addiction involves making or finding meaning that begins to orient a person in her life and the broader world. Some people will do well in a program that provides an easily recognizable framework, such as a twelve-step fellowship. Some desire different frameworks that make no reference to powerlessness or a higher power; they may incline to something more secular. Yet others will want a more explicitly faith-based model or a more therapeutic model. Some will eschew ready-made frameworks in favor of ones that are more of their own construction.
Regardless of the particular framework, people begin to orient their actions and their lives around recovery. Recovery becomes an axis around which life can turn. Recovery is a passionate commitment to living a life of self-care, self-examination, and respectful connection to others.
FROM WILLPOWER TO WILL TO POWER
WILLPOWER IS A POPULAR SUBJECT THESE DAYS. CHANNEL YOUR WILLPOWER in all the right ways, and you can transform your life. Or so it seems. In an interesting and provocative book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, Roy Baumeister and John Tierney argue that willpower has a physical basis and functions like a muscle. Willpower can be strengthened, and it can be depleted. It is a finite resource, so one ought to expend it wisely. Glucose puts the power in willpower; when levels of glucose are low, willpower diminishes. Raise glucose levels, and willpower increases, too.13
It all seems so straightforward. If a person puts herself on the right regimen, she can build her willpower muscles so that she is totally ripped. Then she’ll be able to do anything because her reserves will be plentiful. If, along the way, she becomes savvier about where and when she expends her willpower, there is a compounding effect on her reserves.
This view of willpower raises interesting questions for addiction. Are some addictive behaviors beyond the control of willpower? Many experts in the field of addiction studies would say a full-blown or extreme addiction is beyond the pull of willpower, and the diagnosis of substance use disorder in the DSM-5 now involves a spectrum from mild to moderate use to extreme use.14
Some of the old questions about willpower will return, especially for those who are closer to the mild and slightly moderate end of the spectrum and who could pivot back toward “normal” use or abstinence. Are these “mild” addicts simply not directing their willpower in the proper way if they progress down the spectrum? Or are they not properly “willpower working out” so that they are not building strong temptation-resisting muscles while they still can? These questions raise the specter of the old familiar view that addicts are moral failures because we lack self-control to stop our destructive behaviors. We’re either impetuous and act without thinking or we know what we should do but still give in to the temptation. Either way, it will be crucial to break the link between willpower and moral failure. This is one link in a chain of reasoning that, when internalized by people struggling with addiction, may contribute to a fatalistic attitude. Why bother to stop when someone like me can never change?
Willpower is equated with self-control and saying no. The idea is that we exert willpower when we resist temptation. The temptation can be of any sort—that delicious piece of cake, the extra twenty minutes napping on the couch, surfing the web while at work, or the twelve pack of beer in the refrigerator—and willpower is the ability to say no. Part of the problem is that the same reserve of willpower has to resist all temptations; there aren’t pools of willpower for this sort of temptation and other pools for that sort of temptation.
Willpower also plays a positive role and helps us achieve goals that we have decided are important to us. Willpower motivates us to stick with positive resolutions. But even here, there is still a strong negative function. My healthy eating now means that I need to say no to the chocolate-glazed doughnut taunting me from the bakery case.
Saying no to things is exhausting, as Baumeister and Tierney argue. We live in a world of unending temptations, and it can seem as if we are constantly caught in a deluge of wants and desires. Having said no to ninety-nine things makes it more likely that we cannot resist when the hundredth temptation crosses our path.
So, all those times we resist what are weaker temptations for us while thinking, Oh, now I am really building those willpower muscles, we may actually be setting ourselves up for even greater failures. Many addicts I know who were the “use because I’ve been working so hard” variety are perhaps especially vulnerable to this dynamic. When that hundredth temptation overcomes us, what we may see is total defeat. Many addicts tend to be black or white and all-or-nothing thinkers. We live life trying to jump across a vast space that allows for no middle ground.
Even though giving into the temptation may at first feel like a defeat, it also provides something of a relief. We seem to believe that if we cannot say no 100 percent of the time, we might as well never say no. Our failure serves as justification for never trying again. Furthermore, we might begin to think that a lack of self-control in one area of our life is proof that we just lack all self-control. Since we are constitutionally incapable of self-control, why bother to try to exercise control in other areas of our lives? This way of thinking is familiar to many addicted people and breeds a sort of fatalism.
There is an implicit formula undergirding this concept of willpower in conjunction with addiction that reads “inability to resist temptation = addiction.” All parts of the formula—inability, resistance, temptation, and addiction—are worrisome. It would seem to follow that the further a person moves down the substance use disorder continuum (mild to severe), the less she is able to exert self-control to resist the temptation of her drug of choice. A person either loses the ability she once had to resist or develops the inability as she moves along the continuum. But what space is there to explore the conditions under which she loses the ability completely? Does aging affect our ability to resist? How does familial or social support affect ability? These sorts of questions fall off the table. Instead the focus remains on the individual and her failure to exert her self-control in the right direction to the right degree.
To understand the connection between having power and having the opportunity to exercise it, consider this analogy: In the United States, citizens aged eighteen and older have the right to vote (unless it has been revoked due to conviction of certain crimes). But there are all sorts of conditions that keep people from exercising it, some of which are beyond a person’s control. Public transportation may not be easily available or available at all. Even though employees are entitled to exercise their right to vote during the workday, some may not do so out of fear of negative consequence from their bosses.
Willpower may be difficult to build if people live in conditions that pose very real and significant temptations or challenges. A common example is people newly in recovery who continue to live with their using friends or family. Leaving the situation may not be a realistic option. While it is true that they do have some power to make choices, those choices are largely shaped by considerations that are well beyond their control.
What does it mean to resist a substance or behavior that is tempting? It might seem obvious that it requires not consuming certain substances or abstaining from an activity such as gambling. The spectrum of use disorder may require a recalibration of the concepts of resistance and abstinence. Resistance may include harm reduction or moderate use when it’s not accompanied by the sort of negative consequences that follow from more disordered use. Abstinence, too, may stand in need of newer understandings, which is most clearly seen in the case of food addiction. One cannot completely abstain from food. Is not consuming particular foods or not consuming to specified quantities abstinence? It certainly seems like a form of resistance. Also, what if a person still orients her life around that substance or behavior or keeps many of the same “using” behaviors in the absence of the substance? There
