Perspectives - Vol. 3, No. 3 - There's Self-Help and then There's Self-Help: Women and the Recovery Movement

One of the -- if not the -- most successful of all contemporary self-help models and movements is surely the network of 12-step/anonymous "fellowships." From its inception in 1935, with the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12-step movement has grown to an internationally entrenched, renowned, and influential network of organizations helping members to cope with a mind-boggling array of addictive and/or compulsive behaviors, ranging from such traditional chemical dependencies as drug addiction and alcoholism to more emotionally-based difficulties such as love addiction, shopping addiction, addiction to cosmetic surgery and difficulties arising from incest and other forms of abusive or neglectful parenting.

The greatest expansion of the recovery movement came in the 1980s when, for a variety of reasons, a burgeoning of new fellowships devoted to more emotional and family-produced difficulties brought a huge influx of women into the movement. The publication, in the early 1980s, of best sellers such as Melodie Beatty's Codependent No More and Robin Norwood's Women Who Love Too Much was both a sign and a spur to this mass increase of women into newly founded groups. These books gave birth to the many new terms and labels -- codependency, toxic families, addictive personality, inner child -- by which a plethora of common personal problems suddenly came to be understood and discussed in terms of the "disease/addiction" model that AA had long employed to analyze and treat chemical dependencies.

Suddenly, the mass media -- mass-market paperbacks, TV talk shows and docudramas, slick magazines and pulp-fiction novels -- were filled with talk of addiction along with advice and information on how to cope with it, which invariably involved buying a 12-step-based self-help book or, better yet, attending a 12-step meeting. Schools, parole hearings, corporate employee assistance programs, psychiatric conferences, hospitals and health insurance policies suddenly were inundated with the language and procedures of the 12-step movement, now applied to a growing number of personal difficulties previously handled privately. Now they were seen to be matters of great import to every major institution in the nation, as addictive disorders of all kinds seemed to multiply and spread like the contagious, biologically engendered physical diseases to which they were suddenly being compared.

In order to understand the growth of this cultural and social phenomenon and its broader implications -- especially for the massive numbers of women affected -- it is useful to trace briefly certain key moments in the development of the self-help model in America. Between the rise of AA and the spread of the current mass movement, there was a period -- the late 1960s and early 1970s -- when a very different kind of self-help model was prominent and influential: the feminist consciousness-raising movement (CR), which also named and addressed emotional, family- and relationship-based difficulties plaguing women. CR meetings resembled 12-step meetings in many ways. Women sat in a circle and "testified" to often hidden, shameful personal problems such as abusive fathers, boyfriends and colleagues; body hatred and eating disorders; sexual insecurity and unhappiness; and self-destructive impulses and practices. This sharing, as in the 12-steps, produced a feeling of not being alone and led to a common understanding of one's problems as rooted in certain common, causal factors that then could be addressed and strategically tackled. A feeling of "sisterhood" (if not fellowship) was produced that was empowering and gave hope and faith in one's ability to change one's life. Members shared moments of triumph, as well as moments of defeat and failure, and through the mutual sharing of ups and downs came to see patterns of growth that could be imitated and setbacks that could be overcome.

So successful and influential was this movement, in which hundreds of thousands participated during the brief period between 1968 and 1975, and which was, importantly, a single part of a much broader 'Women's Liberation Movement" that attacked a variety of gender-based political and social injustices, that its truth and teachings became widely known and incorporated into mainstream discourse and institutional practice. Mass-market women's magazines, movies, TV shows and popular music reflected, and still reflect in contradictory and subtle ways, the truths of feminist theory and process, as do any number of policies now institutionalized in workplaces, courts, schools, and even the military.

Indeed, it is my contention that the success of the broad recovery movement of the '80s and '90s in attracting women to its meetings and philosophies, owes much to the ideas and practices of 1960s feminism -- now so internalized within American culture. Women who in the 1960s and 1970s came to theorize their personal pain and understand it as not "natural" but the result of unhealthy sexual, family, and social dynamics were understandably comfortable with the culture of recovery, in which the naming of personal pain and suffering, accompanied by a strategy for sharing and learning to handle such pain, were central. Like CR, groups like Shoppers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous, Love Addicts Anonymous, and Adult Children of Alcoholics approach personal suffering from a point of view that identifies unhealthy family and gender dynamics as causative factors in one's self-destructive tendencies. Low self-esteem, obsessive and manipulative relationships with men, self-defeating habits that sabotage one's own success, and so on are, in 12-step meetings, as in CR, seen as conducive to change once one sees the pattern and its root causes, and changes one's life habits accordingly.

But feminist CR was radically different from the earlier AA model of self-help. Its focus, while immediately centered on personal change, was ultimately concerned with a bigger issue: how to change the institutions and ideologies of sexist society that were directly responsible for many aspects of women's personal suffering. The theory of CR was, in fact, rooted in the now cliched (and generally misunderstood) phrase, "The personal is political" -- that there was an organic link between personal suffering and social and political forces that had to be understood in order to affect social change, especially for women, whose lives were defined, within sexist ideology, in terms of personal, domestic life and who were largely excluded from the public realms of work and politics.

In CR groups, women "spoke bitterness' in order to build generalizations about their common experiences from which strategies for change could be built. And the strategies that such processes spawned tended to be projects that made demands on the media, law, government, unions and others to change sexist policies that demeaned and oppressed women. While the imprint of 1960s and 1970s feminism can be seen and felt in virtually every institutional and cultural aspect of contemporary life, the radical political thrust of the era -- an era that saw similar social movements successfully attack and amend conventional ideas and policies about many things, including race relations, foreign and military policy, attitudes toward differences in sexual orientation, academic curricula and structure, awareness of the environment, popular culture, and more -- the belief in, and support for, activist social and political agendas is on the decline and the defensive. And it is not surprising, in this climate of rightward drift, that so much that was progressive and radical in Second Wave Feminism should have subtly found its way into -- and been transformed by -- the very apolitical, indeed anti-political, 12-step/anonymous network. For that movement, examined closely, bears within it a set of beliefs that could not be more radically different from CR.

Before examining these differences, we might look briefly at what has been happening to women -- especially the generation whose lives and minds were most immediately affected by feminism -- since the 1970s. Much of the hope and optimism about what gender relations and women's lives would be like, once the demands of feminists for social and cultural reform took hold, have been shattered in an age of backlash and right-wing ideology. Women have indeed entered the workforce, and family and sexual relations have been radically transformed to such an extent that the intact, permanent, patriarchal nuclear family is more a nostalgic memory than a visible reality for most of us. But the many economic and social reforms that might have made such radical upheavals liberating have not accompanied these mind-boggling changes.

Women increasingly are finding themselves trapped and stopped by the feminization of poverty, the cuts in child care, health care, welfare, education and job training, and the intractable hold of the "double day' in which women still do almost all housework and childcare. In such a climate of deprivation and fading dreams, it is not surprising that more and more women are finding themselves -- as recovery movement statistics demonstrate -- turning, or falling, more and more often into old patterns of self-destructive, but momentarily palliative, habits that are now widely known as "addictive disorders." The self-esteem and economic independence that feminists rightly understood to be at the heart of women's ultimate happiness and independence are, these days, harder and harder to realize. The return to dependent relationships, chemical and non-chemical "highs" like gambling, shopping, overeating and, to a lesser extent, the kind of alcohol and drug abuse that became so prevalent and socially problematic among men in the 1930s (AA, it should be noted was an exclusively male organization for many years) is now on the rise among women.

And so we are witnessing the rise of the "new" recovery movement and its many branches, most of which, interestingly, address these more typically "feminized" versions of suffering and inadequate coping mechanisms. Go to any meeting of Overeaters Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, or Shoppers Anonymous and you will see roomfuls of women, sharing stories of defeat, shame, abuse, and despair that are very similar to the ones heard, three decades ago, in CR groups. These are stories that differ sharply from the traditional tales of "falling off the wagon" and "hitting bottom" that more traditional, still male-dominated AA groups feature. (Indeed, there is much grumbling among certain AA groups of long standing about this new trend toward talking about marriages and families and bosses and hurt feelings instead of the traditional "meat and potatoes" focus on booze. But if the women's stories are the same, the language and analysis -- and certainly the "cure" -- are radically different. The 12-step philosophy and process, for all its similarities to CR, are based on two assumptions that CR would never have countenanced: that one's problems are the result of a disease called "addiction" that is internal to one's own being and that its "cure" -- which is only managed by staying with the program -- will come from "giving one's life up to a Higher Power," which smacks unmistakably of a traditional patriarchal Christian God.

For feminists, these two ideas are, or should be, anathema. Once one attributes one's suffering and despair, inability to cope with daily life or break destructive habits, and unhealthy entrapment in abusive, demeaning relationships to a "disease" rather than to the multitude of social and economic and cultural institutions and practices that socialize and enforce the sexist power relationships and self-images that form us all from birth, one is blinded to the possibility of the kind of social and political change that might indeed, in the long run, free one from suffering. What does the 12-step philosophy offer in place of social and political change? A spiritual salvation through giving up one's power, something that CR would never have considered. The very point of feminism, of course, is to empower women to change their lives on their own by recognizing and changing the material and social conditions that entrap them.

In hundreds of hours of group meetings, I saw evidence of the subtle ways in which feminist political insight was molded and bent to fit the discourse and ideology of a highly anti-political, anti-feminist worldview. Certainly, I saw and heard tales of true suffering. I saw people change and improve their often tragic lives through strict adherence to the program they entered. And I would never deny the power of that program for those who religiously -- yes, religiously -- stick to it. For those -- especially (mostly male) chemical and sexual addicts -- who had "hit bottom" there was indeed something inspiring about the workings of these groups.

But beyond the immediate behavior changes I saw in some members, there was an unsettling sense of having bought into a worldview that has now, through mass media, become the dominant view of emotional suffering, its causes and its "cures," in which the very possibility of thinking or acting politically has disappeared. Women in abusive relationships now are taught that they are suffering from a disease called codependency, as are their equally "sick' partners, rather than being encouraged to look at the unequal economic and political power relationships between men and women that facilitate and enforce the "normalization" of such male abuse. Women who have come to hate and abuse their bodies because they do not resemble fashion models are similarly taught to view themselves as diseased and to turn to a Higher Power to give them strength to resist their addiction, rather than fighting to change social norms and media images that reflect the unequal gender relations through which women become objects of males' desire to own, possess and even violate. And what little awareness of social injustice exists is invariably addressed within a religious context in which one's Higher Power is trusted to deal with such matters.

This language and train of thought heard so often these days is itself insidious. As feminism itself proved long ago, the way in which we describe and name ourselves and our problems has everything to do with how we come to handle them. The difference between the terms "girl" or "chick" or "doll" and the proper noun "woman" is obvious to most of us today. But to call oneself a codependent is as problematic as other obviously demeaning labels. To define oneself in terms of an illness is disempowering and diminishing, especially when it serves to take attention away from the large social structures and forces that have led to the "codependency" or "bulimia."

There is no doubt that self-help is a powerful, potentially revolutionary, social formation that can and has empowered many to speak and act in their own self-interest and for their own betterment. But it is dangerous to see such formations in a social and political vacuum and fail to evaluate their larger messages and goals in a holistic, political, and cultural context.

The most powerful and useful strategies and tactics -- as history proves -- can be molded and twisted to fit a variety of goals and ends. In the current climate of right-wing ascent, it is particularly important that progressives guard against the glib use of progressive ideas and strategies in the service of long-term agendas that are anything but liberating or empowering, and may ultimately work to inhibit social change. The most depressing thing I witnessed in my study of the recovery movement was the way in which its powerful ideology worked to subtly shift the focus of members' lives more and more toward an inward, self-involved, often obsessive and lifelong focus on meetings and rules and steps and traditions; and further and further from a concern with the larger world whose destructive forces had sent them into meetings in the first place.

Elayne Rapping is professor of communications at Adelphi University. Her most recent book is The Culture of Recovery: Making Sense of the Self-Help Movement in Women's Lives. This article originally appeared in the Spring, 1997 issue of Social Policy and is reprinted here with permission.

APA Reference
Rapping, E. (1998). There's self-help and then there's self-help: Women and the recovery movement. [Online]. Perspectives. [1998, June 26].

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