Recovery & Identity II

5 May 2021

In the last blog, the idea of recovery as changed identity was explored.  The conclusion was that when a person does enter recovery (“…an ongoing dynamic process of behaviour change characterized by relatively stable improvements in biopsychosocial function and purpose in life”), identity is renovated, not replaced.  In other words, the recovered person is herself but with improved life performance habits.

It is because people learn a set of improved performance habits in recovery that I encourage them to look on their addictive careers as blessings rather than curses (Amor Fati, blog, 4 Nov ‘20).  The blessing is in the humility that comes of admitting how many mistakes and mishaps happened along the road to improved biopsychosocial performance.  Such people tend to be less judgmental, kinder, and more forgiving of others than the average bear.  People in recovery, not to put too fine a point on it, have had the stuffing kicked out of them so many times that when they re-emerge, they tend to get some fundamentals.

The first of those fundamentals is that bad decisions happen very easily and at extremely high cost.  Recovery involves forgiving yourself for your own set of less-than-ideal performances.  If you get better at forgiving yourself, you tend to be forgiving of others as such self-acknowledgement fosters empathy.

The second lesson I hear, in the voices of newly and long-recovered people, is immense gratitude for the lives they have been re-gifted.  Like cancer survivors, those in recovery tend not to take a day, a sunrise, or a child’s laughter for granted.  Empathy and gratitude are two of the fundamentals I would list in those who have moved into recovery.

McAdams (2018, p. 191) discussed identity formation as a task of late adolescence and early adulthood.  That task involves answering two main questions: Where is my life going? and Who do I wish to become?  The enormous challenge in recovery is realizing that for many people, with addictive behaviours, late adolescence and early adulthood were precisely the times when their addictions were peaking, not their identities. 

As such, identity formation becomes a critical, painful, and difficult part of the recovery journey. That’s because full human occupancy of self requires that we don’t skip steps in the owner’s manual.  (If only there were such a thing!)  Skipped developmental steps is a subject sometimes discussed in recovery meetings.

If, for example, we grow up with addiction, our attention is not on becoming who we are but on fitting into our addictive families or groups.  When a person is more focused on being included than being, boundaries do not form, they fall away.  We become socially and emotionally dependent on those around us for a sense of who we are.  When sobriety is achieved, and the next day comes, that person in the mirror does not know who the hell she’s looking back at.  And that’s scary.  But soluble.

In the series of blogs on knowing thyself (March-April ’21), there was discussion on the value of turning inward versus turning outward.  Popular culture and our resultant intuition tell us to look inside to understand self.  Not necessarily.  McAdams, mentioned above, says our identities are constructed of parts of us that unfold as actors, agents, and authors.  Actors are part of a larger cast; agents make decisions involving real things in a real world, and authors (autobiographers) look back on their lives and create a story that makes sense of the pieces.  But first the pieces have to be there.  Identity formation involves testing different roles—in the real world—and gauging your own sense of fit with those roles.  McAdams cited Sheldon who maintains that “...becoming ourselves involves self-concordant goal selection.” 

Self-concordance is internal harmony.  Eudaimonia or well-spiritedness comes to mind.  We all know, deep within, when we are where we’re supposed to be.  There is a sense of resonance through which you feel, this is where I am most me.  Keep trying roles until that resonance occurs or per McAdams (2018), “We need to select goals that are consistent with our underlying motivations and with the skills and talents we have.”  Not to mention values.

All of this, described in the last three paragraphs, is what starts unfolding when sobriety gets dull and both recovery and your DoC start calling.  In the simplest terms, this is Jacob wrestling with the angel (image above) or what your high school English teacher described as the theme of man versus herself: addictive identity versus recovered identity. It is probably the most serious battle any of us, soldiers included, enters as the forged or accepted identity then defines every step we take.  So, breathe easy (!) but stick to your values and the roles that resonate.  You will soon be a better you. 

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.