If narcissism causes addiction, what happens when recovery causes narcissism?
Some *still forming* thoughts on what happens when the thing that saved us becomes the thing we need saving from
Hi friends, I started this post a while ago (in February!) and put it aside because I wanted to get some thoughts from my dear friend, addiction psychiatrist
(author The Urge: Our History of Addiction, writer of the Substack Rat Park, host of the Flourishing After Addiction podcast, and the lovely human that peer reviewed my last book, 30 Days to a New Relationship with Alcohol).To me: Carl is one of the smartest humans alive today and probably in all of history when it comes to making sense of addiction, drug use, compulsion, self-control, recovery and how those things are influenced by and intersect culture. He’s my go-to for working out complicated ideas.
We’ve had that conversation now, and you can find it here, and it’s fucking excellent.
Back to the post I started writing months ago.
The title of this essay, “If narcissism causes addiction, what happens when recovery causes narcissism?”, is a little click-bait-ish, and the word narcissism gets thrown around a shit-ton these days, so I want to be super clear I’m not talking about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (as defined by the DSM-5). What I’m referring to is narcissism as a developmental stage, also known as ego-centrism (not egoic but “self-centered” or “self-focused” or unable to see outside one’s immediate emotional or psychological needs—terms that are often used pejoratively, but I’m using them here in a developmental and nonjudgmental sense). Every one of us who is alive and able to read this sentence has passed through that stage; some of us get stuck there, and enough of us cycle back to it, especially in active addiction.
So what I’m essentially asking is: If self-focus plays a role in addiction, what happens when the thing that’s supposed to grow us beyond it ends up turning us right back in on ourselves? What happens when the thing meant to free us becomes another cage?
What follows are a collection of thoughts I had after listening to an episode of The New York Times Interview back in February, where Anna Lembke—the Stanford addiction psychiatrist who wrote Dopamine Nation—suggests that we’re living through a kind of “peak addiction” because we’re also in a kind of “peak self-obsession.” That our escalating propensity to numb out might, in some ways, be because we just need a blessed break from the exhausting task of constantly thinking about ourselves.
I started this post months ago, in a very different mindset and a very different time in culture. It’s not conclusive; a bit chaotic; and not meant to be a polished essay. It’s just a thread I pulled on—and then kept pulling. I’m sharing it as-is because this is something I’m actively workshopping for the book I’m writing (more on that project soon!).
I’d love to hear from those of you with addiction histories—how do you relate to the term recovery these days? Do you still identify with it? Did you ever? Has that changed? How does what I am pulling at below land for you or even just the title of the essay? Have you felt what I’m describing? Has recovery ever felt (or is it beginning to feel) like another identity to manage, another self to optimize, another performance of progress? Have the tools that saved you also become the new standards by which you measure yourself against? Do you ever feel trapped in the version of you who “got better” and like that’s now its own compulsion—to be “that” person who you maybe don’t identify with anymore?
If narcissism causes addiction, what happens when recovery causes narcissism?
A few days ago, I listened to The New York Times Interview with Anna Lembke (interviewed by Lulu Garcia-Navarro), the Stanford addiction psychiatrist who wrote Dopamine Nation (“Digital Drugs Have Us Hooked. Dr. Anna Lembke Sees a Way Out.” (gift, NYT). The whole interview is somewhat novel and well worth your time if you follow these kinds of things. But what got me the most about it—and why I’m writing about it—was how Dr. Lembke answers when Garcia-Navarro asks whether or not we’re all “addicts” now, and whether decreases in rates of AUD, sober curiosity, etc. are the result of many of us just swapping addictions (like shopping, cannabis, social media, etc.). Here’s the answer Lembke gives:
Lemke: It's a really fair question, and I think on some level we really are, which then begs the question, what is it about human nature, or I would argue, what is it about modern life that makes us so vulnerable to these addiction problems? I have kind of some theories on that, totally speculative…We're essentially struggling with endemic narcissism, where our culture is demanding that we focus on ourselves so much that what it's creating is this deep need to escape ourselves. And I think that is what is driving much of our pursuit of intoxicants as a way to just not have to think about ourselves for a blessed hour or two.
Navarro: Let me break this down for a moment to see if I understand what you're saying, which is that modern life requires us to just constantly think about ourselves and be on display. And the use of these ways to take us out of ourselves is increasing because we're constantly narcissistically thinking about ourselves. Is that right?
Lembke: Yeah, that's right. And it's not like the whole explanation because obviously the whole point of Dopamine Nation is that we also live in this world of abundance with constant access and access alone is a risk factor. So I've already kind of made that point. But although I think access is important and supply is more important than we've given credit for, we do have to focus on the demand part of this equation. What is it about our lives now that make us so desperate to essentially be intoxicated in one form or another? And I do think it is this sort of obsessive self-focus.
To summarize: she’s saying we’re all in active addiction now, not just because of hyper-capitalism and free market dislocation and the exponentially increasing availability and potency of addictive substances, processes, and technologies, but because we’re sick of thinking about ourselves, and addiction offers us an escape.
Which got me thinking about how much our current recovery culture has us thinking about ourselves and focusing on ourselves, or how much sobriety has become a symbol of achievement, or what happens when the thing that saved you from yourself becomes the thing that makes you need to escape yourself.
And then thinking about what it all has to do with this particular moment in time, and how much what’s happening in America or because of America is because of this exact thing: An obsessive self-focus run riot; an exceptionalism at full cost; a complete submission to an addiction that feeds off the belief that one can do and become anything one wants, if one just puts their mind to it.
There are so many threads popping out of my brain on this one, and I’m not going to try and put this into a cohesive essay, but instead offer a few points of what this got me thinking about that are loosely connected, and see where that goes.
1. Much of the history of recovery has been focused on ego containment and deflation, renouncing power, and right-sizing, which was seen to be an effective treatment for men who felt like they had too much power, who thought they were God themselves, and has since been applied to all who experience addiction, regardless if they had inflated or deflated egos.
Or rather: much of the history of recovery has been focused on treating narcissism.
Something I discussed in QLAW was Ernest Kurtz’s biography of alcoholics anonymous, titled Not God, as a nod to what made Alcoholics Anonymous so completely appealing to its first adherents, who were mostly WASPY upper-class males. As I said in my book:
Remember when I explained that AA was formed in 1930s America by upper-middle-class white men who were sick from believing they were God, sick from wielding too much power in this world? And that the foundational beliefs of AA came from white, evangelical Protestant organizations? Let’s think about what that means for a second. Those who wrote the rules were those who sat (and still sit) at the top of society—a society made in their image and designed to protect them. They enjoyed unquestioned authority and unchecked power, and their ego—or way of dealing with reality—was developed through that experience. Their ego was formed to believe it was above the law, above reproach, that it was smarter than any set of rules.
For an ego like this, the Twelve Steps and The Big Book make sense. To be reminded you are not God, to become right-sized, to refrain from questioning rules, to humble yourself, to admit your weakness, to chronicle what’s wrong about you, to be vulnerable enough to admit your faults to another person, to shut up and listen: these are all behaviors associated with (and imposed on) women. They are in essence instructions on how to be a woman, and to those men, they were medicine. To act in this manner was a crazy, new way of being, and felt like freedom. But to a woman or any other oppressed group, being told to renounce power, voice, authority, and desire is just more of the same shit. It’s what made us sick in the first place.
2. Regardless of our feelings about point #1, we know that folks who are in an addictive process often experience something called “reciprocal narrowing,” where our world shrinks down to the object of our desire or mechanism of relief. We're operating at a level that is tightly yoked to a pain cycle—and thus (can be, not always) very self-centered.
Using Ken Wilber’s model of development, someone in an addictive process might be considered ego-centric (self-focused—not in a punitive sense, but in the sense that one’s worldview is dominated by trying to meet unmet needs), as opposed to more expansive stages of development like ethno-centric (focused on one’s group, family, or tribe) or world-centric (able to include the self, the tribe, and also those who are unlike us).
In really plain terms, addiction is developmentally regressive, and recovery is developmentally progressive. This is why people often excel in community, not just because we need others to co-regulate with, but also because healing comes from orienting beyond the self and focusing on others.
In theory, we’re supposed to keep on growing outward, maintaining a balance between a healthy self-focus and a healthy outer-focus. And in theory, this should lead to something called “transpersonal development,” in which we transcend the personal (for instance, I would characterize my last five years as transpersonal). Again, this doesn’t mean we become self-denying ascetics—it just means we’re healthy, integrated, and can spend our considerable resources not putting out constantly managing our own fires, but tending to the ones out there.