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

Abstract

This article focuses on the ways in which members of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous construct themselves as being in recovery from addiction. In this original study, data were taken from 19 participants. They were analysed using Willig’s 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 Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous 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 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 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.