Hi, my name is Eve, and I’m a creature.
CREATURES, monstrously choral: Hi Eve!
I put off reading Maia Szalavitz’s 2016 Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction for a long time. Szalavitz, a muckraker and science journalist, was hugely helpful to me in my last year of drinking and first year of recovery. (Last year of drinking so far.) She gave me hope, in part because of her insistence that there are many valid paths to recovery, and you can “take what you need, and leave the rest” from all of them. But I was (over)committed to the idea that there is no essence of addiction, no Platonic ideal or supracultural truth about it. I didn’t want a Grand Unifying Theory of Drunks. And I also knew Szalavitz wanted to steer our understanding of addiction away from a spiritual and moral framework, when those aspects have been, as far as I can tell, central to both my drinking and my recovery.
I’m sorry I hesitated! Unbroken Brain is a moving, provocative, lowkey brilliant book.
There are flashes of dry humor (Szalavitz notes, of an ex-boyfriend, “One of Matt’s favorite words was ‘fetid’”). Szalavitz structures the book around her own experience of addiction and recovery. This is something everybody does nowadays, and it inevitably introduces distortions. Here, imho!!!!!, Szalavitz struggles to understand or even describe spiritual and religious elements that play huge roles in others’ stories but quite limited ones in her own. But with that exception, she handles the contemporary genre of “I wanted to write about survey data and brain scans, but my publisher says it has to be a memoir… here’s my brain” with unusual elegance. The book is suspenseful! I cared deeply about what happened to her, and she makes it easy to see how her own life is sometimes an illustration of larger issues and sometimes an exception.
And sometimes it’s complicated, and Szalavitz isn’t entirely sure, to this day, what her experience meant. I was surprised by how much this big-theory book makes room for both unanswered questions and alternative explanations. I’m not sure this is the same as making room for mystery, for something inexplicable in our own experience that is somehow beyond our capacity to grasp; but it’s a stance deeply respectful of both individuality and objective truth.
Szalavitz’s big theory is that addiction is best understood as a learning disorder. I hope I’m not butchering these ideas too badly, but what I gathered is that addiction is a kind of overlearning. We learn to associate our substance or behavior of choice with certain rewards, and the association is so tight that we persist in seeking those rewards through that substance or behavior even when it becomes clear that our pursuit is damaging our lives, relationships, and even our ability to enjoy the rewards we set out after in the first place. Like all learning, addiction is influenced by culture, as well as by individual decisions and predispositions—and underlying strengths and vulnerabilities.
Szalavitz defines the essence of addiction as, “being able to persist despite negative consequences.” And she points out, So many of the good things in life require this! Persistence in spite of difficulty, spurred on to crazy depths of self-abnegating action by extremely unpredictable and intermittent rewards, is one description of compulsive gambling—or of parenting. Achieving almost anything big in life requires a dogged and undaunted persistence.
I’m thrilled to report that this understanding of addiction is embedded in the word’s roots and earliest English usage. Rebecca Lemon’s terrific Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England explores the way “addiction” was used in Shakespeare’s day to mean complete devotion. Christians were urged to addict ourselves to God. You can tilt this insight in several directions, of course. You can say that continuing to pray when your prayers rarely lead to measurable positive life change is like a rat starving as it hammers the button that randomly dispenses cocaine. You can say that the real difference between addiction and religion is that one isolates and one guides you to deeper connection. (Szalavitz: “Whether you love a person, a drug, or an intellectual interest, if it is spurring creativity, connection, and kindness, it’s not an addiction—but if it’s making you isolated, dull, and mean, it is.”) Or maybe you can see evolution as a sentence spoken by God, in which our drives and disorders serve life or death in themselves and also represent aspects of our life with or alienation from God. In this perspective, addiction, in which our brains fasten far too tightly onto patterns and associations (heroin = safety, pleasure, comfort, okayness), is a postlapsarian disorder of our drive to discern the meanings that God in fact wove into Creation. I don’t know if I’m 100% convinced of the third thing, but I do think it’s stumbling toward something real.
Szalavitz overemphasizes “finding a mate and reproduction” as the core human goals and markers of success, which like, a) let’s all create Just So Stories about how religions across the world developed asceticism and celibacy in order to mate better overall, this is definitely not cope, and b) any worldview in which Emily Dickinson led an unsuccessful human life is silly. Szalavitz writes, “Successful adolescent development requires a drive for novelty and social contact with same-age peers to pull teens away from family and toward friends and potential partners.” Who are you to judge what success is? Maybe we’re primed to find “the new, exciting, and dangerous… incredibly alluring” to prepare us for the encounter with the living God and an embrace of the apostolic counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience! Anyway yes, there are times when Szalavitz seems to reduce everything to drives and diagnoses. But then there are also quite sensitive passages about what it feels like when you can tell that your will is constrained by addiction, but not completely absent.
Szalavitz generally believes that “moralizing” in treatment is bad. She attributes much of AA’s (relative, arguable, etc etc) success to its community and provision of “social contact.” Lol these are the parts I hated, whereas I love the 12 Steps, so I was always a hard sell on this point. I guess I’ll just say that morality is part of what we do and need as humans. We need not just “social contact” (I am having enrichment time in my enclosure, as they say on TikTok) but friendship and virtue. I don’t believe that people with addictions need moral guidance or spiritual regeneration more than others. You all need Jesus! But precisely because addiction isolates, providing us with pathways back to participation in the moral community is especially important—for our recovery from despair, not just from substance misuse. And imho morality is unsustainable without faith in a God Who can make the amends we can’t, Whose mercy is infinite and Whose image we can never erase from our being no matter what we do.
There’s so much more to say about this book, which you should absolutely read if you have any interest in the nature and treatment of addiction. There’s an excellent discussion of the reasons autistic kids and kids with ADHD are esp vulnerable to addiction; there’s a great section on “the pleasures of the hunt” vs. “the pleasures of the feast” and how that distinction illuminates the way some drugs decrease their pleasure over time and others increase their pain and some do both; Szalavitz exposes the harms excused by the idea of “hitting rock bottom,” and deploys the well-known (...to drug users, I guess) importance of “set and setting” in a powerful critique of drug laws. She lays out clearly the ways her one big insight should reshape how we respond to our own addictions and others’.
Let me end with this passage, about her experience with an illegal needle exchange. This whole section is a beautiful meditation on the infinite dignity of every person; and it’s an immensely moving exploration of what helps people learn a new way of life, through people who believed in their ability to learn, change, and serve:
What was most amazing, however, was the emotional climate. The crowds felt benign, not threatening. Their interactions didn’t have the tension of an illegal drug transaction—nor did they have the general air of dreariness, depression, and despair I had experienced at my methadone program. Instead, participants were grateful and quietly protective. Many were obviously moved that anyone cared at all—let alone enough to risk arrest to try to help them. It was as though they couldn’t believe their eyes and for at least a moment, their masks of distress and pain would lift.
icymi
I reviewed Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess at the Bulwark:
THERE ARE NIGHTS IN MY YOUTH whose memory seems lit by the glow of reckless conversation. Late into the night, usually over alcohol, I’d rant and volley with my friends as we crafted our personae, trying to say things so interesting they just had to be true. This kind of talk isn’t elegant or syllogistic; it galumphs, it’s catty and clumsy, glib and unfair and sometimes infuriating. And yet it can also uncover insights so powerful and perfect that they change a life. In the excesses of my youth, there are many acts and omissions I regret. But there are also joys and truths I encountered by going too far.
That’s my best attempt to both describe Becca Rothfeld’s new book, All Things Are Too Small, and summarize its thesis.
Weird Science
“Fembots,” fanvid.
Now Playing
Andre Nickatina, “Ayo for Yayo.” A song I first found at The Fix (RIP).
Blurry image of Maia Szalavitz via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.
Me, at this line: "Szalavitz defines the essence of addiction as, “being able to persist despite negative consequences.”
"Oh no"
I came across Becca Rothfeld recently because she had written a very enthusiastic review of a reissue of Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination. So the opening paragraphs of your review are definitely on the right track.