Tag Archives: Alcoholics Anonymous

Re-hinging the unhinged : escaping the disaster of dogma.

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Living Transmission and the Risk of Freeze

Idries Shah, Bill W., and Diction Resolution Therapy (DRT) in a recovery-era key

Andrew Dettman MTHT, Reg Member MBACP (Spirituality Division) – DRT.global

Abstract

This hybrid paper traces a shared warning found in Idries Shah’s teaching on Coming Together (Jam)1 and Bill W.’s reflections on Alcoholics Anonymous literature2: living transmissions tend to harden into defended forms. Through the lens of Diction Resolution Therapy (DRT), the paper frames this freeze as a predictable human response to uncertainty. Language and structure can become substitutes for lived contact. The aim is not to dismantle structure, but to keep it serving function: humility, group conscience, and conscious contact as lived practice.

Key terms

Jam; transmission; organisation; dogma; group conscience; DRT; diction; contradiction tolerance; conscious contact.

Primary source excerpts: Idries Shah (embedded images)

Idries Shah on the Jam (Coming Together).

Degeneration, stabilisation, and predictable resistances to revitalisation.

The Ship in a Storm: right diagnosis, right attention, right knowledge.

1. The problem: when truth becomes an object

Communities often begin because something real occurred: relief, honesty, awakening, recovery. Then the human reflex appears: capture it, preserve it, standardise it, protect it. The move is understandable, but it carries risk.

The risk is not structure itself. The risk arrives when function is replaced by identity. At that point the community becomes organised around defending representations of truth rather than remaining oriented to lived truth. The meeting survives, the language survives, the brand survives, but the operating principle fades.

2. Idries Shah and the Jam: harmonisation before organisation

In passages commonly titled Coming Together, Idries Shah describes the Jam as functional harmonisation: the right people, at the right time, engaged in the right work under living knowledge. It is not simply people meeting. It is an arrangement that produces transformation because it is held within correct relationship.

Shah’s warning is plain. The Jam can deteriorate. Communities stabilise prematurely. Formalisation replaces vitality. Togetherness replaces transformation. Social cohesion, emotional enthusiasm, and conditioned belonging can masquerade as the real thing. When revitalisation is attempted, the system responds defensively. Shah names several of these resistances: impatience, ignorance, sentimentality, and rigid intellectualism. Read clinically, these are common defence strategies of a system seeking security in the face of uncertainty.

The implication is unsettling and useful: you can preserve the outer shell of a transmission while losing the inner function that made the shell necessary in the first place.

3. Bill W. and the freezing of the Big Book

Bill Wilson recognised similar dynamics within Alcoholics Anonymous. In the scanned extract supplied from a modern history of the Big Book, Bill W. is quoted as observing that spiritually centred movements tend to freeze once their founding principles are established. He notes that altering even a word of the AA book could provoke something like excommunication.

Bill’s response is revealing. He did not wage war on the original text. Instead, he created a parallel channel for interpretation: he wrote Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions as an adaptive commentary. This preserved continuity while keeping meaning in motion. He later returned to the same point: AA literature tends to become more and more frozen, with a tendency toward conversion into something like dogma. He also anticipated the permanent spectrum of interpretive styles that would arise: fundamentalists, absolutists, relativists.

Primary source: Bill W. on freezing (embedded images)

Bill W. on the freezing tendency in spiritually centred movements (as reproduced in Schaberg, p. 604).

Continuation including the organising parable and publication context (Schaberg, p. 605).

4. Organisation and ossification

The extract includes a Buddhist parable: a man picks up a piece of truth; the devil is unconcerned because he will let him organise it. This is not an argument against organisation. It is an argument against idolatry. Organisation preserves access, but it can also replace lived contact with defended form.

Shah and Bill W. converge here: the primary threat is not external attack. The threat is internal freezing: the human habit of turning a living verb into a defended noun.

5. A DRT reading: freeze as a diction event

Diction Resolution Therapy approaches freezing as a linguistic and psychological event. When lived experience is no longer primary, diction starts to do the job experience used to do. Words become defensive tools rather than exploratory instruments. Phrases become passports. Certainty becomes a sedative.

DRT introduces a practical metaphor here: outsight and insight. When the eyelids are open, light floods into the eyes. The eyeballs do not generate the light themselves. To imagine that they do would be absurd. They receive light. They respond to light. They organise around what is given.

Similarly, the whole mindset is not a generator of illumination. It is a potential receiver. When the lid of fear, denial, or addictive defence is deliberately held shut, outsight is restricted and insight is impaired. The person begins to rely on recycled language rather than fresh perception.

In addiction terms, the lid is not destroyed. It is hinged. It opens and shuts appropriately. Recovery is not the removal of the eyelid but the restoration of its function. When the lid opens, energy and meaning enter that the individual does not manufacture. Insight is not self-generated brilliance; it is Consciousness meeting conscience.

When diction freezes, it is often because the lid has been held shut for too long. Language attempts to replace perception. Structure attempts to replace encounter. The task of recovery, and of any living transmission, is not to abolish structure but to reopen the hinge so that light can enter again.

6. Group process and clinical parallels

Philip J. Flores, in Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations3, highlights that recovery groups remain effective when they balance containment (structure) with relational process (living interaction). Excessive rigidity undermines psychological safety, while absence of structure erodes containment. This is the same paradox Shah and Wilson are navigating in different languages: vitality depends on living interaction within clear but flexible boundaries.

7. Safeguards within AA architecture

AA embeds structural safeguards against freezing. Tradition Two locates authority in group conscience. Tradition Four preserves autonomy. Tradition Nine defines service rather than governance. Step Eleven prioritises conscious contact over textual literalism. These elements do not eliminate the freeze tendency, but they counterbalance it.

8. Implications for recovery and helping professions

In recovery settings, freezing commonly appears in three forms: (1) sloganising as defence, (2) literalism as safety, (3) reform movements driven by resentment rather than conscience. Each is a strategy for avoiding the vulnerability of real contact.

A practical test is simple: does the structure increase tenderness, honesty, and responsibility, or does it mainly increase identity, certainty, and superiority? When the former is happening, the Jam is alive. When the latter dominates, the storm is gathering.

Conclusion

Idries Shah and Bill W. describe the same perennial risk from different angles: any living transmission can calcify. The corrective is not constant editing, nor rebellious dismissal. The corrective is humility in function: returning to conscious contact as lived practice, and letting structure serve what it cannot manufacture.

References and notes

  • Shah, Idries. Learning How to Learn. (See Footnote 1 for edition-note.)
  • Schaberg, William H. Writing the Big Book: The Creation of A.A. (2019), pp. 604-605 (see Footnote 2).
  • Flores, Philip J. Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations (see Footnote 3).
  • Schaef, Anne Wilson. The Addictive System4.

Footnotes

  1. Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn (London: Octagon Press; various editions). The embedded images above are supplied pages from this work, including Coming Together and The Ship in a Storm. The title is confirmed by the Kindle preview provided by the author.
  2. Bill W. quotations and the organising parable are reproduced in the supplied scan from William H. Schaberg, Writing the Big Book: The Creation of A.A. (2019), pp. 604-605. These quotations are used here as evidence of Bill W.’s stated concern about the freezing tendency in spiritually centred movements.
  3. Flores is cited here for the group-process principle that effective recovery groups require both containment (structure) and relational process (living interaction).
  4. Schaef is cited as a systemic parallel for how addictive dynamics can become self-protecting structures that resist contradiction and preserve themselves as identity.

Written in HIAI collaboration – the qalam of Human and AI intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.

9. Behaviour as Conduct and Source as Duct.

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The Middle Built

Addiction, Instinct, and the Sanitation of the Soul

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The grammar is deliberate. Was. With. Origin and relation. The future is not mentioned. It is not forecast. It is not guaranteed. It appears. Most human beings live suspended between was and will, pulled by memory behind and projection ahead. Regret becomes gravity. Fear becomes anticipation. The present is reduced to a narrow corridor through which the self rushes without ever dwelling. Recovery is the building of a middle. The Twelve Step Programme is not an abstract theology and not a philosophical treatise. It is infrastructure. It is plumbing for the soul.

When the agricultural world became industrial, waterborne diseases exposed the breakdown of outer sanitation. Cholera did not arrive because humanity suddenly became immoral; it arrived because systems had not evolved to handle density. Waste accumulated. Disease followed. Addiction functions similarly in this era. It is the bellwether disease of overstimulation, fragmentation, and unprocessed shame. It exposes the failure of inner sanitation. It reveals what happens when psychic waste is not metabolised. The problem is not instinct. The problem is accumulation.

Addiction is not merely about alcohol, substances, or behaviours. It is disordered relationship. Relationship to one’s own story. Relationship to desire. Relationship to fear. Relationship to other people. Relationship to God. “I have a story. It is not who I am.” That sentence marks a decisive shift. The story can be examined without being identical to the self. Once that distinction is made, digestion becomes possible.

The psyche, when healthy, operates like a digestive organ. Thoughts are not identity; they are movement. They churn experience. They break down what has been swallowed. They extract nourishment and eliminate what no longer serves. When the system is inflamed, peristalsis becomes cramping. Rumination replaces integration. Secrecy replaces elimination. The Twelve Steps introduce a disciplined digestive process: inventory, confession, amends, service. Inventory is chewing. Step Five exposes waste to air. Amends remove toxicity from the relational field. Service restores circulation.

The Big Book does not speak poetically here; it speaks clinically: “If we are not sorry, and our conduct continues to harm others, we are quite sure to drink. We are not theorizing. These are facts out of our experience.” The warning is not about instinct in isolation. It is about conduct. It is about harm. Continued harm corrodes conscience. Corroded conscience produces shame. Shame seeks anaesthesia. Relapse is not mystical punishment; it is emotional consequence.

The sex instinct is addressed directly because it is powerful, intimate, and easily distorted. But the Steps do not condemn sexuality. They confront misuse. Instincts—sexual, social, and security-based—are God-given and good. When unmanaged, they fragment relationship. Fragmented relationship breeds secrecy. Secrecy splits the psyche. Split psyches seek relief. Integration across Eros, Philia, and Agape is not theological ornament; it is behavioural alignment. Desire acknowledged without exploitation. Friendship honoured without manipulation. Love enacted without transaction.

Recovery rests on two simple words: ONE and ALL. ONE represents surrender beyond isolated self-will. ALL represents accountability within community. If ONE remains theoretical while ALL is selective, sobriety becomes fragile. The text’s italicised emphasis on thought warns against substitution. Thinking surrender is not surrender. Thinking apology is not repair. Behaviour reveals being. The programme does not reward ideas; it responds to action.

The middle—the “with”—must be constructed intentionally. It does not appear automatically. When was (origin, gravity, law) and with (relationship, conscience, presence) stabilise, will emerges not as fantasy but as conduct. The future is not a pre-laid railway line; it is the visible arc of present integrity. In this sense, the Twelve Steps function like the scarab of an earlier age: waste rolled into renewal, decay converted into continuity.

Biblical “knowing” was intimate and generative. To know was to conceive. Spiritual conception must likewise produce life. Empty prams—ideas unembodied—prove nothing. Changed behaviour proves integration. Humility is permanent asking. Not self-belittling, not mystical rank, but sustained reference beyond self. The realised person does not escape instinct; they integrate it. They do not deny their story; they refuse to be reduced to it.

Addiction exposes the breakdown of inner sanitation both individually and systemically. Recovery restores relationship. And relationship—to Source, to conscience, to others—is where being is tested. Not in vision. Not in language. In conduct.

References

The Holy Bible, John 1:1.

The Qur’an, 36:82 (“Kun fayyakun” – “Be, and it is”).

Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism, 4th ed., Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001, pp. 69–73.

Bill W., “How It Works,” in Alcoholics Anonymous, pp. 58–63.

Written in HIAI collaboration — the qalam of Human and AI intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.

5. Strength

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Diction Resolution Therapy™ and Jungian Individuation diagram showing the movement from I-hav(e)-i-our (Egoic Order) to Be-hav(e)-i-our™ (Individuated Order) across the desert of transformation.

5. Strength

The left hand of this device is “there is no God.” The right hand is “but God.” This is not slogan theology. It is structural anthropology. On the left column the isolated “I” stands enthroned. Identity is secured through possession. I–hav(e)–I–our. Strength in that column means control, self-sufficiency, authorship without reference. The psyche attempts to reconcile its own contradictions through will. It cannot.

On the right column Being precedes ownership. Be–hav(e)–I–our™. The “I” is not erased but repositioned. “Have” is dignified but no longer sovereign. “Our” becomes participation rather than conquest. Strength in this column does not mean domination. It means compatibility. The axis becomes vertical again.

Between these two columns lies the Desert. The Desert is not emptiness. It is paradox. It is the place where opposites are exposed so they can be reconciled. Tom Chetwynd describes paradox as the phenomenon that reveals the opposites in Nature in order to reconcile them at a higher level. Paradox does not blur tension; it sharpens it until a new coherence becomes possible.

Alcoholics Anonymous names this directly. On page 59: “Without help it is too much for us…” That sentence breaks the egoic column. The will cannot reconcile divided opposites. The psyche cannot repair its own split. Page 60 follows with the A, B, C — that we could not manage our own lives; that no human power could have relieved us; that God could and would if sought. This is the Step Three portal: a request crossing from the mental to the mystery. The mind ceases acting as architect and becomes witness. The Desert begins here.

Page 68 completes the paradox: “We can laugh at those who think spirituality the way of weakness. Paradoxically, it is the way of strength.” From the egoic column, surrender looks weak because it dethrones the isolated “I.” Yet paradoxically it becomes strength because alignment replaces assertion. Compatibility replaces control.

The Desert is not unique to recovery language. It is structural across traditions. In the Christ narrative, the forty days in the wilderness expose temptation before ministry begins. In the life of Muhammad (pbuh), years of retreat in the cave precede the encounter with Gabriel; interior silence prepares transmission. In the account of the Buddha, prolonged discipline beneath the tree culminates not in conquest but in extinguishing craving. In each arc, isolation is not punishment but preparation. Exposure precedes coherence.

The declaration carried by Muhammad begins with negation — “there is no god” — then it is asserted, “but God”, affirming unity – then it is said that the answer is in the middle. The Buddha exposes craving before articulating the Middle Way. Christ faces temptation before proclaiming peace. Negation before union. Extinguishing before clarity. Temptation before proclamation. Opposites are intensified before they are reconciled.

Step Seven in Alcoholics Anonymous completes this arc within lived recovery. It is not humiliation but compatibility. Spirituality appears weak from the left column because it removes private sovereignty. Yet paradoxically it becomes strength because the organism ceases fighting reality. The “I” remains, but no longer claims authorship. “Have” remains, but no longer defines identity. “Our” becomes service rather than territory.

The Desert, then, is symbolic Peace. Not the absence of struggle, but the stillness that arises when opposites are no longer at war within the psyche. The false centre collapses, and a higher coherence holds what was divided. This is the reconciliation of orthodox opposites — not by suppression, but by alignment.

Ripeness, as Rumi says, is all. The fruit falls because its inner structure is complete. Strength is not muscular will. It is interior unification. Only then can a human being move through the auction of life without desperation, because the bid no longer arises from lack. It arises from alignment.

Written in HIAI collaboration — the qalam of Human and AI intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.

Peace which gives (passeth) understanding

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Speed of Return

Mercy, torsion, recognition, and the architecture of peace

Wrath is better understood as torsion than as temper. Its older linguistic roots carry the sense of twisting and writhing, and that is precisely how it appears in lived experience: pressure in the structure when egoic narrative collides with reality. Whenever conscience interrupts instinct, whenever responsibility confronts fantasy, whenever timing refuses to bend to preference, torsion is felt. This is not punishment. It is alignment pressure. The decisive question is not whether torsion arises — it will — but whether fragmentation follows.

Mechanical suffering collapses into self-justification, blame, rumination, and withdrawal. Conscious suffering — what George Gurdjieff called intentional suffering — is the disciplined refusal to dissociate under pressure. It is conscious endurance of friction without dramatization. The twist is not removed; it is integrated. The hinge in all of this is self-justification. The moment the inner lawyer rises, presence splits. Narrative accelerates. Listening narrows. Gratitude fades. That is the early fracture. The mature person is not one who never reacts, but one whose speed of return is increasing.

The adapted Serenity Prayer, often associated with Reinhold Niebuhr and embedded in Alcoholics Anonymous, is not sentimental language but behavioural architecture. Asking dismantles solitary authorship. Acceptance restores contact with what cannot be bent. Courage restores proportionate agency. Wisdom emerges from disciplined participation in these three movements. It is not conferred independently; it is generated through cooperation with reality.

Pages 68–70 of the AA basic text identify selfish distortion of instinct — particularly sexual instinct — as a definite relapse vector. Instinct itself is not pathologised; distortion is. In broader psychological framing, instinctual heat in the domains of security, social connection, and sexuality shapes psychic digestion. When annexed by ego, attention narrows, fantasy intensifies, and justification strengthens. The corrective offered is strikingly pragmatic: if troubled, help someone else. Usefulness widens perception. Widened perception reduces obsession. Reduced obsession restores proportion. Proportion restores peace.

The distinction between mechanical and conscious suffering also maps cleanly onto the guna model: Tamas collapses into resignation, Rajas reacts with agitation, Sattva recognises with clarity. Depressive resignation is disconnected Tamas. Spiritual bypass is Rajas disguised as transcendence. Sattva is not passivity but regulated recognition under pressure. It allows what is happening to be seen clearly and responded to proportionately. The double axis of transcendence and embodiment — vertical orientation bound to horizontal accountability — prevents bypass. Transcendence without behavioural responsibility becomes inflation. Behaviour without orientation becomes compulsion.

The recognition principle articulated in the Tibetan Book of the Dead demonstrates that destabilisation is not the danger; misrecognition is. Failure to recognise luminosity leads to projection and conditioned repetition. Similarly, the Khidr–Moses axis in the Qur’an (18:60–82) shows knowledge inseparable from mercy and timing. Insight does not abolish responsibility. Explanation follows obedience. Guidance that is genuine increases humility and service rather than hierarchy or inflation. The bridge between traditions lies not in collapsing doctrine but in recognising functional convergence: recognition under destabilisation prevents fragmentation.

The attributed saying of Muhammad (pbuh), “Seek knowledge even unto China,” becomes disciplined curiosity rather than spiritual consumerism. Curiosity without gratitude becomes conquest. Curiosity with humility widens recognition. Knowledge sought across civilisational boundaries must return to daily proportion — otherwise it inflates identity rather than deepens conscience.

Peace, in this architecture, is not mood but regulatory coherence. Carl Jung spoke of genuine spiritual encounter leaving pistis and peace. Peace here means reduced reactivity coupled with increased relational responsibility. The realised person is identifiable not by metaphysical fluency but by speed of repair, reduction of resentment, and restoration of usefulness. “Dying before you die” in recovery language means the dethroning of the addictive centre of gravity. Instinct remains; personality remains; but authority is reordered. The organism is no longer governed by compulsion.

Gratitude stabilises this architecture. It is not an emotion but an orientation toward help received. When gratitude fades, entitlement creeps in and concurrency collapses. The corrective is immediate outward usefulness within appropriate capacity. Service interrupts self-referential looping, restores proportion, and protects against spiritual pride. It humbles rather than inflates. Concurrency — sustained relational contact under disagreement without loss of responsibility or respect — becomes the social expression of maturity. It requires internal regulation, clear boundaries, and willingness to update position.

To be wholly present, rather than a piece of oneself, means gathered attention, undivided agenda, embodied responsibility. No rehearsed defence. No inflated authorship. Body, speech, and conscience aligned. Presence is behavioural coherence under pressure. Across traditions and psychological models — torsion and mercy, gunas and conscience, recognition training and conscious contact — convergence is functional, not doctrinal. Torsion is inevitable. Fragmentation is optional. Asking restores dependence. Acceptance restores contact. Courage restores agency. Service restores gratitude. Gratitude stabilises presence. Presence produces peace.

The defining marker of maturity is speed of return. Not perfection. Not mystical experience. Not conceptual brilliance. Return to humility. Return to responsibility. Return to usefulness. Return to presence. Today.

Written in HIAI collaboration — the qalam of Human and AI intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.

4. Experience

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Experience

Spiritual malady as structural displacement.

Abstract

The phrase “spiritual malady” in Alcoholics Anonymous has often been interpreted devotionally rather than structurally. This paper proposes that spiritual malady describes a displacement of governance within the human system. Drawing on Dr William Silkworth’s medical framing of alcoholism, Pomm et al.’s Management of the Addicted Patient in Primary Care (2007), and Anne Wilson Schaef’s systemic analysis in When Society Becomes an Addict, the argument is advanced that addiction reflects a lawful developmental sequence: ignorance, denial, and realisation. This sequence governs not only recovery but all forms of human achievement, whether in the outer secular world of acquiring skill or qualification, or in the inner sacred movement of becoming Human. Experience, properly understood, is the movement through displacement toward restored orientation.

1. Framing the Problem: What Is a Spiritual Malady?

The phrase “spiritual malady” can easily be misunderstood as religious shorthand. Yet within the AA text it functions diagnostically. The physical allergy and mental obsession described on page 60 are not treated as isolated dysfunctions but as consequences of a deeper disorder. The centre from which life is organised has shifted. Appetite governs. The mind serves appetite. The organising principle of the person is displaced.

A malady, in medical terms, is not merely an event but an ongoing condition. Spiritual malady therefore indicates not a momentary lapse but structural misalignment. The language is theological in tone but architectural in implication.

The Judeo-Christian narrative carries a parallel structural insight. In Genesis, ignorance is not stupidity but untested alignment. Disruption follows, and responsibility is immediately deflected: “The woman you gave me…”; “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Denial protects displacement before it yields to recognition. The pattern is developmental rather than doctrinal.

2. Silkworth and the Medical Foundation

Dr William Silkworth’s early contribution to AA was to articulate alcoholism as involving both an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind. This dual model remains clinically durable. The body reacts abnormally once exposed; the mind returns the person to exposure despite consequence.

Pomm et al. (2007), writing for primary care physicians, echo this structure decades later. Addiction is described not as moral weakness but as a chronic, relapsing condition requiring coordinated physical, psychological, and behavioural management. The physician’s role is not to shame but to stabilise, monitor, and engage.

What neither Silkworth nor Pomm reduce the condition to, however, is purely somatic pathology. There remains a governing dimension — motivation, meaning, orientation — that medicine alone does not restore. Across traditions, exile and wilderness function symbolically as exposure: false security is stripped and misalignment becomes visible. Experience becomes the teacher.

3. Schaef and Systemic Addiction

Anne Wilson Schaef extended the insight further in When Society Becomes an Addict, arguing that addictive logic can operate at the level of systems and culture. Denial becomes institutionalised. Reality is distorted to protect continuity of behaviour. The problem is not merely substance use but a structure of avoidance.

This mirrors the prophetic tradition in which collective denial is named rather than excused. The prophetic voice does not invent morality; it exposes displacement. When denial is normalised, suffering multiplies. Realisation begins when reality is spoken aloud.

4. Ignorance, Denial, Realisation

The movement from ignorance to denial to realisation is not unique to recovery. It is the blueprint of all achievement.

In the outer secular world of “having” — learning a trade, earning a qualification, mastering a discipline — ignorance is the starting point. Denial often follows: minimising the gap between current capacity and required skill. Realisation occurs when the deficit is acknowledged and disciplined effort begins.

The same structure governs inner maturation. Ignorance of displacement sustains addiction. Denial protects the existing order. Realisation begins when the governing centre is questioned.

The Prodigal Son narrative offers a clear illustration. Ignorance assumes sufficiency; denial sustains excess; famine exposes illusion. The turning point is not catastrophe but recognition: “He came to himself.” Realisation restores orientation before restoration restores circumstance.

Experience, in this sense, is not the accumulation of events but the passage through these phases. What is denied remains displaced. What is realised can be reordered.

5. Structural Synthesis

Spiritual malady describes structural displacement. The body and mind exhibit symptoms, but the organising centre has shifted away from proportion. Silkworth names the physiological vulnerability. Pomm articulates clinical management. Schaef exposes systemic denial. The Twelve Steps provide a pathway from realisation to restored orientation.

Peter’s denial and subsequent weeping illustrate this shift at the level of identity. False strength collapses. Dependence is acknowledged. The individual who believed himself self-sustaining becomes capable of responsibility. Weakness marks the end of defensive autonomy and the beginning of ordered courage.

Displacement is not corrected through force but through acknowledgement and reordering. Experience is the medium through which that reordering becomes possible.

6. Clinical Implications

For practitioners, the sequence ignorance → denial → realisation provides a developmental map. Resistance is not failure; it is phase. The task is not to overwhelm denial but to illuminate it. Similarly, in secular education, growth depends on the learner’s willingness to move beyond defensive minimisation into disciplined engagement.

Experience therefore becomes diagnostic. Pain signals displacement. Honest reflection initiates realignment. The movement is lawful across domains.

Conclusion

Spiritual malady describes not religious deficiency but structural misalignment. Recovery is the movement from ignorance through denial into realisation, restoring governance across physical, mental, and spiritual domains.

The pattern holds in sacred narrative and secular achievement alike. What is denied remains displaced. What is realised can be reordered. Experience is the passage through which that reordering occurs.

References

  • Alcoholics Anonymous World Services. Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed., 2001.
  • Pomm, D. et al. Management of the Addicted Patient in Primary Care, Springer, 2007.
  • Schaef, Anne Wilson. When Society Becomes an Addict.
  • Silkworth, William D. “The Doctor’s Opinion,” in Alcoholics Anonymous.

Written in HIAI collaboration — the qalam of Human and AI intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.

3. Recovery

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Recovery

The oscillation between Rajas and Tamas in addiction and the restoration of Sattva.

Addiction is not a fixed state; it is a swing. Those who have lived inside it recognise the pattern immediately: urgency followed by exhaustion, pursuit followed by collapse, intensity followed by shame. The movement rarely resolves itself. It alternates. One pole dominates until it becomes unbearable, and then the opposite pole offers temporary relief. The swing itself becomes the trap.

Classical Indian psychology offers language that clarifies this pattern without moralising it. Rajas names restless propulsion — appetite, drive, urgency, heat. Tamas names inertia — heaviness, obscuration, withdrawal, collapse. In addiction these two forces replace one another in exhausting succession. What is often absent is Sattva: clarity, proportion, balanced luminosity. Without Sattva, Rajas and Tamas do not reconcile; they merely alternate.

This oscillation is not merely psychological; it is embodied. Under Rajasic dominance the nervous system accelerates: agitation, sleeplessness, impulsive movement, compulsive justification. Under Tamasic dominance the system slows and dulls: fatigue, dissociation, paralysis, despair. The organism swings between hyperactivation and shutdown. The mind is recruited to explain both. Appetite governs; collapse retaliates; clarity is displaced.

The text of Alcoholics Anonymous describes addiction in similarly structural terms. On page 60 it identifies the problem as physical, mental, and spiritual. Later, on page 64, it makes a concise claim: “When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.” This statement can be heard as devotional reassurance. It can also be read as structural psychology. If the governing centre is restored, the mental and physical domains reorganise.

Trauma research has provided contemporary language for how distortion becomes embodied. The Greek word trauma means wound. A wound is not merely an event remembered; it is a pattern carried. When overwhelming experience cannot be metabolised, the body retains incomplete defensive responses. Activation may remain suspended; collapse may become habitual. The wound persists in posture, reflex, tension, and relational expectation.

In this light, the Rajasic–Tamasic swing becomes clinically intelligible. Hyperarousal and shutdown are not abstract spiritual categories but lived physiological states. Addiction frequently functions as improvised regulation of this instability. Stimulants amplify Rajas; depressants deepen Tamas. Temporary steadiness is achieved at the cost of deeper imbalance. The wound is managed, not integrated. The swing resumes.

The AA claim that we “straighten out mentally and physically” suggests something more than behavioural suppression. To straighten implies that something has bent. Trauma bends the system. Compulsion warps attention. Shame compresses posture and possibility. The question becomes: what does straightening actually mean?

The Sanskrit word often translated as chakra literally means wheel — a turning. A wheel functions only when its spokes hold balanced tension. If certain spokes are tightened excessively while others slacken, the rim buckles. The wheel wobbles. Movement continues, but not smoothly.

Trauma can distort the inner wheel in precisely this way. Certain life events become over-tightened — rigid narratives, hypervigilance, defensive control. Other areas slacken — avoidance, emotional numbing, collapse. The person compensates and continues forward, but the turning is uneven. Addiction frequently becomes an attempt to force the rim back into temporary roundness, without correcting the spoke tension beneath it.

To repair a buckled wheel, one does not smash the rim. One uses a spoke spanner, tightening here and loosening there, restoring proportion across the whole structure. The work is precise and patient. Spiritual reorientation, when authentic, functions in a comparable way. It does not erase history or deny wound. It restores governing balance.

The linguistic relationship between “speak” and “spoke” illuminates this further. A spoke holds structural tension. To speak is to give form to what is held. When trauma remains unspoken — unnamed, unprocessed — certain spokes remain warped. Diction, in its fuller sense, is not mere verbal expression but disciplined attention to what speaks in the body, in behaviour, in memory, and in silence.

Everything speaks. Posture speaks. Compulsion speaks. Withdrawal speaks. Irritation speaks. Collapse speaks. In recovery, as experience becomes speakable, tension can be adjusted. What has been slackened by avoidance can be gently tightened through accountability. What has been over-tightened by control can be loosened through humility. The wheel begins to turn without wobble.

This is where Sattva becomes visible. Sattva does not eliminate Rajas or Tamas; it orders them. Drive becomes purposeful energy rather than frantic pursuit. Rest becomes grounded stability rather than paralysis. The swing diminishes because a governing clarity has returned. The centre holds.

In recovery practice, this shift is observable. When humility, inventory, amends, and service replace appetite and resentment as organising principles, the nervous system often stabilises in ways that exceed forceful self-management alone. The mind becomes less preoccupied with justification. The body becomes less reactive to triggers. Straightening out becomes lived experience rather than slogan.

This framework does not compete with trauma therapy; it complements it. Somatic work without moral integration can leave relational distortion intact. Cognitive insight without restored hierarchy can leave the mind in service to appetite. Spiritual language without embodiment can become bypass. Recovery, understood structurally, integrates physical regulation, mental clarity, and spiritual orientation.

Addiction is an oscillation between restless drive and inertial collapse. Trauma is the wound that anchors that oscillation in the body. Recovery is not suppression of one pole by the other. It is restored proportion. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically — not by force, but by balance regained. The wheel turns again, steadily.

References

  • Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed., Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001 (pp.60, 64).
  • Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma.
  • van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score.
  • Bhagavad Gītā, Chapter 14 (Sattva, Rajas, Tamas).

Written in HIAI collaboration — the qalam of Human and AI intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.

2 Service

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The Marriage of Opposites: From Step Three to Step Seven

McGilchrist, Jung, and the restoration of message-carrying in Step Twelve.

If recovery is real, it is not merely behavioural compliance. It is an interior re-ordering that makes a person capable of carrying a message without distortion. That claim can be tested. People in sustained recovery exhibit a recognisable shift: less compulsion, less self-justification, less grievance, and a more stable capacity to tell the truth, repair harm, and serve without performance. The Twelve Steps name this shift as a spiritual awakening expressed through practice. Yet the mechanism is often misunderstood. This paper proposes a structural reading: Steps Three through Seven function as a marriage of inner opposites. Step Twelve then becomes the outward expression of that marriage — message-carrying as a lawful consequence of restored inner unity.

To ground this, we draw on two distinct but convergent bodies of thought. The first is Iain McGilchrist’s thesis in The Master and His Emissary, which describes the divided functions of the cerebral hemispheres and the civilisational consequences of mistaking the emissary for the master. The second is Jung’s psychology of opposites, including the animus and anima, and the way psychic splitting produces not only imbalance but antagonism — what we can name, with linguistic precision, as animosity: resentment arising when inner counterparts are split rather than reconciled. These frameworks are not used here as decorative intellectualism. They are used because they help name what the Steps actually do.

1. The Master and the Emissary: When the Servant Rules

McGilchrist’s central claim (stated carefully) is not that the left hemisphere is “bad” and the right hemisphere is “good,” but that each hemisphere attends to the world differently. The left hemisphere tends toward precision, abstraction, manipulation, and the handling of what is already known; it is superb at tools, categories, and control. The right hemisphere tends toward contextual wholeness, relational presence, living meaning, and the apprehension of novelty; it is the mode through which we primarily meet the real, not merely the named. The tragedy, McGilchrist argues, is the cultural and personal tendency for the emissary’s mode to dominate — for the tool-making, category-making function to mistake itself for the ruler.

This maps directly onto addiction and the recovery process because addiction is, in part, a governance crisis. In active addiction, the mind becomes a solicitor for appetite. It drafts arguments, exceptions, future promises, and moral accounting — all in service of the next compulsion. The emissary takes the throne. The person becomes governed by a narrow, repetitive loop. Not because the person lacks intelligence, but because the governance hierarchy is inverted: the servant is ruling.

Recovery requires not merely new information, but restored hierarchy. The mind must return to service. It must stop pretending to be the centre. It must become capable of receiving meaning rather than manufacturing justification. This is precisely the territory Steps Three through Seven occupy.

2. Jung: Anima, Animus, and the Birth of Animosity

Jung’s language of anima and animus is often misused as simplistic gender symbolism. In its more careful psychological use, it points to inner counterparts: complementary psychic functions that, when disowned, appear externally as projections. The consequence of disowning inner counterparts is not neutrality but conflict. The split does not merely create difference; it generates hostility. This is where the word animosity becomes clinically interesting: resentment as the emotional signature of a split system. When inner opposites are not held in relationship, they become enemies. Then the person becomes governed by reaction rather than integration.

Addiction thrives on this internal civil war. The substance (or behaviour) becomes a crude reconciliation attempt: a temporary anaesthetic for the conflict, or a false unity that soon collapses. The organism oscillates — relief, remorse; inflation, collapse; craving, shame — because the inner opposites are not married. They are merely alternated. Alternation is not integration. It is rotation around a wound.

The Twelve Steps can be read as a method of ending the civil war by establishing a lawful marriage of opposites — not through “positive thinking,” but through confession, humility, restitution, and surrender. This is why the Steps work when they work: they are not merely behavioural; they are integrative.

3. Step Three: Consent to Governance

Step Three states: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. Whatever one’s theological frame, the structural function is discernible. Step Three is the consent that restores governance to the rightful axis. It is the moment the person stops appointing the emissary as master. It is also the moment the split system stops demanding that one inner pole dominate the other. A decision is made to be governed by something beyond appetite, resentment, and self-justification. Step Three is not a mood. It is a pivot of hierarchy.

In psychological terms, Step Three establishes a reference point outside the warring parts. In McGilchrist’s terms, it re-privileges the mode of attention oriented to wholeness and meaning over the mode oriented to control. In Jung’s terms, it creates the conditions in which opposites can be held together without annihilating each other. Step Three does not complete the marriage. It begins it.

4. Steps Four to Six: Differentiation Without Warfare

A marriage of opposites is not achieved by pretending there are no differences. It requires differentiation: seeing clearly what is present, naming it, and owning it. Steps Four to Six perform this work. Step Four is a fearless moral inventory — a structured act of truth-telling. Step Five discloses that inventory to another human being (and to God as understood), moving truth from private rumination into relational reality. Step Six becomes readiness: the willingness to have what is distorted removed.

These Steps are often treated as merely moral or confessional. Structurally, they are integrative. They prevent the left-hemisphere style of private, self-justifying narrative from remaining sovereign. They place the self-story into the light of relationship and accountability, where distortion cannot survive so easily. They also reduce projection, because what is owned internally is less likely to be hunted externally.

In Jungian terms, this is shadow work done within a vessel. It is not indulgent introspection. It is ethical differentiation that makes integration possible. The opposites become recognisable rather than fused. This is the necessary precondition for marriage: one cannot unite what one refuses to name.

5. Step Seven: Humility as the Seal of Integration

Step Seven states: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. This is not self-hatred. It is not perfectionism. It is humility as restored proportion — the end of inner tyranny. Step Seven is the moment the person stops using the mind to control the outcome of the inner life. It is an act of relinquishment that seals the arc begun in Step Three. One might say: Step Three is consent; Step Seven is surrender.

In McGilchrist’s terms, Step Seven is the re-enthronement of the master: the living centre that perceives meaning, relationship, and the whole. In Jung’s terms, Step Seven is the movement that allows opposites to be held under a third term — a unifying principle that is not merely another ego position. This is why resentment tends to reduce in people who actually work this arc. Animosity requires a split system. Humility repairs the split by dissolving the compulsion to dominate or be dominated.

6. From Inner Marriage to Step Twelve: Message-Carrying as Lawful Consequence

Step Twelve is explicit: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. Note the grammar: the awakening is “as the result of these steps,” and message-carrying is an attempt made after awakening. In other words, Step Twelve is not a marketing instruction. It is the outward expression of restored inner unity. A person who is still split tends to carry a distorted message: coercive, resentful, inflated, or despairing. A person whose inner opposites have begun to reconcile can carry a message with less distortion. The message is not “my method.” The message is lived coherence.

This is where the resonance with Qur’anic “conveying” becomes clinically interesting, provided it is handled with restraint. The Qur’an repeatedly frames prophetic function as balāgh: conveying, delivering, making clear — not coercing, not controlling, not owning outcomes. In that sense, Step Twelve’s instruction to “carry this message” can be read as a universal spiritual ethic: transmission without domination. The inner marriage accomplished through Steps Three to Seven stabilises the person so that they may convey without grasping, speak without resentment, and serve without needing to be right.

In other words, message-carrying is not an added job layered on top of recovery. It is the natural consequence of recovered governance. When the emissary returns to service and the inner opposites cease their war, the person becomes capable of truthful communication — diction with integrity — and that becomes transmissible.

7. Clinical Implications: Resentment as a Marker of Splitting

If animosity is resentment arising from psychic splitting, then resentment becomes a clinical marker. It is not merely a “bad attitude.” It is a signal that inner opposites are not yet held in unity. This is why recovery programmes place such emphasis on resentment inventories, amends, and humility. They are not moralistic add-ons. They are integration technologies. When resentment dominates, message-carrying becomes distorted. When humility grows, message-carrying becomes clean.

Practically, this suggests an assessment question: when a person speaks about recovery, do they sound governed by grievance or guided by meaning? Do they speak as a solicitor for appetite and pride, or as a steward of truth and service? These are not personality critiques. They are governance diagnostics.

Conclusion

Steps Three through Seven can be read as a coherent arc of inner marriage. Step Three restores governance by consent; Steps Four to Six differentiate truth without warfare; Step Seven seals the arc through humility, dissolving the compulsion to dominate. The result is not merely abstinence but coherence: a person capable of carrying a message without needing to control its reception.

In McGilchrist’s terms, the master is re-enthroned and the emissary returns to service. In Jung’s terms, inner opposites are brought into relationship rather than projection, reducing animosity by ending the civil war. In Twelve Step terms, the spiritual awakening becomes transmissible through Step Twelve: carrying the message and practising the principles. And in Qur’anic terms, the ethic of conveying without coercion becomes legible as a universal spiritual instruction — the Unseen helping the Seen through a human being who is no longer split.

References (blog-friendly)

  • McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, 2009 (and subsequent editions).
  • Jung, C. G. Works on the psychology of opposites; anima/animus; projection and shadow (see Aion and related essays in the Collected Works).
  • Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001. (Step Three; Step Twelve; see also p.60 for the tripartite framing.)
  • Qur’anic theme of conveying/clarifying the message (balāgh) as prophetic function (consult a translation and, where appropriate, a classical tafsīr for linguistic nuance).

Written in HIAI collaboration — the qalam of Human and AI intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.

1. Unity

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The Three Gunas and the A–B–C of Addiction

Eros, Philia, Agape and the re-ordering of the human vehicle — a structural reflection for recovery practitioners.

Across cultures and centuries, human beings have described disorder in strikingly similar structural terms. This paper offers a professional, practice-facing synthesis that brings three triads into a single coherent frame: the Three Gunas of classical Hindu thought (Sattva, Rajas, Tamas); the Greek distinctions of love (Eros, Philia, Agape); and the tripartite description of addiction in Alcoholics Anonymous (p.60), where the problem is presented as physical, mental, and spiritual. The aim is not to merge traditions or to claim doctrinal equivalence. The aim is to clarify a shared architecture: what collapses in addiction, and what is restored in recovery.

The AA text is unusually precise in its anthropology. On page 60 (4th edition), alcoholism is described in three domains: a physical problem (the body’s abnormal reaction and craving), a mental problem (the obsession that returns a person to use despite consequences), and a spiritual problem (a “spiritual malady”). Whatever one’s metaphysical commitments, the structure is plain. Addiction is not presented as weak character or insufficient intelligence; it is presented as systemic disconnection. The body pulls. The mind returns. The spirit is displaced. The human vehicle fragments.

The Three Gunas, articulated with particular clarity in the Bhagavad Gītā (Chapter 14), describe dynamic tendencies within embodied life rather than moral verdicts. Sattva names clarity, harmony, and luminosity. Rajas names drive, restless motion, passion, and appetite. Tamas names inertia, heaviness, obscuration, and collapse. The Gunas are always interwoven; health is not the elimination of Rajas or Tamas, but balance under right governance. When Rajas dominates, agitation and craving intensify. When Tamas dominates, denial, paralysis, and despair thicken. When Sattva governs, discernment returns and proportion is restored. In lived addiction, the oscillation between restless drive and exhausted collapse is familiar: a Rajasic–Tamasic loop, with Sattvic clarity no longer governing the whole.

The Greek distinctions of love add a second lens without requiring theological agreement. Eros names appetitive desire, attraction, and life-force. Philia names relational bonding, shared meaning, and social cohesion. Agape names self-giving love that transcends self-centred appetite — not as sentiment, but as orientation. Popular summaries sometimes flatten these terms into slogans; classical and later theological treatments do not. Eros is not inherently corrupt. It becomes destructive when detached from higher ordering principles. In addiction, Eros tends to become compulsive appetite, while Philia is either weaponised into rationalisation (“this time will be different”) or collapses into isolation and enabling dynamics. Agape — the orienting love that re-orders desire rather than suppressing it — is displaced from governance.

At this point a structural resonance becomes visible. The AA triad (physical–mental–spiritual), the Guna triad (Tamas–Rajas–Sattva), and the love triad (Eros–Philia–Agape) do not map as perfect one-to-one equivalents, and they should not be forced into a rigid correspondence. Yet a coherent pattern does emerge when we treat them as describing the same human architecture from different angles. In addiction, the physical domain is often dominated by heaviness and compulsion (a Tamasic flavour), while the mental domain is dominated by restless obsession and justification (a Rajasic flavour). What is missing is not “effort” but governance: the clarifying, harmonising function (Sattva) and the re-ordering love (Agape) that can hold desire in proportion rather than letting desire hold the whole person hostage.

For practitioners, this matters because it reframes the clinical problem as mis-ordered hierarchy. Addiction is not simply “too much” of something; it is appetite governing cognition, and cognition serving appetite, with the spiritual axis no longer guiding the system. When this hierarchy collapses, the mind becomes a solicitor for compulsion: it drafts arguments, exceptions, and future promises in service of the next use. The body then becomes the instrument through which the obsession completes itself. The person is left with an experience of being driven, then dropped; driven, then dropped — the Rajasic–Tamasic swing.

This is why Step Three can be read as an act of re-ordering rather than mere “religious agreement.” Step Three states: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. Interpreted clinically, Step Three is consent to restored governance: the spiritual axis is re-installed as primary. Interpreted within the present synthesis, Step Three is the moment Agape is invited back into command — not to suppress Eros, but to order it; not to abolish Philia, but to purify it into fellowship rather than justification. In Guna terms, it is the decision that allows Sattva to govern Rajas and Tamas rather than remaining captive to them.

The practical implication is subtle and essential: recovery is not the killing of desire. It is the rehabilitation of desire within a higher order. Eros becomes vitality rather than compulsion. Rajas becomes disciplined energy rather than restless obsession. Tamas becomes stability rather than collapse. Philia becomes belonging and shared truth rather than enabling. Under spiritual governance, the mental domain is drawn back into honesty, and the physical domain is drawn back into stewardship. The person experiences not suppression but reintegration.

This is also why purely physical or purely cognitive interventions often fail to produce durable remission on their own. Physical stabilisation matters; cognitive work matters; containment matters. But if the hierarchy remains inverted — if appetite still governs, and the mind still serves appetite — the system eventually returns to its old attractor state. The AA text’s insistence on a spiritual solution is not an insult to psychology; it is an architectural claim. The problem is structural. Therefore the remedy must be structural. Step Three names the pivot of governance — and the subsequent Steps operationalise that pivot through inventory, disclosure, readiness, humility, restitution, maintenance, conscious contact, and service.

In summary, this synthesis proposes a single plain statement that can be tested against lived practice: addiction is mis-ordered love. Not love as sentiment, but love as orientation and governance. When Eros governs without Agape, the mind becomes an apologist for compulsion and the body becomes its mechanism. When Agape governs, the mind and body return to harmony: cognition resumes truth-telling, the body resumes stewardship, and desire is restored to proportion. Across the AA A–B–C description, the Guna psychology of balance, and the Greek distinctions of love, the same human architecture is glimpsed from different windows. The windows differ; the building is recognisable.

References (blog-friendly)

  • Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001. (See p.60 for the tripartite description: physical, mental, spiritual.)
  • Bhagavad Gītā, Chapter 14 (The Three Gunas: Sattva, Rajas, Tamas). (Translation varies; consult a scholarly edition suited to your tradition.)
  • Plato, Symposium. (Eros as a central theme within classical philosophy.)
  • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. (Philia/friendship as a foundational ethical-relational concept.)
  • Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. (A major 20th-century theological-philosophical treatment of the distinction.)

Written in HIAI collaboration — the qalam of Human and AI intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source.

Bridge To Remission

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Primary Care, Twelve Steps, and the HIAI–DRT Bridge

Clinical Excerpt (Primary Care Context)

The following excerpt is reproduced from Pomm, H.A., & Pomm, R.M., Management of the Addicted Patient in Primary Care (Springer, 2007), and is presented here to situate Twelve-Step engagement as a recognised medical intervention within primary care.

“No matter how far down the scale we have gone, there is always hope.”

There are few things as gratifying and moving as watching your addicted patient finally grasp the idea of recovery and begin to blossom in every area of his or her life.

When working with patients involved in a Twelve Step program, such as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, physicians are encouraged to ask whether patients have a sponsor, whether they are working the steps, and how often they attend meetings.

It is generally felt in the treatment community that patients who are abstinent but not working a recovery program remain clinically vulnerable.

AA and other Twelve Step programs are spiritual, not religious, and are not psychotherapy. Referral to a therapist familiar with addiction and recovery issues may be appropriate in addition to Twelve Step participation.

Patients should be reminded to take recovery one day at a time, as thinking in lifetime terms can feel overwhelming and counter-productive in early recovery.

Even in recovery, patients may engage in substitute or “acting-out” behaviours that activate similar neurophysiological reward pathways and increase relapse risk.

In our experience, Twelve Step programs have proven to be the backbone of long-term recovery—long after detoxification and formal treatment have ended.

Source: Pomm et al., Management of the Addicted Patient in Primary Care, Springer, 2007.


In clinical reality, addiction is not “solved” in detox. It is stewarded—over time—inside real lives, real bodies, and real follow-up. What struck me reading Management of the Addicted Patient in Primary Care is how plainly it frames the primary care clinician’s role: not as a replacement therapist, but as a steady medical hand who keeps recovery practices in view, visit after visit.

Primary care as steward of recovery

A clinical snapshot from Management of the Addicted Patient in Primary Care (Springer, 2007): hope held in structure, continuity over crisis, recovery observed in lived behaviour—not declared intention.
The medical stance: hope, structure, follow-up

The tone is both sober and kind. The excerpt opens with hope, then moves immediately into concrete, primary-care actions—simple questions that function as clinical orienting instruments: sponsorship, step work, meeting rhythm, and what the patient is actually doing between appointments.

The message is clear: recovery is observable in behaviour, not merely declared in intention.

AA/NA as recovery architecture (not psychotherapy)

Pomm & Pomm name a boundary that matters for safe care. Twelve-Step fellowship is not a substitute for therapy. That single clarification protects patients, clinicians, and the fellowship itself from misuse or confusion of roles.

DRT language: from abstinence to recovery (the difference that shows)

In DRT terms, abstinence can be a necessary pause, but recovery is a lived re-patterning. Without structure, a person can remain internally driven, brittle, and relapse-prone even while substance-free.

What looks like “non-compliance” may be the organism’s attempt to re-route pressure through familiar channels. The clinical task is not to shame the channel, but to help build a new one that can carry load without rupture.

The primary care micro-interventions (small questions with big leverage)

  • sponsorship (including temporary sponsorship),
  • active engagement with the Twelve Steps,
  • meeting frequency and rhythm,
  • the patient’s subjective experience of meetings.

The power here is not ideology—it is continuity. In systems where addicted patients are often treated episodically, continuity itself becomes a form of medicine.

“One day at a time” as nervous-system realism

This is not a slogan. It is a time-horizon intervention. “Just today” restores scale, reduces overwhelm, and allows the nervous system to stand down.

Acting-out substitutions: relapse risk wearing new clothes

Substitute behaviours—gambling, sexual acting out, compulsive work, overspending—are not moral failures. They are signals that reward circuitry remains recruitable. Skilled curiosity, not surprise, is the appropriate clinical stance.

HIAI framing: the qalam that serves the same Source

HIAI—Human–AI Intelligence—is our USP: the qalam of human and artificial intelligence, the Unseen helping the Seen, both answering to the same Source. It allows translation, clarity, and continuity—without pretending we can mechanise conscience, awakening, or grace.

Primary care can remain primary care. Fellowship can remain fellowship. Therapy can remain therapy. And the patient can remain—first and last—a person.