The Work Is Not Recovery

And other hard-won lessons

Addiction, as the Alcoholics Anonymous line goes, is cunning, baffling, and powerful.

It’s cunning because things that should work to solve it, don’t work.

It’s baffling because enough failed attempts can stupefy the will to keep trying, can “teach” you there’s no point in trying because everything you’ve tried hasn’t worked.

It’s powerful because it can overwhelm, can dictate your life (in the sense of a dictator).

Little in life is as cunning, baffling, and powerful as addiction. So we try new things. And we call the process of trying new things “recovery.” Yet, the question — does it ever actually work? What is recovery, anyway? How do you recover?

What’s Not-Recovery

IFS work isn’t recovery. Parts work can be helpful to make subpersonalities legible, help parts metabolize pain, and even deal with pernicious protectors. But the obsessive thinking that’s the hallmark of addition isn’t neutralized by IFS work.

Breathwork isn’t recovery. Moderating your nervous system can be helpful. But the obsessive thinking or pre-frontal cortex shutdown that make addiction so compulsive aren’t reversed or neutralized by breathwork.

Attending AA meetings isn’t recovery. It’s helpful to be with others like you who’ve been where you are, to learn what’s been helpful for them, to gain via repetition some sense of up and down amidst the chaos of addiction. But it’s totally possible to walk out of a meeting and head straight to your dealer’s — so meetings themselves are little block when addiction’s deciding your life for you.

Meeting with a sponsor isn’t recovery. Hopefully a sponsor can impart what’s been useful to them on their journey, speak into challenging moments with good opposite action, hear your particular brand of insanity and nudge you a degree or two that day closer to sanity. But eventually the amorphous, invisible, unpredictable shift that made a difference for your sponsor will need to happen for you too, and that’s not transmissible via conversation.

Exercise isn’t recovery. Exercise is for feeling healthier, strengthening a weakened body, enlivening your mood and nervous system. But healthy, strengthened, enlivened people often feel and obey the calm quiet seduction of their chosen substance. The gym won’t fix you.

Setting and achieving goals isn’t recovery. In the four years I’ve been in “serious” recovery after a short stint of homelessness, I built a portfolio of 135+ angel investments in high-growth crypto and AI startups, recorded 120 episodes of a well-liked crypto podcast, joined a successful go-to-market agency as a Partner, received over 425,000 streams in the first year of being signed to a record label for piano work, and traveled to Malaysia, Singapore, France, Switzerland, and England (among other fun domestic USA trips). I also relapsed three weeks ago and just moved into a sober house for the upcoming month of June to decelerate the inevitable escalation. They say “build a life worth being in recovery for.” These four years of being mostly-sober has created a life I’d actually like to live within — and yet that life’s loveliness offers little to no brakes in that moment where obsessiveness begins to override reason.

Producing music and writing isn’t recovery. This past year I’ve had the chance to create two albums of piano music I’ve always dreamed of making, with the support of the finest neoclassical label in the world. I’ve also begun creating electronic music (inspired by the latest Brian Eno documentary). I’ve written 55,000 words on Substack across 31 essays. Yet these opportunities to live my dreams of artistic creation somehow are outweighed by the desire for a substance to change how I feel in the moment (even if I’m feeling good already!).

Therapy isn’t recovery. I’ve had the benefit of two remarkable therapists, both esteemed among their peers, one of whom regularly speaks nationally on healing. Both have provided insight, safety, and frankly companionship during both dark and light days in recovery. But I’ve yet to find a therapy insight (or modality – EMDR, etc.) permanently useful against addiction.

Psychedelic use isn’t recovery. Psychedelic use has been helpful for waking up my emotional life. Yet waking up my emotional life hasn’t been terminally useful in squelching addiction’s siren call in dire moments, at least not yet.

Rehab isn’t recovery. I’ve been to four inpatient treatment facilities, one for 3 months and the others for short “holy-shit-I’ve-gotta-put-the-brakes-on-this-relapse” stays. Rehab can be pivotal. But life isn’t a contained environment like rehab, and the triggers you’re inoculated from there will require new fortitude on the outside (which most experience as relapse, not permanent success).

Service isn’t recovery. I co-founded the Dallas chapter of Psychedelics in Recovery and nurtured it the past two years into a thriving weekly group with a book club and regular retreats. I’ve relapsed on my DOC on-and-off through this period of time, while chairing many if not most of the weekly meetings as a trusted servant.

Healthy relationships aren’t recovery. I have abundant friends, old and new, who make my life sing with meaning and curiosity and excitement. I have a wonderful girlfriend who brightens my life immeasurably. My family relationships have been mostly rebuilt and are thriving. Yet none of that matters when addiction asserts itself back into my life — the amends, the painful conversations, the embarrassing disclosures, the painstaking rebuilding of trust, all falls by the wayside.

What’s Recovery

My simple in media res meditation would be this:

Recovery isn’t about doing any of these things.

More specifically, recovery isn’t a doing thing at all, rather it’s a being thing.

Recovery is about being a different person. But you can’t immediately be a different person. You must become a different person. Being requires prior becoming. And we’re always becoming — some version of our infinite possible selves is actuating into reality at all times.

So recovery is about becoming a different person that thinks differently, feels differently, behaves differently than the one who relies on the solution of their chosen substance to fix them, entertain them, unlock them, save them.

Which means it’s normal within recovery — within becoming — that you’ll think, feel, and behave how you don’t want to. Part of recovery is learning self-compassion and unconditional friendliness toward yourself as you try and often fail to become someone new.

And it’s normal within recovery — within becoming — that you’ll relapse against your wishes. You spent who-knows-how-long with that knee-jerk reaction to use as your default. “Relapse is a part of recovery,” but only because you’re in between who you’ve been and who you’ll be.

And it’s normal within recovery — within becoming — for the deep insights that’ll shift your tectonic plates to take time. Cate Hall mentions on this podcast that one big piece of what ended up getting her out of the addictive cycle was this:

“I also think there was a lot of thinking I did and a lot of minor blocks in the puzzle or something that made it possible for me to quit. One of them I think was realizing that obviously this couldn’t be what the plan was, and I just needed to accept that. Another was coming to the realization that the potential cost of my addiction and to continuing to use drugs were not that I would die — which I was not really concerned about, I thought if I die then I die, that’s fine — but the bad situation was, I would just spend all of my money, lose all of my friends and family, lose the place I was living which became a possibility toward the end, and would basically just have a really shitty life. Just like a really boring unremarkable life where my brain didn’t work very well and I wasn’t doing interesting things — and that terrified me… It was some form of self-loyalty where I felt like I’d been through a lot of really difficult things in life and had a life I was very proud of that felt very interesting, and it just felt like a disrespectful ending to the life of the person who had put in all of that work so that I would have a good life.”

A friend of mine in Texas told me something similar yet different: it was the simple deep recognition, after roughly five years of cyclical relapsing and whack-a-mole of various substances, that eventually this was going to kill him. It was about seeing and knowing this reality, rather than thinking or predicting it, that shifted his relationship with substances virtually overnight.

I’ve not experienced either of those shifts yet: not terminally, not finally. And some of my closest friends haven’t experienced them yet either. Instead they’ll experience broken ribs by drug dealers, seven months in inpatient treatment for the 9^th time, suicide attempts, crashed cars, miserable sober houses haunted by hungry ghosts, utterly ruined professional reputations, shattered relationships with families who’ve disowned them and former friends who avoid them and women who want to love them but quite literally can’t find enough sober surface area to stick to, walking miles per day merely to get to AA meetings then walking miles back home…

Cunning. Baffling. Powerful. What makes recovery happen for some and not others? What makes any good gift happen for some and not others? We’re all cursed and blessed with our various quirks of mind and spirit, metered out disproportionately across chance and luck.

I perpetually hope for a shift, for myself and for my friends still in addictive cycles. It sometimes feels like a shift that changes when observed, whose effects neutralize if paying too close of attention for whether “this” shift will be “the” shift. It’s perplexing that a salvific shift could itself be cunning, baffling, and powerful, not just the addiction.

But regardless of that timing, I’m not convinced all the things I’ve been doing these past four years are “recovery.” I think it’s probably all part of The Work of healing. But I think recovery is whatever ultimately begins, amidst much pain and confusion and frustration and anger, when you stumble across that invisible internal threshold where you’re simply done, and can stay done with some maintenance. The maintenance may look like any of the activities from the list above. But to treat those as the medicine itself instead of fuel for the journey I think isn’t correct.