerodynamics of the human body made it impossible. It seemed that belief must be true because no matter how many thousands of runners attempted it, they all failed. Yet on May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds.

Once the old paradigm was smashed and a new paradigm was created, running the mile in less than four minutes became a common occurrence. It’s not that the runners were faster or stronger—it’s that they knew it could be done.

That’s what happens to a paradigm when a hole is blown in it; everyone pours through the gap in the new way of thinking. And that’s what I convey to everyone who comes to our center for healing: Now it is your turn to end your existing thought paradigm about alcoholism and addiction and you. You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever.