Needed: a radical recovery - Culture; psychological 'recovery' movement - Column

Progressive, The, Jan, 1993 by Elayne Rapping

A recent issue of Time magazine ran a piece on Al Gore's frequent use of "recovery talk"--the now widely spoken language of the Twelve Step/Addiction/Self-Help movement--in his campaign appearances. The New York Times, a few weeks earlier, ran a similar piece about Bill Clinton's frequent references to his experience with family "dysfunction," drug and alcohol abuse, and therapy.

To which Bush aide Torie Clarke responded--invoking the days when a candidate could easily be defeated by the mere disclosure that he had sought treatment for emotional problems (Thomas Eagleton) or by allowing the cameras to see a single tear-filled eye (Edmund Muskie)--that "real men don't lie on couches."

But, as the Republicans found out, the times they are a--changin'. "Codependency," wounded "inner children," "adult children" of various kinds of "dysfunctional" parents, are the cultural and, increasingly, the real currency of today's marketplace of ideas and things. Melody Beattie's Beyond Codependency and Codependent No More were on The Times bestseller list for many months. So were Robin Norwood's Women Who Love Too Much and the continuous tumble of John

Bradshaw treatises on every calamity that might befall a person growing up in a dysfunctional family. Bradshaw offers books, tapes, seminars, and even vacation "recovery" cruises for those fortunate enough to have "survived" family dysfunction and also prospered.

And the Hazelden addiction empire, famous for leading such notables as Liz Taylor, Kitty Dukakis, and Liza Minnelli to "recovery"--to name just one of many treatment-centers-turned-million-dollar corporations--also markets everything from greeting cards to key chains, necklaces and bracelets, from coffee mugs (decaf only) to "daily meditation" books, all inscribed with uplifting slogans from the gurus of the movement. And then there are the electronic media. You can hardly watch a day of daytime talk (and that's a lot of talk these days, what with all the cable clones of Oprah and Phil) without coming up against at least one problem for which the solution turns out to be a twelve-step recovery program. A random sample of freeze frames on any channel-surfing excursion will almost surely hit on one or two talking heads with identification tags like "drug-addicted transsexual prostitute" or "compulsive blinker." And in every case, there will be an "expert" hawking another self-help book with information on how to find the appropriate Anonymous group for this "addiction."

In the last ten years or so, more than seventy made-for-TV movies have dealt with addictive disorders and their family-destroying aftermaths. Lately, more and more of them end with the sufferers attending group meetings where they are seen to weep with relief at having found the "solution" to their "problem."

Just last month, I saw two starring Connie Sellecca. In the first, made in the 1980s, she suffers from bulimia. In the second, brand new, she plays a successful career woman in a "codependent" relationship with a man who is a "sexaholic." In the end, she goes to Codependents Anonymous (CODA) while he, terminally "in denial," goes from bad to worse.

If any of this makes sense to you, if you recognize the language and the gestalt it refers to, you know that stuff represents a major cultural phenomenon in American life. Nor is it obviously, as too many critics blithely assume, a politically "conservative" (as opposed to "liberal" or "progressive") movement. Not with such left-feminists as Gloria Steinem writing bestsellers on the need for "healing" one's "inner child" and developing the "self-esteem" destroyed by "dysfunctional" family dynamics.

No, traditional political terminology is not so easily applied to this brave New Age world of recovery. Like all totalizing discourses, "recovery thought" reflects a world view that explains and addresses everything, in its own terms. Any troublesome behavior pattern, from shopping "too much" to sleeping "too much" to worrying "too much," can be made to fit the loose definition of "addiction." Any objection or doubt can be answered with the all-purpose dismissal that one must be "in denial."

Do you worry that such self-absorption takes people away from political matters? You are using political activity "addictively" as a way of avoiding "your problem." I have been told so many times, "You can't change the world until you heal yourself," that I don't raise the issue any more. Do you insist that your own moderate, but regular, use of alcohol is a pleasure rather than a problem? You are, so far, "controlling" your addiction, but it will soon "progress" and "become unmanageable." Just wait.

It is this totalizing, politically reductive aspect of the movement that critics--most notably Wendy Kaminer in I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional and David Rieff in "Victims, All? Recovery, Codependency, and the Art of Blaming Somebody Else," in the October 1991 issue of Harper's--most oppose.

Movement people call everyone a "victim" of a "dysfunctional," "abusive" family system: Bradshaw and friends use a widely quoted figure of 96 per cent as their official statistic on dysfunctional families, and most agree with Robin Norwood that virtually everyone in therapy could use" a twelve-step program. Their critics argue, however, that to do so is to trivialize the idea of "victimization" and oppression."