The Importance of Self-Narration in Recovery from Addiction

Abstract

Addiction involves a chronic deficit in selfgovernance that treatment aims to restore. We draw on our interviews with addicted people to argue that addiction is, in part, a problem of self-narrative change. Over time, agents come to strongly identify with the aspects of their self-narratives that are consistently verified by others. When addiction self-narratives become established, they shape the addicted person's experience, plans, and expectations so that pathways to recovery seem to be implausible and feel alien. Therefore, the agent may prefer to enact her disvalued self-narrative because at least it represents who she takes herself to be. To recover, the agent needs to conduct narrative work, adjusting her existing self-narrative so that it better supports recovery-directed narrative projections. Reducing cravings, managing withdrawals, increasing self-control, and developing goals are all important for recovery, but those approaches will often be in vain if the influence of self-narrative is ignored. If our analysis is correct, addiction treatment will typically be more effective if it incorporates support for self-narrative change.

“It’s probably an addiction—It can't be anything else”: The role of addiction discourse in the self-identity of men who pay for sex.

“…Even a good human being … who just, has, as they call it, a disease.We argue that the medicalized addiction discourse provided Moshe the opportunity to align his self-identity with his embodied experience, after he “was never able to explain” how regularly paying for sex corresponded with other parts of his identity (McConnell & Golova, 2023). In the face of doubts and uncertainty about how to self-narrate what appeared to be an essential aspect of his life, the addiction discourse provided Moshe with an established self-identity that captured varied, often contradictive, facets of who he is (McConnell & Snoek, 2018).…”

Narrative identity in addictive disorders: a conceptual review

“…The main findings showed a change in the use of negative and positive emotion words, first-person singular pronouns, and verb tens during treatment, with a reduction in negative emotion words predicting a better outcome. Overall, also in addictive disorders the restoration of identity as a person in recovery, the overcoming of the feeling of having alien parts of oneself, loss of self-governance, and unintegrated self-states ( Weegmann, 2010 ; McConnell, 2016 ; McConnell and Snoek, 2018 ) could be facilitated through similar narrative-based approaches.…”

Understanding as a bottleneck for the data-driven approach to psychiatric science

“…Finally, focusing on a person-centered, intentional, mental ability like understanding when conceptualizing the goals of psychiatry may be of pragmatic value. Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that a sense of agency and self-efficacy are important for recovery from mental illness (Glover, 2020;McConnell & Snoek, 2018). Framing the challenge of recovery as the development of understanding emphasizes the power of the human subject to actively negotiate an alleviation of their own suffering (Anthony, 2000;Coulombe et al, 2016).…”