February 21, 2016

Kristina Spaude and Matt Alspaugh

Homily – Kristina

I applied to graduate school for a third time in the fall of 2009. I had submitted materials to the University of Akron and was accepted. After months of discernment about what I was actually going to do with my life, including the longest appointment the career counselor at Kent State had ever had, at the end of which she reaffirmed the very thing my parents and grandparents had always told me – that I could do anything I wanted, I just had to pick something – I had made a decision. I was going to be an addictions counselor, specializing, I expected, primarily in the care of those with substance abuse issues.

That road, you may have guessed, has remained the road untraveled, although I still have a passionate interest in this work. My employment situation became unstable that fall and my plans for graduate school were set aside as I tried to navigate through the shifting sands of the economy and life in general.

My interest in addictions had begun about 5 years before that. I started dating a guy who I found out had a drug addiction but he had been in recovery for a little while and things seemed to be ok. I knew very little about how addictions worked or manifested so I trusted that if things seemed ok that they were.

I had grown up with alcohol in the home. My father is an alcoholic – some might say recovered or recovering, but my father doesn’t. He hasn’t had a drink in more than 25 years and has no desire for it to be a part of his life anymore. I had a grandparent who had obsessive-compulsive disorder – although not a drinker. And my stepfather was a heavy drinker. I made a decision early that I wasn’t going to be involved with alcohol or drugs – my life was enough of a mess as it was and substance use wasn’t going to make anything any better. I was also pretty sure that heredity probably wasn’t on my side and I’d just be playing with fire.

So when I met this guy, I knew nothing about what addiction meant, but I was about to get a crash course. I attended some AA meetings with him and resonated a lot with them. He relapsed after we’d been dating for a few months; the nature of his addiction was that he would be gone for a few days, bingeing, and then return, worn out, depressed, and self-loathing. After a week or so he’d be back to himself and starting working a program of recovery again. We went down the road a ways. There were the middle-of-the-night calls to pick him up and get him home, which I would do out of concern for his safety and well-being.

I stayed in that relationship for a while because I cared about him a lot and apart from the addiction – which I was never directly involved with – things weren’t that bad. Over time, though, they got harder. He would disappear – he always used away from home and family – for a few days or sometimes more, missing work and other important things. He’d be gone more frequently and for longer periods of time. The caretaking on my part and that of his family got to be harder, mostly in quantity. Broken promises and unfulfilled dreams were part of the path. And after a while, I eventually decided I didn’t want to do it anymore. It was exhausting, obviously wasn’t healthy, and seemed like a slow road to nowhere. He went out one day and I decided that was it. I didn’t even have a chance to actually say those words to him, as that time he was gone for 6 weeks and ended up in jail, and then on to prison.

I learned a lot in our time together – he was a brilliant computer networking specialist and information technology guru – and I at least matched his passion for learning. I also learned a lot about addictions – about how they function, who they hurt and how, and I learned about Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon, for friends and family of those who have alcohol use issues, about Narcotics Anonymous, and other 12-Step programs. After the last time the guy I had been dating went on a binge, I decided to attend AA meetings alone for a while. I found the community to be amazingly supportive. They let me grieve – for all my losses, past and present – and held me through it.

It was actually because of their love and realizing that as much as I loved them, too, that that was not the right community for me – I am, after all, not an alcoholic or addict, whatever my predispositions and personality might indicate – and that as they needed each other for a particular purpose, I, too, needed to find my people. Simply put, going to AA is what brought me to church. Their fellowship and their radical view of “G-d as we understand him/her/it” convinced me that I would be able to find a church to call home.

I’m not sure it’s possible to overstate how significant AA was in my spiritual journey. “Transformative” and “powerful” are two descriptors I use. Is AA the answer for everyone? I’m sure it’s not, although it has helped millions of people. But the 12 steps offer anyone and everyone a framework for more intentional and mindful living, and practicing them is powerful – accepting the idea that we can’t control everything, surrendering to this knowledge, taking a moral inventory, making amends as we are able, and continuing to use these ideas to guide our lives, working with others to live more faithfully.

Speaking directly to the this month’s theme of desire, one last thing that my ex-boyfriend taught me about addiction: I bought a t-shirt on a whim – it was purple – that read “Satisfied” across it. At that point in my life, it seemed like a good reminder about what was good and where I was. One time when I was wearing the shirt he told me that that statement – satisfied – is the thing that addicts struggle with the most. Having enough. Being enough. That feeling of being satiated, enjoying what we have and being satisfied with it. Addictions create a disconnect in what is enough – there’s always the chase for more, wanting, craving more, and it’s not uncommon to focus hard on one addiction and have another one pop up, although sometimes because they are more socially or culturally acceptable they don’t seem like addictions. It’s something worth thinking about – the next time we’re chasing someone’s approval, bingeing on TV, drinking a pot of coffee just to be functional – is this our best self? What would it take to be satisfied? When are you satisfied?

Homily – Matt

I have been involved with the Unitarian Universalist faith for almost thirty years now, and have seen many changes, most for the good, over the years. Among the changes that I cherish most is our increased willingness to acknowledge our human imperfections, our humility, even our brokenness as people.

It has only been in the last fifteen years or so that we as a movement began to fully acknowledge the presence of people suffering from addiction in our midst. Certainly we have long welcomed AA groups into our buildings, or as frequently the non-theistic AA offshoots like Rational Recovery or SmartRecovery. But we rarely acknowledged the direct effect that addiction had on our own people, here, now.  Too often, we saw ourselves as nearly perfect people, untouched by addiction. And so our addictions and those of our family members and friends remained hidden and secret. And so, I could not talk of the alcoholism of my dear mother, toward the end of her life. And so, I could not explore the drug abuse that led to crime, prison, and estrangement of my half-sister. There was no place to talk of such human imperfections in the UU churches of those days.

But we’ve come a long way. We have realized the extent of addiction in and around us. We have come to understand that addiction comes in many forms: substances, drugs, drink, but also food, sex, money, and risk. Just about anything we can desire can become an addictive object. We have come to understand the interconnectedness of the suffering that addiction brings into families and friendships and communities. We have moved beyond an “anything goes” kind of permissiveness or libertarianism to a much more nuanced understanding of what behaviors makes sense from a social and legal perspective.

But our experience as UUs is just a small part of a larger messy story. How we handle people with substance abuse issues has a long, difficult history in this country. There seem to be at least three separate strands that run through our history. The first is a Calvinist religious belief that people who are addicted are morally degenerate, shameful, sinful beings, unworthy of our concern. They got themselves into trouble, and they need to get themselves out of trouble, and if they don’t, we should just lock them up.[http://visual.ly/history-addiction-treatment-us] The insanity of this approach is summed up well by singer Billie Holiday, who ultimately died in treatment for drug addiction:  

“Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, and sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day of the week to sick people hooked on drugs.”

[Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs” 2015, p. 31]

Perhaps in response to that Calvinist religious view, we have developed a secular understanding of addiction as a disease, which sees addiction as a purely physiological condition that can be treated by medical interventions. Often these involve replacement of an addictive substance with a less addictive substance, usually by prescription, such as replacing heroin with methadone. [http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/reducing-drug-harm/replacement-therapy/our-priorities]  Or they may involve an opioid antagonist, such as  naltrexone, often used with alcoholics. [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/].

The medical approach is rational, and seeks to be evidence based, but we have little good data on the best treatments. Why do we have so little data? Because the legal system, still bound up in its Calvinist views, makes  drug research so difficult. On top of that, much of the medical system these days is commercialized, focused on maximum profits. Consequently, we have companies like Purdue Pharma aggressively pushing Oxycontin as a non-addictive painkiller, and as we know, Oxycontin became a gateway drug to heroin, leading to the current heroin epidemic. [http://theweek.com/articles/605224/americas-painkiller-epidemic-explained] Thus, the medical approach is viewed with suspicion by many people.

A third view is the awareness that addiction as a spiritual problem, wherein the addict is using the substance to fill some emptiness in their life.  That emptiness might be lack of control, lack of life purpose, lack of presence of god, or disconnection with others.  This lack leads to pain, often existential, sometimes physical, and the substance answers that pain.

British actor and addict Russell Brand tells us,

“I cannot accurately convey to you the efficiency of heroin in neutralising pain. It transforms a tight, white fist into a gentle, brown wave. From my first inhalation 15 years ago, it fumigated my private hell and lay me down in its hazy pastures and … embraced me like a womb.” [http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/09/russell-brand-life-without-drugs]

But since the addictive behavior doesn’t actually fill the emptiness, it doesn’t relieve the pain, the person is driven to repeat the behavior, drinking, drugging, gambling, running for political office, whatever. And this leads to increasingly bad results.

So the spiritual approaches to management of addiction try to help people fill the emptiness. Such approaches try to help people realize the impossibility of their situation, and find something more spiritually substantial, the “Power greater than ourselves”, to fill that hole. And most importantly, they connect people to other people for support.

At the same time, AA and related spiritual approaches to addiction have their limitations. These programs are like a religion. They have their truth. They have their traditions, fixed and unchanging, regardless of scientific evidence. Like individual churches, the meetings vary, some are warm and welcoming, and others are cold and judgmental. Some are too wrapped up in a Christian understanding of the “higher power” to be appealing to many secular folks, or for that matter, many UUs.

I see recovery as a spiritual practice. It is being willing to love people, even in their failure, and in their brokenness. Writer Johann Hari tells us,

“the core of that message — you’re not alone, we love you — has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially, politically and individually. For 100 years now, we’ve been singing war songs about addicts. I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them, because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.” [https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong/transcript]

When we begin to view addiction as disconnection, as emptiness, we create a much more expansive possibility for healing, because we discover that many of our addictions are not merely about substances. After all, when we examine ourselves, we see we are addicted to material things, to possessions, to screens, to programmed experiences, to overwork and to power. As addicts in a society built on addiction, we are destroying the earth and damaging our lives. And yet we are taught not to see these subtle everyday addictions. Dr. Gabor Maté, in his book “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction”, tells us:

“Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict, when as a social collective, we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations? … because we don’t wish to see how much we resemble him. … Like the hard-core addict’s pursuit of drugs, much of our economic and cultural life caters to people’s cravings to escape mental and emotional distress.” [Gabor Maté, “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction”, 2010, p. 271]

To heal these — our own addictions, to live wholly, we have very deep work to do as individuals and as a culture. We have to move from isolation and loneliness to love and connection. We have  to find the sources of spiritual wholeness that fill us to completeness, even as imperfect, fallible human beings.

When we do these things as individual people, we become healed, and connected, and when we do this together, we build a beloved society and the health of our planet is gradually restored.