Tips For Dating a Person in 12 Step Recovery

Would you let your daughter go out with an addict?

In the title of her book, Girlfriend of Bill, author Karen Nagy riffs on the time-honored public code for mutual AA recognition: “Are you a friend of [AA co-founder] Bill?” Nagy says she was unable to find any material written “specifically for someone who is new to such a relationship or who is thinking about dating someone in recovery.” So she wrote one, and the publishing arm of Hazelden brought it out. People in Hazelden-style recovery (Nagy calls them “PIRs”) can present challenges, since, as Nagy learned by dating several of them, stopping drinking or using is not necessarily the end of the matter.

Readers should know that the book is written from the perspective of a member of Al-Anon, who is also a firm believer in the 12 Steps. But if dating people who participate in AA or NA is not your thing, than Nagy suggests dating people from SMART recovery, Secular Organizations for Sobriety, church, mental health peer support programs, therapy groups, and so on. Her own experience, however, appears mainly limited to men in and out of 12-Step recovery programs.

While the controversial disease model of addiction continues to provoke heated debate, Nagy discovered that “knowing addiction is a disease has helped me to confront and get over my past prejudices about alcoholics and drug addicts, and to better understand why they might think, act, and react the way they do.”

“Change is tough for all of us,” says Nagy, “but it can be especially hard for an addict” because of the strong tendency to rationalize and resist needed change. Addicts, she adds, “are also known for ‘wanting it now,’ a trait that could be related to their brain chemistry and addictive cravings.” (Or, as non-practicing addict Carrie Fisher memorably put it, “instant gratification takes too long.”)

Her summation of the notion behind the AA/NA concept of a higher power is a common one these days: “Some might call their Higher Power God; others might define it as nature, the positive energy of their group, or an unnamed sense of spirit.” While that may sound naïve to some, what the addict must grasp is that white-knuckle notions of triumph through personal will may have to be abandoned along the way, if we are talking about chronic, active addiction. And she correctly points out that the AA Big Book is “written in an old-fashioned style that hearkens back to the 1930s,” when the amateur self-help group known as AA was founded.

It’s easy to forget that there are common experiences that most recovering addicts are heir to. “We who care about a Person in Recovery are also powerless over alcohol and drugs,” Nagy writes. “Try as we might—we can’t control whether or not the PIR uses them.” And non-addicts who are dating them might usefully be forewarned about such things, Nagy believes. In addition, “It can take months for an addict’s body to adjust to abstinence,” she writes. “Aches and pains are common in withdrawal, and so are digestive problems that can include constipation, diarrhea, and loss of appetite… sleep disorders can be a huge problem….”

Nagy also tips boyfriends and girlfriends to the widening and primarily generational dispute over the use of medications for craving or associated mental health disorders. “Believing ‘a drug is a drug is a drug,’ many old-timers in recovery resist taking medications, whereas younger People in Recovery are more open to taking them if they need them.”

Addicts new to recovery may be coming off a period of social isolation, and a sense of being cut off from others. Nagy advises that a summary knowledge of the 12 Steps can be helpful, in particular the business about “making amends” to people one has harmed. Forgiveness is a touchy and ongoing bit of business. It never hurts to say you’re sorry, if in fact you are. Or to say it again.

Perhaps the single most common complaint takes the form of jealousy or irritation: Why is the Person in Recovery spending so much time with those other people, rather than with me? Aren’t I “supportive” enough? Nagy views the essence of AA/NA as a “spirituality of companionship—friends accompanying friends, helping, sharing, daring, celebrating, or grieving.” In the end, Nagy believes, “it’s not about religion; it’s about connection.”

The Ghost in the Receptor

The “spiritual” thing.

It often seems as if the proponents of the biological view are offering a take-it-or-leave-it view of human nature and behavior. The gene proposes and the neuropeptide disposes. But one important attribute of the brain’s receptor systems is that they are not static. The number and density of receptor fields, the sensitivity of individual receptors, and the “stickiness” of the cell membranes themselves all differ at different times.

We have come a long way in our understanding of “unconscious” bodily processes. Yogis demonstrated decades ago that such internal states as breathing rate, blood pressure, and the generation of certain brain waves, once thought to be impervious to volitional control, could in fact be “mentally” influenced. With the proper five-minute introduction, most people can learn to change the surface temperature of their hands by a few degrees using simple biofeedback techniques. Many spiritual growth techniques center on breathing exercises, for the same reason that diet and dietary restrictions are frequently emphasized: Such activities release different neurotransmitters in the brain, the gut, and the respiratory center, and these changes can alter consciousness. Many spiritual techniques that are physical in nature were designed to produce specific changes in brain state. We do not need to soar into the metaphysical to see the wide-ranging role of neurotransmitters. Neurotransmission via receptors is clearly an evolutionary strategy well preserved in the larger scheme of things.

Nonetheless, from A.A. to Ibogaine, alternative treatments are frequently suffused with spirituality, if not outright religiosity. All the way out there, on the edge of speculation, is the notion that a disordered reward pathway might be the impetus for the religious quest, the search for existential meaning, the artistic struggle to create. God is a neuropeptide, Candace Pert once mischievously suggested. Was Martin Luther serotonin- and dopamine-deficient? How about Joan of Arc? Or Michelangelo? Is love, or hate, any less real for having neuropharmacological substrates, microscopic chemical correlates, in the brain and body?

This all sounds funny, or blasphemous, or nonsensical—but it may be the metaphorical key to A.A.’s modest successes over the years. We know with certainty that depression and addiction are deeply linked disorders. What has begun to emerge at the edges of depression and addiction literature is that religious faith, or a spiritual belief system of some kind, can sometimes be of value in the battle against depression, drugs, and drink. This does not mean that any sort of correlation between recovery and prayer, or between decreased depression and frequency of church attendance has emerged. Nevertheless, feelings are not just feelings. Emotions influence our health, our evolutionary fitness, our learning, and our decision-making. There is the recurrent suggestion in some of the work that the additional factor at play is something researchers have referred to as “intrinsic religiosity.” People recover from all sorts of mental and physical afflictions and frequently give credit to their religious beliefs. Whatever we choose to call it, successful recovery from serious illnesses of the mind and body frequently seem to call for a fundamental shift in mental processes. Sometimes the emotional impulse that kicks off a successful recovery comes in a form identified as “spiritual.”

As Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili conclude in “Why God Won’t Go Away,” “It only means that humans have a genetically inherited talent for entering unitary states, and that many of us interpret these states as the presence of a higher spiritual power.”

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