Unhooked Science Readings

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`RECOVERY' MOVEMENT: A BLAME GAME CARRIED TOO FAR

By Ronder Thomas Young

ATLANTA JOURNAL & CONSTITUTION (Atlanta, Ga.) Nov. 17, 1991, pp. G1

I grew up with an alcoholic father. I don't mean cocktail hours gone too long or too loud; I mean dark binges that distorted the family for weeks.

Between binges, my father ensured the middle-class comfort of my three brothers, my sister and me by working at his grocery store seven days a week. He'd been working forever, since deep into his own stark, short, fatherless childhood.

He read his daily newspaper completely and carefully. Looking up once, he told me, "This is my schooling." I was his oldest child, an odd and bookish girl, odd not merely with him, it seemed, but with our whole small Southern town.

I was a college senior, on my second or third weekend home, when he looked up again and said, "What exactly is it that you're studying there?"

I told him my major. His eyes went blank, but he nodded.

You could view that as a sad lack of communication between parent and child. I saw it as a rare trust, giving that approving nod even though he didn't have a clue about why or what I was doing. I appreciated it.

There are many ways to tell a story. I could slant mine sadly, but the last thing this country needs is another victim.

Confessing to affliction, addition and malfunction, being identified as the adult children of just about everything, is all the rage. More than a trend, it's an industry.

Every day, magazines and television talk shows identify some new addiction or syndrome. Advertisements entice and intimidate us into diagnosis. Bookstores and bestseller lists are crowded with titles such as "The Co-dependent Reality," "Lost in the Shuffle," "Children of Trauma," and "Rediscovering Your Discarded Self."

Dr. Charles Whitfield's book, "Healing the Child Within," contains a "recovery potential survey." Among the questions: "Do you seek approval or affirmation?" "Do you respond with anxiety to authority figures and angry people?" "Do you find it difficult to express your emotions?"

Who could not respond to these types of questions with at least one "occasionally"? Just one such response is enough, according to Dr. Whitfield, to require remedial attention to the "child" inside us. Even a slew of "hardly evers" may merely indicate the respondent is unaware of these feelings.

Is everyone a victim?

It should be no surprise that the recent cover of a national magazine informed us that experts consider 96 percent of the families in this country dysfunctional.

A sad side effect of all this is that it's become downright honorable to declare, "It's not my fault." The problem is that if everyone is a victim, no one is a victim.

I have known too many people at real risk to accept that. I have known children who, like me, struggled through drunken binges, but who, unlike me, had no continuity of love and support. I have seen the destructive, lasting legacy of domestic violence. I have seen people shaking and sweating, so twisted by chemical withdrawal that I became very careful not to make liberal use of the word "addiction."

I don't quibble with the notion of a direct connection between childhood experience and our subsequent lives. I see it clearly in my own. I'm private, I think before speaking and I carry an inordinate amount of responsibility for everything and everyone. Being the oldest child in a household with an alcoholic parent contributed to all that.

I also, however, must hold my father responsible for my integrity, empathy and professionalism. His advice was always as simple and reassuring as his nod. Tell the truth. Never kick anyone when they're down. Do the best you can at whatever you do.

I do not argue with the notion that recovery is sometimes necessary, and that therapy can be an expedient and efficient way to bring it about. I've been writing since I was a child, and since a writer, by definition, leads an examined life, then I suppose I've always had a sort of frugal, private therapy going.

Yet experts in the recovery movement tend to dismiss individual explorations as incomplete at best and delusional at worst. Many of the inhabitants of this ever-expanding 12-step adult-child world exhibit a kind of religious intolerance. To speak of strength or weakness of character is politically incorrect.

When my father was struggling with his binges, there was no fashionable Betty Ford Center. An alcoholic was weak, immoral and shameful, and the medical community was quick to let him know it. Knowing my father was subjected to those attitudes hurt me more than any of his actions or words ever could.

My father hasn't had a drink since I graduated from high school almost 20 years ago. In the absence of a sympathetic medical community, he put down the bottle and regained control of his life. And in the absence of recovery experts, I was able to make a happy, healthy passage into adulthood. Back then, our inner strength was the only support we had and it served us well.

An appeal for balance

The recovery movement, in many ways, was overdue. It gave a voice and community to formerly isolated victims and lifted the shame from their situation.

At the same time, it has infected our already litigious society with another easy way to delegate blame. It has gone the way of big business, insistent upon expansion and conformity. Worst of all, as even caring, sensitive people grow weary of yet another sad story, it numbs society's capacity for compassion.

Real recovery requires balance; the quest for who's responsible cannot be more important than the quest for inner resources.

Ronder Thomas Young is a freelance writer in Norcross.