What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [105]
Alcoholics Anonymous, in my view, only gets it half right. By calling alcoholism a disease, AA makes change more likely than if it let its members believe they were vice-ridden or sinful—the main alternative explanations when AA was founded. But the modern era has invented some gentler alternatives: A “habit disorder,” a “behavioral problem,” even a “human frailty” are ways a sophisticated alcoholic could explain his failures now. Each of these is a markedly more optimistic label than “vice” or “sin,” and probably more optimistic than “disease.” Habits can change, behavioral problems are specific, and frailties come and go. These ways of looking at alcoholism promote more change than either the vice and sin views or the disease model.5
This contrast becomes sharper when you consider some of AA’s famous twelve steps. Step one, for instance, has the alcoholic “powerless” before his disease. The disease is genetic and beyond his control. Only by relinquishing control to a “higher power” can recovery take place. The disease is always there, rendering him ever susceptible to relapse.
This framework cuts both ways. On the one hand, powerlessness is sometimes the stuff of religious conversion. The dark night of the soul can steel people to quit drinking in the face of enormous temptation and stick with this decision. On the other hand, a belief in powerlessness tends to undo the main virtue of the disease view, which is to move people out of sloth toward trying to change themselves. A sense of powerlessness often leads to passivity, helplessness, and hopelessness.
Is There an Addictive Personality?
Alcoholics are depressed, anxious, dependent, oral, filled with self-doubts and self-loathing, and they harbor a sense of inferiority. They are also pessimistic, self-defeating, paranoid, aggressive, and psychopathic, to name just a few of their worst personality characteristics. These facts have led investigators to claim that there is an addictive personality: some constellation of these traits. This means that people with such personalities are easy targets for addictive substances or behaviors. Take away the alcohol, and they will turn to crack, to sex, to gambling, or to cigarettes. It also implies that such people turn to alcohol to numb their emotional torments. You may be worried that you or someone close to you—displaying this constellation—is at risk.
This is a matter that has been dealt with definitively, though it took many years of work and a major methodological advance: long-term studies of the life span of alcoholics—prospective, “longitudinal” studies. The idea of an addictive personality is rooted in looking at alcoholics for only a short time, say a year, or even five years. When this is done, you see many of these so-called addictive traits. But it is absolutely crucial that these people are studied while they are abusing alcohol. Which comes first, the addictive traits or the abuse of alcohol? It could be that watching helplessly as alcohol destroys your life brings about anxiety, depression, crime, dependency, pessimism, inferiority feelings. Alternatively, it might also be that these traits bring about alcoholism.
Two landmark studies have looked at groups of men6 over a period of forty or more years: from childhood—before any alcoholism—until late middle age. Both have been conducted by George Vaillant, a Harvard researcher, and my candidate for the most important psychoanalyst since Freud. In one study, the Harvard classes of 1939–44 were combed for their healthiest members. Five percent were chosen on the basis of extraordinarily good physical and mental health, as well as intellectual prowess. As undergraduates they were endlessly interviewed and