I’ve been thinking and reading a lot recently about addiction and recovery can be experienced and imagined and responded to differently, by different social groups – like, across lines of race and gender and geography and sexual identity and religious identity and probably lots of others too. Seems like there are lots of articles out there about the ways the opiate epidemic is getting a very different political response from crack, because there are more white people affected by opiates. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/crack-heroin-and-race/401015/ I’ve also been wondering about how alcoholism and alcohol abuse and drug abuse are seen or experienced as different for women from men, or can be (https://www.autostraddle.com/sober-in-the-city-a-feminist-walks-into-aa-262218/; http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/24/elizabeth-pena-and-the-truth-about-alcoholic-women.html). I know things get contentious when you start asking whether AA is geared towards the white guys (the socially dominant groups are the ones who need the submission to higher power thing, which is potentially less helpful if you weren’t “higher” to start with) – and I don’t want to get contentious. I know plenty of women and plenty of people of color have been helped by AA. But I’m curious about whether people on this forum experience sobriety and recovery as a process that feels implicated in issues of racial and sexual identity – and about whether there’s anything we as a community of recoverers can do, to be more inclusive of all the different voices and perspectives of different people who have struggled with addiction.
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Yes. I like this. That’s a very deep question I have no response to…need to think about it. Thank you
I’m viewing recovery simply as recovery. I think we all fall into that pot or at least that’s how I view everyone. We all have a different set of values, motives, and how to dos that ultimately have the same goal. Sobriety. I’m not sure that demographics play a huge role in our recovery. However, I do think that demographics play a huge role in abuse. People abuse substances for a variety of reasons. Physical abuse, sexuality, depression, to name a few. There’s a lot missing. But to me recovery is recovery. Of course I say that knowing that I am in that superior group of white males. We all have to find our own way to reach the same point.