Attending Narcotics Anonymous Addiction Recovery

Introduction

This field report covers two separate visits to a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting, both at the St. Matthews Missionary Baptist Church, located at 6100 NW 24th Avenue in Miami, Florida. Both meetings started at 5:15PM and ended at 6:30PM. One of the meetings took place on Tuesday, November 28, and the other on Friday, December 1, 2017. Both meetings have a theme called “Inner City Recovery.” Located in the heart of Liberty City, St. Matthews caters to the local African-American community. Unsurprisingly, attendants of the both the Inner City Recovery NA meetings were predominantly black males with a low socio-economic status. Results of the fieldwork illustrates the role Twelve Step programs like NA play in recovery.
Meeting Description
The fieldwork took place over the course of two non-contiguous days. On Tuesday, November 28, the meeting had a theme focused on Step Two of the Twelve Steps: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” The Friday meeting did not focus on a specific step and was structured more like an open meeting. However, both meetings are structured with an opening discussion that leads towards individuals sharing stories. Only about fifteen people attended the Tuesday meeting, whereas the Friday meeting included many more—close to fifty.
The meeting room is large, and belonging to the church, has some religious iconography adorning the walls. There are also inspirational sayings, which coincide with the spiritual tenor of the NA meetings. Both of the meetings began with an opening prayer and concluded with a finishing prayer. During the less crowded Tuesday meeting, participants were asked to move their chairs in a circle, whereas for the Friday meeting, seats were arranged in rows. At both meetings, a proctor had set up a table full of Narcotics Anonymous and other Twelve Step literature, including copies of “The Big Book,” and other literature both free and for sale. No dues are collected, but there is a small donation box on the table where participants may drop money that can be used for members who cannot afford to purchase the literature. There were also some used copies of the literature for sale at a discounted price. Several men were browsing the collection of pamphlets when the leader called the meeting to adjourn.
Both meetings were structured. The Tuesday meeting started with two prayers: the Lord’s prayer and the Serenity prayer. Group members held hands during the prayers. The leader then introduced himself by saying, “Hi, my name is John and I’m an addict.” The other members of the group said, “Hi, John.” After affirming everyone’s presence in the room through eye contact, John started by saying that they were going to focus on Step Two of the Twelve Steps. Reading the full text of the step aloud first, the speaker than proceeded to share his take on what “coming to believe” means to him. First, he talked about the fact that he was always a religious person in the sense that he believed in God and had respect for the church. He then posed a rhetorical question, “How do we come to believe again?” The speaker then said that through recovery one has the opportunity to be reborn in a sense, because by taking the first step of recognizing our powerlessness, the second step comes relatively easy. He said that “coming to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore is to sanity” is one of the most powerful steps in all the twelve because it is the moment where we take that leap of faith. The speaker said that he strayed from God not by using drugs, but by failing to have faith that God was there for him when he needed God, or when things got so rough he did not know where to turn. He never stopped believing in God, the leader said, but he never fully believed that God cared for him. As a result, he turned to drugs. Drugs became his best friend, his ally, his support system, effectively a proxy for God. He felt invincible at first: the drugs made him feel on top of the world. Feeling powerful and capable of managing his emotions while on drugs, he started to lose touch with reality. Soon his life started falling apart because he put all his trust into drugs, and none of it into God.
Then, the speaker started to focus on the concept of sanity versus insanity. He said that a lot of people who come to these meetings struggle with the term “insanity.” Then he iterated a saying that is common in the Twelve Step setting, which is that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” When several of the members of the group chuckled, the speaker smiled and looked them in the eyes. He said that insanity was shouting at his mother at the top of his lungs for no reason. Insanity was hitting his friend for no reason. Insanity was running around at 2 or 3 in the morning desperate to get high. Insanity was getting high at work. Insanity was losing the love of his life to drugs. When he said this latter thing, the speaker’s voice choked up; he was visibly emotional reflecting on the low point of his life. Yet these low points were what led him to “come to believe,” as he put it.
People nodded while he spoke, affirming that they could relate. After the leader completed his sharing, the people in the room clapped out of genuine appreciation. Then the leader said he was going to open the floor for others to share their stories of recovery. The people who nodded enthusiastically and with a big smile seemed like veterans to the group. One immediately put up his hand, and when given a nod of approval, started to speak. “Hi, my name is Elijah and I’m an addict and an alcoholic and a gambling addict!” He said it laughingly and humbly at the same time. The other group members echoed, “Hi, Elijah!” Elijah shared his story, and his was followed by one of the three women at the meeting who shared her story. Although all their stories were different, common themes emerged among them including being at rock bottom before being willing to change. All three tried to return to the theme of the meeting, of coming to believe that God could restore one to sanity, by sharing their struggle with faith. With faith comes freedom, the woman said as she spoke, but we need to believe also that we are worthy of God’s love. “Let me tell you,” she said, “You are worthy. Every single one of you. Don’t you ever forget it. As soon as you believe that you lack worth, that you lack value in the eyes of God, is when you lose your own humanity. Always have faith. God is the only thing that can restore us to sanity. It’s written in this Big Book,” she held up her well-worn copy of the blue-bound copy of the Alcoholics Anonymous tome and continued, “and it’s written in the very Big Book.” Her quip helped the other people in the room laugh.
The Friday meeting had a less personal and more sobering tone than the Tuesday meeting. Also beginning with the Lord’s prayer and the Serenity prayer, this meeting had an open format but was lead by one speaker. The speaker, Charelle, shared her story in a longer format and with slightly more formality than John had the previous Tuesday. She talked about how both her sons are addicts and she now feels powerless to help them, and that she has recently been taking herself through the twelve steps specifically regarding her powerlessness over her sons and her need to turn it all over to God. Charelle said that she first started using when she was just eight years old, started smoking pot and drinking occasionally and “next thing you knew, I was on the street.” She then said she kept blaming other people for her problems. “It was always someone else’s fault. Ain’t it funny how that works?” When the people in the meeting laughed, she continued, “So if it was always someone else’s fault, then that meant I never had to take responsibility for nothing. Not a thing.” Charelle said that she has been sober for almost five years and six months, and that over this time she learned that these meetings are about a lot more than just herself getting sober. They are about “coming home.” She hopes that her sons will “come home” soon, she said in a tearful conclusion to her powerful story. After Charelle opened the podium for others to share, several men of various ages came up. The first one said that after spending a few years in jail, which was where he found the Twelve Steps originally, that the biggest struggle has not even been staying clean but finding a job. He said that now he realizes how easy it is to turn to things like drugs, either as a business or as a recreational habit, but that if you put drugs on top of all the other problems, “then you just got one more problem!” That seemed to resonate with the room too. The next speaker also discussed financial hardships, and how he struggles every day with cravings. He said that he has been clean and sober for six days, but that every time he cleans up he ends up relapsing. Several people in the room called out support to him, saying things like “One day at a time!” The atmosphere in both the meetings attended was positive, uplifting, and supportive. People sharing their struggles receive social power through their honesty and their willingness to expose the raw truth of their lives.
Critique
Twelve Step programs remain one of the most common interventions for substance abuse (Capuzzi & Stauffer, 2016). Visiting these two meetings reveals many of the reasons why the Twelve Step model remains such an important part of the addiction recovery process. The meetings were much different from what I was expecting. For one, there was less give and take than I had anticipated. Meetings are not about counseling or giving members advice. Members rarely even talked about the process of recovery or even about drugs in any detail. The focus was on the spiritual processes of recovery. Although Chapter 12 of the Capuzzi & Stauffer (2016) text does provide an outline of what to expect from a Twelve Step meeting, being there and seeing how one actually operates clarified how the seemingly abstract principles of the Twelve Steps can be put into concrete action. As Khantzian (2014) points out, it can be helpful to understand the Twelve Steps from within a psychodynamic framework. The psychodynamic perspective frames addiction “as a self-regulation disorder involving difficulties in regulating emotions, self-esteem, relationships, and behavior and how the working of AA address and correct these vulnerabilities,” (Khantzian, 2014, p. 225). This is why the members who shared were talking about things other than drugs. This is also why there was some talk in the meetings about how recovery is not about willpower. The most mystifying thing was hearing that recovery had nothing to do with willpower, and yet especially after Tuesday’s meeting I understood. When a person surrenders his or her will to a higher power, they are preventing themselves from getting in the way. Willpower puts the “self” back into the recovery process, something that can be detrimental to growth and change.
The meetings are filled with slogans and catch phrases, many of which I knew already but some of which were new to me. These repeated phrases did impart a strange sort of club feeling to the meetings, but I believe that the members benefit from having additional verbal structures. The inclusion of the Lord’s prayer was unsurprising given the meeting was held in a church, although I do wonder what other meetings use. From what Capuzzi & Stauffer (2016) describe, not all members of Twelve Step groups are necessarily religious, and some defer to the group as their higher power instead of God. This meeting at St. Matthews was definitively and unapologetically religious.
I learned also that the recovery process is about personal transformation. Gathered by what was said and shared at the meetings, the people have changed fundamentally as a result of applying the Twelve Steps in their life. This is why members o the group “keep coming back,” as they chant. They keep coming back because “it works if you work it.” You cannot simply walk away from recovery. I believe many addicts are put off by the notion that they cannot just go in for a quick cure. The Twelve Step group is a long-term solution, but one that offers members additional benefits such as a community of supportive individuals who, like them, rely on the power of the group for spiritual sustenance. I resonated a lot with what almost everyone in the meeting said, especially in terms of how being an addict had torn their lives apart and how hard it was to put the pieces back in place. Surrendering to a higher power, even if that power is a group, can be a tremendously liberating experience. The people in the group demonstrate remarkable courage for being able to show up to the meetings even when it would be easier to reach for whatever drug they preferred most.




References

Capuzzi, D. & Stauffer, M.D. (2016). Foundations of Addictions Counseling, 3rd Edition. Pearson.
Khantzian, E.J. (2014). A psychodynamic perspective on the efficacy of 12-step programs. Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly 32(2-3): 225-236.