robinturner | I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional (Reply)

Once in a while I see a book title that plucks my inner lyre with such a resounding thwang that my first thought is "Damn, I wish I'd written that book." Titles like "God Plays Dice" and "A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else", for example. This rarely has anything to do with the content of the book: God Plays Dice deals with probability and prediction, while the second book is a novel about adolescence; both are excellent, but neither are books that I would (or even could) write.

In the case of I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, though, it was enough to read a few pages to realise that not only would I have liked to have written a book with that title, I would have written pretty much the same book (though naturally not as well). It deals with the "recovery movement", and the author, Wendy Kaminer, stands in much the same relationship to it as Marat did to the French aristocracy. She was even invited to appear on Oprah as a token non-codependent:

"Try to put aside your experiences in recovery and the way it makes you feel," I suggested to the audience on "Oprah". Think about what the fascination with addiction means to us as a culture. Think about the political implications of advising people to surrender their will and submit to a higher power." People in the audience stared at me blankly.

The point Kaminer failed to get across to the studio audience, and which she makes throughout the book, is that Americans' obsession with recovery from a host of real or imagined abuses, addictions and dependencies through seminars, self-help books and 12-step programs is a cultural poison. Despite its rhetoric of empowerment and horror of dependency, it makes its disciples powerless and dependent:

The first step in recovery is admitting that you are powerless over your addiction and incapable of willing your way to health; the next step is surrendering your will to a higher power. Demanding self-surrender, the recovery movement is essentially religious, not psychotherapeutic, and most closely resembles nineteenth-century revivalism, with a little Christian Science thrown in. Imagine the slogan of recovery - admit that you're powerless and submit - as a political slogan, and what is wrong with this movement becomes clear.

The politics do not stop there, though. It is a tenet of the movement that pretty much everyone is dependant, or codependant, or recovering from dependency, or depending on recovery ... whatever. Everyone is an "adult child" and a victim of something or other, and this leads to a narcissism of misery which obscures the fact that some people suffer a hell of a lot more than others.

There is something niggardly and mean-spirited in the passion with which some recovering codependents point to themselves as victims of abuse, laying claim to the crown of thorns. Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOAs) are like Holocaust survivors, suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, John Bradshaw writes offensively. Recovery gives people permission always to put themselves first, partly because it doesn't give them a sense of perspective on their own complaints: parental nagging is not the same as physical abuse and deprivation, much less genocide; vague intimations of unease are not the same as cancer.

Having spent my life in Britain and Turkey, I find some of the vocabulary of the recovery movement rather puzzling, but to my relief, so does Kaminer:

Anne Wilson Schaef, author of the best-selling When Society Becomes an Addict and Co-Dependence: Misunderstood - Mistreated, defines it as "a disease process whose assumptions, beliefs, and lack of spiritual awareness lead to a process of non-living which is progressive." That some readers think they know what this means is a tribute to what George Orwell considered reduced expectations of language.

So if just about everyone (96%, according to one author cited by Kaminer) is going through or recovering from, this "disease process", what's my dependency, I wonder? All bad things are supposed to come from dysfunctional families, but when I look at my own childhood, I can't recall being abused in any way. I was "sexually abused" at the age of four by a girl a whole two years my senior, but I really enjoyed it and if I were to run into her again, I'd be tempted to ask if we could repeat the experience. My father was not violent or an alcoholic, though I suppose in the vocabulary of the movement he could have been described as "distant", in that he never kissed me or told me that he loved me. My Turkish wife found this surprising; I explained that it was because we're British, and the average male Briton would be more likely to need therapy if his father protested his love and gave him a big sloppy kiss.

So what else do I have? I am addicted to cigarettes, but that is, as I have mentioned before, because I am a worm with no willpower (ah, low self-esteem?). If a doctor told me tomorrow that had a 90% chance of developing cancer if I didn't quit immediately, I would be going cold turkey with no need for self-esteem or self-help groups; simple fear would do the trick. I suppose I could call myself a "recovering Buddhist", in that I still sometimes wake up and think that all life is suffering, especially when I've been hitting the booze the night before. And no, I'm not an alcoholic, a recovering alcoholic or an adult child of an adult child of someone who was sexually abused by an alcoholic - I just drink too much.

Aha, I have it! I am addicted to acidity. I am a recovering cynic, ascerbically dependant, a sarcaholic. I thought I was simply being witty and perceptive, but I was in denial. Now I think about it, I can even trace it back to a traumatic childhood event: my primary teacher called me "precocious". My inner child was scarred. Of course at that time, my inner child was pretty much the same person as my outer child, but ... See, I'm doing it again, covering my hurt with a patina of glib observations. I'm probably doing it because I feel that if I'm not eloquent, people won't love me.

I feel so much better now that I've testified. I think I'll go and write a self-help book ...