Together by Vivek H. Murthy M.D

Author:Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Driving Addiction

Bill Wilson, a cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), was as clear on the therapeutic role of service between AA members as he was on the relationship between loneliness and addiction. This three-way association is as true for addiction to opioids, gambling, gaming, and food, as it is for alcoholism. Wilson, however, was the pioneer who connected these three dots, and his goal was to help alcoholics.

“Almost without exception,” Wilson wrote, “alcoholics are tortured by loneliness.12 Even before our drinking got bad and people began to cut us off, nearly all of us suffered the feeling that we didn’t quite belong. Either we were shy, and dared not draw near others, or we were apt to be noisy good fellows craving attention and companionship, but never getting it—at least to our way of thinking. There was always that mysterious barrier we could neither surmount nor understand.”

Wilson understood this because of his personal experience with addiction. A few months into his sobriety, it struck him that if he was going to remain sober, he would need to connect with someone else who was struggling with alcohol—someone who could talk to him as an equal, particularly when the urge to drink resurfaced with a vengeance. That someone was Dr. Bob, who’d been struggling with his drinking as well. The relationship they built not only inspired AA, but it was the basis for a form of service called “sponsorship,” where alcoholics serve as trusted, confidential mentors to help each other stay sober. As described in AA’s pamphlet on sponsorship, “We know from experience that our own sobriety is greatly strengthened when we give it away!”13

What this is saying is that service is a two-way gift. Sponsors “give away” their sobriety by drawing on all their struggles, triumphs, strategies, and perseverance to guide, encourage, and help their fellow members, but this service is not a sacrifice. It actually strengthens recovery for the sponsor as well as for the recipient. This is what Steve Cole meant when he talked about “finding purpose and taking part in something larger than yourself.”

When loneliness leaves an aching hole in one’s life, violence, drugs, and alcohol aren’t the only unhealthy behaviors that people use to anesthetize the pain. Food, sex, and even work can also be used to mask the void. Often, these stopgaps are connected to loneliness, and sometimes to one another, in ways we cannot see. All can do us harm.

Dr. Bryan Robinson is a psychotherapist who’s studied and experienced this firsthand when it comes to work. Through his own life, as well as hundreds of interviews, he’s traced the trajectory from childhood to workaholism in his book #Chill: Turn Off Your Job and Turn On Your Life.14 For Robinson, as for those he interviewed, loneliness played a starring role in this story.

Bryan’s father was an alcoholic who never got help for his drinking. As a young boy, Bryan told me, he and his siblings would get blindsided when their dad came home and fights broke out.

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