I’ve been in a twelve-step program, or, as they (I mean we) say, “recovery,” for about five minutes. So, I’m obviously ready to make an authoritative set of observations.

I had never drunk vodka for breakfast. Nor injected heroin between my toes. I clung to those horror stories when I first came into “the rooms” (the preferred nomenclature for twelve-step meetings). Why? Dwelling on that species of “rock bottom” helped me deny the fact that my name is James and I’m an addict.

I am addicted to everything, or at least everything I can get my hands on. Nicotine. Alcohol. Caffeine. Prescription meds. Food. Sex. Spending. It doesn’t matter what the substance is. Sugar is porn! My drug of choice is more. My story, as American novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison writes of her own, comes down “to the same demolished and reductive and recycled core: Desire. Use. Repeat.”

In the wake of my separation and divorce, I found a highly respectable, sympathetic drug dealer within the discreetly brass-plated Harley Street drug-den that is my beloved private doctor’s office.

I needed this because the local NHS clinic in East London had let me down. They had refused to prescribe me Zopiclone and Valium. I needed that medicine, I insisted, to regulate sleep and manage anxiety. That’s what I told them. That’s what I told myself. But shortsighted and resource strapped as socialized medicine is, the NHS wasn’t having any of it.

Easier to manipulate was my tall, languid, private doctor in his Henry Poole double-breasted suit with his double-barreled name. He was a far cry from Tuco Salamanca, the short, psychotic, gold-toothed drug kingpin in Breaking Bad. My man was charming and obliging and seemed to have all the time in the world for me. The leisurely appointments were a delight! We got on famously, breezily discussing all manner of topics. (Why is the Unites States so polarized? Which is the best independent school in London?) I wouldn’t be having these kinds of conversations with this kind of person if my life were falling apart, if I were the kind of person whose life could fall apart. My new confidante – I counted him a friend, really – was willing to listen for hour upon billable hour.

The therapy-speak that has become common, with its blanket affirmation of “my truth” as opposed to “the truth,” often facilitates denial of my own part in sowing the chaos I’m reaping.

In truth, I wanted the drugs to cut out the long, lonely evenings now that my routine was no longer reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to my daughters before cajoling or bribing them to brush their teeth (molars included, get that toothbrush all the way in the back). I used to wish I had more time to read. Now I have all the time in the world to read. So, drugs were the way I could slink away from the world – earlier and earlier in the day. Like Romeo sequestered in his bedroom, I’d shut up my windows, lock fair light out, and make myself an artificial night. Drugs were the way I’d try to quash the pain. Desire, use, repeat. The euphoria you get before passing out with Zopiclone, like the courtesan’s final energetic aria in La Traviata before she succumbs to her tuberculosis, allowed me to change the way I felt. “By feigned deaths to die” is how John Donne describes such prolonged absences. The more straightforward way to put it is that drugs were the means by which I could fuck off for a bit.

Apart from my man in Harley Street, no one knew about this. I hadn’t let anyone else in. Why would I? So my friends could dissuade me? But I’d resolved on this way of coping. No one knowing, however, meant no one identifying the increasing regularity with which I got high. It meant no one could warn me. Soon the odd treat was not enough. I started taking Zopiclone daily, and when I acclimated, taking more, upping the dosage, then supplementing it with Valium. After all, not being able to sleep while addicted to sleeping pills is anxiety-inducing! In the end, every night I risked slipping into a coma. Anything to avoid lying on my side on my bed, forced to relive and re-narrate the last months of my marriage – those things I ought to have done, those things I ought not to have done.

Twelve-step fellowships famously pride themselves on being spiritual, not religious. The act of surrender so critical to overcoming addiction (we “made a decision to turn our will and our lives over …,” according to step 2) is to be made to a “higher power” or “God as we understood Him.” Despite this, what strikes me as a newcomer is how liturgical AA is. For someone hailing from a charismatic-evangelical background with no set liturgy or unison prayers or spoken creeds, AA seems remarkably high church.

Take the structure of your average AA meeting. It commences with creedal proclamation; tattered, laminated cards are read out – “The Twelve Steps,” “Twelve Traditions,” or “The Promises” – as well as a daily reflection and an extract from the semi-sacred text that is “the Big Book.” Then there’s a testimony or “chair”: an invited speaker – sometimes a regular, sometimes a guest – shares their “experience, strength, and hope” for fifteen minutes. Next is communal confession: for a carefully timed three minutes people “share back” to the speaker (but not, crucially, to each other; this counts as “crosstalk” and is discouraged so what you say won’t be publicly criticized). Typically, people vocalize what resonates with them in the story they’ve just heard (“look for the similarity, not the differences”) or else they open up (“honesty in meetings helps us to stay sober”) about what it’s like climbing back from the eighth circle of hell. Then comes the sacrament (different colored chips handed out for recovery milestones) and a kind of altar call (a chip for anyone who wants to commit to a new way of life). The meeting then closes with corporate petition (the “Serenity Prayer” written by the midcentury American neoorthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr). God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

It’s not just that the meetings are liturgical; AA also revolves around a rule of life. The Twelve Steps are introduced in the literature as “a group of principles, spiritual in nature, which, if practiced as a way of life, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole.” It is a way of life because it is a daily program. Only by focusing relentlessly on the day, hour, minute at hand, only by refusing to wander around in the past and future (“times that do not belong to us,” as Pascal wrote), can one hope to overcome addiction. Liberation hinges on taking a positively monastic approach to living.

In our culture, most problems are construed as general, the solutions specific. Someone says he suffers from anxiety; one friend recommends Hatha Yoga to solve this problem; a second suggests walks in nature, a third medication. AA reverses this. The problem is specific: alcoholics can’t stop drinking when everyone else does. But then the solution is general: becoming a better person.

If you’d asked me what people talk about in an AA meeting before I’d attended my first one, I would’ve guessed they sat around discussing their favorite gin substitutes. In fact, what fellows talk about is wanting to live a life worthy of a human being. They talk about what they have done, or what they are realizing they need to do – the action they need to take – to be able to live with themselves: actions like risking the truth at work; showing up as a parent; or regaining the trust of their spouse. They talk, that is, about learning to be good.

This is the reason why recovery is such a potent antidote to our therapized culture. This may not be true of all therapy, but the therapeutic intervention I experienced as a patient in a psychiatric hospital I found profoundly demoralizing. Being told by a psychologist that “values are subjective” made me feel worse, and left me more depressed. Why? Because in the grip of depression, the only things I knew to be true about the world were certain orienting convictions about right and wrong – that abuse is always wicked, and goodness not merely a matter of perspective. But these were convictions my psychologist was inadvertently contesting when he – with all the authority of his credentials – informed me that morality is merely “externally imposed by society.” He was taking a sledgehammer to my moral compass; I was left reeling, bereft of coordinates, consigned to the position of those the psalmist speaks about: “There be many that say, Who will shew us any good?” (Psalm 4:6).

I can’t yet see all the good there is in this new health, but I have a hint. I have the end of a thread.

The twelve-step outlook is radically different: it avoids the pitfall of indulgence as well as that of judgmentalism. The therapy-speak that has become common in the workplace and the family, with its blanket affirmation of “my truth” as opposed to “the truth,” all too often facilitates denial of my own part in sowing the chaos I’m reaping in my own life and in the lives of others. Say I’ve come to identify greed or lust or pride in myself; my therapist assures me that we are all in the same boat; that there’s nothing to be done; and that these should not be thought of as vices to be repented of but as, perhaps, coping strategies to be understood. Twelve-step recovery is readier to recognize that some boats are sinking, and that honor among thieves is scant consolation when the dark waters begin to flood the deck.

Following Carl Rogers, the twentieth-century pioneer of humanistic psychology, person-centered therapists insist upon “unconditional positive regard.” But in recovery, while there’s certainly a strong belief in the irreplaceable value of persons, we’re also told that, in order to survive – let alone thrive – there are some things about oneself it makes sense not to accept. I wouldn’t, frankly, wish my authentic self on my worst enemy. Instead, we are instructed, kindly but firmly, to find the “courage to change the things we can.” The idea of making “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves” (step 4), admitting “the exact nature of our wrongs” (step 5), and then being willing to consent to the removal of “all these defects of character” (step 6), would be anathema to many psychoanalysts; it might even be deemed abusive.

It is not. The twelve-step programs are bulwarks against nihilism, and their steady and consistent success among men and women of all kinds and conditions testifies to the match between what philosophers name “moral realism” – the insistence that some ways to live really are better than others – and achieving a flourishing life.

To pathologize is typically to exculpate; in other words, we don’t blame people for being ill. Twelve-step fellowships, however, contest the assumption that the specific disease that is addiction is exempt from moral evaluation. “We have come to believe [alcoholism] an illness,” the Big Book reads, but an illness that “involves those about us in a way no other human sickness can.” The collateral damage from addiction – at this juncture the Big Book lists “fierce resentment,” “financial insecurity,” “sad” spouses and the cost to children – can be immense, but it wasn’t inevitable. AA is not heavily moralistic, but neither is it deterministic. It refuses to dissolve responsibility in the acid of fatalism. There may be strong genetic predispositions to addiction. There may be horrendous circumstances that precipitate it. There also remain choices. As an addict, one is unwell. But with this particular kind of sickness, one may learn to be well.

Surrender, too, is a choice. But what kind of choice? Does surrender to God entail an extinction of self, as many gurus insist – that is, an elimination of the desires that make up me?

At first it seems that a negation of desire is exactly what AA has in mind. “The only condition for membership is a desire to stop drinking,” states the preamble read out at the beginning of every meeting. But in my experience desire is a moving target. What I want deep down at 7:30 a.m., fully caffeinated and ensconced in my morning AA meeting, is not always what I want at 7:30 p.m. when I’m hangry and my concentration is shot. And precisely because desire wanes, I am finding that perhaps a better bet than merely desisting from using (i.e., sitting on my hands, “white-knuckling it,” trying to stop wanting to finagle drugs from a doctor) is, instead, to put myself in a position where I can be enticed by goods worthier of my attention. Indeed, in Saint Paul’s ethical injunctions to the Ephesians, he doesn’t simply counsel abstaining from vice but enumerates replacement activities:

Let the thief no longer steal, but instead let him work, accomplishing something good with his own hands so that he might have it to share with the person in need. Out of your foul mouth let no utterance proceed, but instead whatever is good for needed edification, that it might impart a grace to those listening. (Eph. 4:28–29)

AA suggests a whole load of things to get on with. Sobriety is about taking up, not just giving up. So I am rediscovering long-forsaken hobbies; I’m listening to Counting Crows ballads circa 1993 on repeat; I’m studiously rewatching Alan Partridge sitcoms; I might even try to play for England again. I am attempting – for instance, by making calls to fellows in the old-fashioned hope of connection – to put myself in a position where I can be bewitched by alternative “objects” of attention, rival and more worthy objects of love. I can’t yet see all the good there is in this new health, but I have a hint. I have the end of a thread. To follow that hint is to enter into all the life that lies in store, a life that I will, I must, show up for.

Perhaps this is what Iris Murdoch meant when she said we “grow by looking.” Maybe she meant putting yourself in a position where you can at least get an unobstructed view of things you intuit to be more wholesome than those which preoccupy you now. Perhaps “growing by looking” is simply making yourself available for seizure, for an arrest that will ensure the radical reshaping of your desires.

Perhaps, finally, the search for the higher power who is the Deus absconditus, the hidden God, is like this too. Maybe I just have to shift my stance, as it were, or crane my neck round, so I can look in his general direction, this God of my understanding whom I know I cannot fully understand.