Surrender to win: Constructions of 12-step recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Permanent repository link: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/23583/ Link to published version: http://dx. AbstractThis article focuses on the ways in which members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) construct themselves as being in recovery from addiction. In this original study, data were taken from nineteen participants. They were analysed using Willig's (2013) six-stage Foucauldian discourse analytic method. This method is suited to enabling the analyst to locate discourse resources used by participants within broader, dominant, discourses, and for exploration of the implications of these constructions for subjectivity and practice. This article presents a discussion of analytic findings.Mainstream academia has often constructed 12-Step recovery as a largely totalising discourse. This is likely to have negatively prejudiced health professionals and may help explain relatively low referral rates into 12-Step resources for addicted clients.However, our analysis suggested that participants constructed themselves not as subjected by AA and NA discourse, but as drawing on it in ways aligned with agency, in order to practice care of the self in pursuit of various ethical goals. This implies 12-Step recovery to be less antithetical to, and indeed more aligned with, humanistic practitioner values than is perhaps often assumed to be the case. This 3 3 finding suggests that practitioners may need to consider reappraising their view of 12-Step recovery. The discussion will therefore focus on the agency-structure dialectic that seemed to be at the heart of participant constructions of addiction and recovery. It is also is a finding which points to an urgent need for more qualitative studies in the currently under-researched, and hence perhaps poorly understood, area of 12-Step recovery from addiction.

Recovery and identity: a five-year follow-up of persons treated in 12-step-related programs

“…Now, five years later, their decision to stay in the 12step movement or to internalize the perspective might be based to a greater extent on them identifying their own perceptions of their AOD problems. This is also what Gordon and Willig (2020) found when interviewing people in recovery who were active members of AA/NA groups. The interviewees constructed themselves as exercising agency in consciously and self-reflexively taking up a position within the AA/NA discourse.…”