Recovery From the Dominant Culture
My name is Nichola, and I’m an addict. I have what is sometimes called, in pop psychology terms, an “addictive personality.” When I am not working a recovery program, I tend to develop unhealthy attachments to people, ways of being, and substances that I then try to use to give my life meaning or at least to numb the meaninglessness for a while.
Over the years, I have used all of the following in this way: career, activism, politics, large quantities of sugar and flour and fried foods, romantic partners, people I’ve taken on as fix-it projects, and spirituality. All of these addictions have—progressively over time—made my life unmanageable, although some are more socially acceptable than others and have even gotten me kudos from some corners.
Photo by S. Reacher
I first found some relief from this unmanageability many years ago through the Al Anon program, which is a 12-step recovery program for people who have been affected by someone else’s drinking. Having grown up with an alcoholic father and having since involved myself with many people who struggle with addiction, I found a lot of resonance in those rooms. I recognized myself in the stories people told; I, too, had trouble accessing my own emotions, tended to focus on other people (both as the source of my happiness and as the source of my suffering), spent a lot of time trying to help other people while my own life fell apart, and based my self-worth on what others thought of me. When I would share in meetings, however, I often found myself struggling to relate my problems to alcoholism. Often the current triggers for my behavior had nothing to do with anyone’s drinking or addictive behavior. I also wondered why it seemed to me that almost everyone I knew could benefit from Al Anon, even though they didn’t all have experience with alcoholism.
Then I ran across Anne Wilson Schaef’s little book, WHEN SOCIETY BECOMES AN ADDICT, and I suddenly understood what I had been sensing. While many people have not been intimately involved with an alcoholic, all of us who grew up in the United States have been shaped by interaction with an addict—namely, the society into which we were born, with its insatiable economic appetites, its unrelenting drive to fulfill them, its obsession with keeping up appearances that cover over intense suffering, brutality, and despair, and its insistence on recruiting us into serving all of that.
What’s more, I came to believe that alcoholism is a symptom of or reaction to this cultural dysfunction. Compulsive eating, drug addiction, sex addiction, workaholism, compulsive activism—all are symptoms of some larger dis-ease that comes from living amidst and colluding with so much brutality, oppression, and injustice.
For example, my father was born in 1939 in Berlin. He learned to walk in a bomb shelter while his father was off serving in the SS. He won’t talk about most of what he saw during the first six years of his life, but I know from other family members that he witnessed his best friend being crushed under a building collapsing from bombing damage. I don’t know what, if anything, he knew about what was happening to Jews in his country, but I do know that it was (literally) in the air. When he was seven, he was brought to this country, where he didn’t know the language, where he was hated as an enemy German, and where he was raised by a brutal grandmother shaped by her own experience laboring for almost nothing in the German potato fields. Having inculcated gender norms that dictate what it means to be a man, he has never found a way to speak of this, much less grieve it. Is it any wonder that he has turned to alcohol?
It is a vast oversimplification to say that my distorted ways of being originate in exposure to alcoholism. It also lets the rest of the culture off the hook, enabling it to continue unchecked, churning out more and more wounded people.
I think we desperately need to start naming the social, political, economic, and historical forces that have contributed to our suffering. We are taught that if we are unhappy, it must be our own fault. We must be doing something wrong. Either that, or it’s our family’s fault. (Usually it’s our mother’s fault. Remember the “schizophrenogenic mother,” the woman whose parenting was believed to foster schizophrenia in her offspring?)
It’s time we begin to call a lie a lie. It’s time we begin to name the ways that racism, sexism and its handmaiden heterosexism, capitalist labor practices, immigration, land theft, genocide, and war have impacted our families and the institutions in which we grew up. Dr. Joy DeGruy has done groundbreaking work in this area; her book Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome lays out some of the ways that enslaved Africans developed parenting practices that once helped them survive, but now, handed down over many generations, no longer serve. I believe we need to do the same work around how slaveholding impacted parenting in white families. For example, what effects did it have that many white women took massive amounts of opium to numb their human reactions against the brutality of slave-beatings, or, if they didn’t take drugs, simply retreated to their rooms with unnamed infirmities that made them unavailable to their children? And what did it mean, then, for those children to be raised by African-descended women whom they were simultaneously being taught to despise and subjugate? How are those effects still felt in our families today?
Please note that I am not trying to create an equivalency between the suffering of enslaved children and that of the children of their masters but to lay out the ways that brutal and unjust practices harm everyone, albeit in different ways. It is our willingness to remain in denial about that simple fact that disrupts solidarity and allows those brutal and unjust practices to continue.
Similarly, we need to ask how ongoing capitalist labor practices have shaped our upbringing and our tendency to equate personal worth and value with our ability to produce and consume. Our “personal” suffering is not separate from the suffering of the life force held hostage to profit and power. It turns out that it is not healthy for human beings to participate in the degradation of other human beings, animals, plants, and the earth itself, and yet it is not possible to escape doing so without radically transforming our social systems.
It stands to reason, then, that “we cannot fully recover without contributing to the healing of the culture that makes us sick.” This is part of the preamble that we read at every weekly meeting of the new Recovery from the Dominant Culture program.
Recovery from the Dominant Culture is an experimental program in which we apply the 12 steps—the same steps that have been phenomenally successful in helping people recover from alcoholism—to our recovery from internalized oppression and supremacy and other limiting or harmful beliefs, values, habits, and ways of being.
We start by acknowledging that we have been shaped by larger social and historical forces that were beyond our control. We admit that we are powerless over having been affected by those forces and that, alone, we cannot change them. No one, acting alone, can transform heteropatriarchy, or white supremacy, or capitalism. We can only do that by working together as a community of people in life recovery.
We also open ourselves to the notion that a higher power can lead us to sanity. Some of us think of this higher power as a decolonized version of God; others turn to the interdependent web of existence as our higher power. Still others turn to Love or the Life Force or the Force for Healing and Transformation in the Universe. There is no standard definition of higher power. What we do share is a commitment to turning our will and our lives over to a higher power, “praying only for the knowledge of that higher power’s will for us and the power to carry that out.” Doing this moment by moment, held accountable in a diverse community, enables us to surrender our self-will and become humble agents of life and love in the communities in which we live, work, and play.
Infused throughout the program is a sense that we cannot afford to look only at our personal relationships but must also look at the social systems that structure our social relations. For example, working steps 8 and 9, which ask us to “make a list of all persons we have harmed” and then to “make amends to such people except where to do so would injure them or others,” requires that we think not only of people we’ve harmed directly, but those who have been harmed by social systems from which we have benefitted. How do people who benefit from white skin privilege begin to make amends to people of color who have paid the price for our privilege? How do we, in the so-called first world, make amends to the workers who have been exploited so that we could buy cheap goods? Or to the people around the world who go hungry as a result of trade policies that channel resources toward the wealthiest nations? How do we make amends to ourselves for having internalized our own oppression, taking on the shame of being female, or gay, or not being white, or not fitting into pre-existing gender categories or socially approved body types? There are no easy solutions, but we know that we can’t “heal” or “get well” without taking some steps, no matter how faltering, toward the liberation of all people. As Solomon Burke famously sang, “None of us is free when one of us is chained. None of us is free.”
Alcoholics in recovery often say that they “can’t keep it unless they give it away.” Similarly, those of us in recovery from the dominant culture can’t benefit from our recovery unless we are continually working for the liberation—the health, healing, and well-being—of all beings. We may never see what that looks like, but we can do ourpart, trusting that the outcomes are not ultimately up to us.
Nichola Torbett is the founding director of Seminary of the Street, a spiritual formation and training academy for “love warriors” seeking to change their communities by embodying God’s love in the world. Nichola has degrees from the University of Toledo and Indiana University at Bloomington, but has been most radically shaped by engagement with people who were willing to be real with her across lines of difference.
michelle puckett
such a welcome article on this day, in particular. thank you.
Brandon Lott
BOO YAH!!
This is interesting as yesterday I was thinking, before I begin my PhD, that my dissertation would be “Colonized America, Liberation and A Return to Our Roots” and I was thinking along these very same lines, but what is exceptional about your presentation that it is personally relevant/reflective and with such deep experience you give it such an authenticity that is tactfully beautiful.
Healing is the movement.
Thanks for putting the work in our laps.
Mark Nichols
I understant and agree and sympathize with many of the points made by Ms. Torbert, but I find the base argument to be too symplistic. Most of the white pepole of our early country did not own slaves and in fact many eurpoean whites were sent here as indentured servants, a forced servitude that ended often in death. Poor white men could not vote and, before the struggle for labor rights, lived in terrible poverty with their families. But if you look at any civilization around the world and at all times, nations were formed by conquest and the subjegation of the conquered population. In Asia, Africa, Europe,the Americas, and anywhere there have been people of ANY race, the story is the same. All races have been agressors and victimns. The Aztecs, the Monguls, the Chineese, any and all. It is wrong to lump all Caucasians together as villians. Also our country may have done terrible things to other countries and peoples’ (name one country that hasn’t including Tibet) but we also have a constitution that even though it is often ignored (even by our present president) it is the finest declaration of human rights ever written. We have more freedoms and rights (even for non-whites and women) than any other country. We have helped conquer diseases not only for our citizens, but for all the world. Our advances in technology and sience have brought our standards of living and longevity to many. Yes there is the dark side of exploitation of nations and resorces (which ALL nations have done when they gained power) but we (all of us) have created many wonderful things from the arts to the sciences.One last thing that drives me crazy is the fact that most people want to live with their own, people that look and are culturaly simaliar to themselves. Somehow this is OK unless you are Caucasian. There is a double standard being used here. Even people who are interested in Bhuddism are like this. You are always reading about these complaints in letters to the editor in Bhuddist journals and magazines that Hispanic and African-Americans want to be part of a sanga that looks and talks like them and are uncomfortable being in a majority Caucasian sanga. I understand ,but I won’t apoligize for being Caucasian. If you don’t want to hang out with me just because I am Caucasian then start your own group. This may be straying from the original topic but it underlines my point that all people are basically the same. If you want to live in my neighborhood then please be clean and respectful of my culture. Don’t trash it with beer bottles, cans. and fastfood bags,uneaten food, and even baby diapers that are thrown on the lawns and parkways and into the gutters. Don’t play loud music out your car windows where everyother word is Bitch, Whore, or that most awlful of words M””’F””and expect me to accept it because I won’t. We ALL have to respect each other. Our similarities and differences, but the word is RESPECT. Maybe all I’m saying is”don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater”.
Nichola Torbett
Thank you for your comment, Mark, and for your willingness to engage on some very difficult issues to talk about.
In recovery programs, we have a practice of “cleaning up our own side of the street.” That means, rather than focusing on what is wrong with someone else and what they are doing, we focus on what we contribute to the problem and how we can change that. That means looking at our part not only in interpersonal conflicts, but in systemic problems such as economic exploitation, police brutality, environmental degradation, and so on.
In the past few years, through studying history and analyzing what is happening in the world around me, I have come to understand that I’ve been part of a devil’s bargain that involves getting certain privileges in exchange for my participation in the harming of others. You are right to point out that many white people were brought to this country as indentured servants and initially were treated much like enslaved Africans. What you may not know is what happened next: The state of Virginia led the way in passing a series of laws–the “slave codes”–designed to give white indentured servants some small privileges over their darker skinned co-laborers. For example, the laws stipulated that white indentured servants could not be beaten naked, but enslaved Africans could. Further, they stipulated that upon the end of the indentured period, white servants would be given small parcels of land and/or livestock. (Of course, there was no end to the indentured period of enslaved Africans.) The purpose of these laws–and this was not a secret but was openly stated–was to disrupt solidarity across racial lines among the servants to prevent further mass uprisings like those that took place in Virginia in the 1600s.
The same kind of deal-making continues today, though it is unspoken. For example, there is a deal that I will be protected by the Oakland Police Department so long as I don’t make too big a protest about the brutality with which young people of color are treated by that police department. If I break that unspoken bargain, I may be in for some of that brutality myself.
What I am coming to understand in Recovery from the Dominant Culture is that cleaning up my own side of the street requires that I clean up my involvement in such bargains to the degree that they benefit me but harm others I do that not because I am striving for moral superiority, but because it is the only way for me to be spiritually healthy.
Another part of my recovery has been to uncover the ways that common concepts in our culture have been racialized. For example, when most Americans hear the word “crime,” they think of dark-skinned poor people. They do not think of mostly white corporate CEOs who embezzle funds or give themselves large bonuses while laying off workers and lowering workplace safety standards? Is the latter any less “stealing,” or in buddhist terms, “taking that which is not freely given?” Is littering, which you mention above, really worse than filling out streams, rivers, lakes, oceans, soil, and air with toxins? And is littering–if that is where you want to focus–solely perpetrated by people of color and poor people, as you seem to imply? Or is that a racialized myth you’ve bought into? These are the sorts of questions those of us in recovery from the dominant culture must face.
I actually agree with you that domination, oppression, violence, and exploitation are not unique to white people. The tendencies toward those things seem to be universal. But because white people tend to be in charge, they are able to do much more damage with their tendencies under current social arrangements. The answer cannot just be flipping the tables, if that is what you are concerned about. We need to do the work of recovery from the *ways of being* that make up the dominant culture–not just white folks but all of us, to some degree–if real transformation is going to happen.
So I am not proposing that we “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” but when there is clear evidence that the bathwater is full of toxins that poison the baby, we have to do what we can to clear up the cultural water.
B Dickson
This has profound implications. It’s so easy for we progressives to take our critical stances and project them on an “other” that does not account for the fact that we are enmeshed, even constructed by the same cultural forces. That we internalize them, often embody them more than we’d like.
I’ve had the opportunity to live in some extremely rural, redneck, conservative places. This gave me the opportunity to, at least to some extent, see what the world looks like from that perspective. While I can’t often agree, I can “see” from their perspective how phony and elitist the progressive stance can look from the perspective of a poorly educated worker who lives in a trailer park or worse. It’s like the environmentalist who hops on an airplane for a little weekend at the second home.
It I had the money, I’d probably buy a nice second (well, first) home myself. So I’m enmeshed. I see the phoniness of the “environmentalist” who uses more than their share of resources, yet I would likely do the very same thing myself, given the opportunity.
Beginning the discourse of disengaging, or at least becoming aware of our necessary participation in a toxic culture, is important, and it seems that, once again, the twelve-step approach has value.
Let me throw out a friendly challenge to the Buddhist Community here by asking, “To what extent has Buddhism, as it manifests in the USA (my country), reinscribed some of the less-than-desirable cultural characteristics that many of us are critical of and that, sometimes, Buddhism itself may contradict. Specifically, I’m thinking about $400 weekend retreats and the like. Fancy rural retreat centers. Is this spiritual practice, or upscale indulgence?
mercadeo
We start by acknowledging that we have been shaped by larger social and historical forces that were beyond our control. We admit that we are powerless over having been affected by those forces and that, alone, we cannot change them. No one, acting alone, can transform heteropatriarchy, or white supremacy, or capitalism. We can only do that by working together as a community of people in life recovery.
kristina yates
Great article Nichola! Thanks. I also appreciated your response to Mark. I like when you share personally (like about your father) because I then feel connected to you and like you’re not just talking theory.