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Values: Building on Your Values Foundation
Values play a critical role in addiction—and your values are likely to be the key to your escaping addiction. This is a matter of both considering what your values are and sometimes refocusing on dormant values or even developing new ones. When you can truly experience how a habit is damaging what is most important to you, the steps out of your destructive habit often fall readily into place.
While you can utilize any of a wide range of values in your fight against addiction—and to a certain extent you can go with whatever works for you—it is not true that all values are equally useful in this fight. Some values even support continued bad habits and compulsions.
In this chapter we will examine values that are the most antiaddictive and that support your independence, and how you can use your own values as a tool to fight addiction. Exercises geared toward identifying and utilizing your values are provided at the end of the chapter.
What Are Values? Do They Really Matter?
Your values are your beliefs that some things are right and good and others wrong and bad, that some things are more important than others, and that one way of doing things is better than another. Values are usually deeply held—they come from your earliest learning and background. Values reflect what your parents taught you, what you learned in school and religious institutions, and what the social and cultural groups you belong to hold to be true and right.
It is impossible to maintain that values don't matter in addiction or its cure. The best predictor of whether college students will have an alcohol problem is their attitudes toward drinking—that is, whether it's okay, even good, to binge.1 On the other hand, what makes some people join AA and quit drinking? It is because they have decided their drinking is wrong, even beyond its negative health impact for them. For people in the United States who have a drinking problem—or are told by others that they have one—treatment consists mainly of convincing them that their drinking is bad and harmful, and that they should quit.
Values are important to all addictions, and not just addictive drinking and drug taking. If you compulsively gamble, shop, or have affairs, then your values are on display. Many people feel good and get a boost to their self-esteem from shopping. However, most of these people don't consistently spend beyond their limits. They refrain from overspending because they don't think it's right. They recognize that overspending would keep them from upholding other important values, like paying their debts or providing for their children, and so they curtail their expenditures.
The same principle applies to pursuing sexual opportunities to the exclusion of productive activity. Most people enjoy sex, but they avoid compulsive or random sex because they feel it's wrong. If you engage in indiscriminate sex, then you are signaling either that you see little wrong in it or that the other values in your life are less important than the good feelings you derive from such sex. If you are willing to accept this picture of your values, then so be it. If, on the other hand, you have other values that run against compulsive sexual activity, eating, or shopping, then these values can serve as an important tool with which to root out your addiction.
Many people find that alcohol is tremendously relaxing, sexually exhilarating, or provides some other powerful, welcome feeling—but they do not become alcoholics. They simply refuse to go there. Have you ever heard someone say, "I know that when I have more than one drink, I throw all caution to the wind"? Most people who react so violently to alcohol say, "That's why I limit myself to a single drink" or "That's why I don't drink." But alcoholics regularly override this realization about their reactions to alcohol and continue to drink. Some people who are tense by nature find that smoking is one way to relax. Yet many such people still refuse to smoke. Many simply rule it out of their lives for any of a variety of reasons—health, appearance, or their general feeling that it's bad.
Values do not simply dictate whether you do or don't try a drink, a cigarette, or a drug. They also influence whether you continue to indulge in an activity or substance and how much you will allow your indulgence to affect your life before you limit or quit your involvement. Finally, at a deeper level, values determine how intensely and how irreversibly you become addicted. They also play a major role in whether or not you choose to quit after your become addicted.
Constructive Involvements
Some values directly contradict addictions. If you have these values, they help you to fight addiction. And if you don't, developing such values is potentially a critical therapeutic tool. (This occurs through involvement and success in positive activities, which I describe in later chapters.)
Values can be expressed by statements about what you think is right and wrong, or about your preferences, such as "I value our relationship," "I value my health," "I believe in hard work," "Nothing is more important to me than my children," or "It is embarrassing to be out of control of yourself." All of these values oppose addiction. Other values, or an absence of values, can reinforce addiction. For example, if you don't think that it's wrong to be intoxicated or high, if it's not important to you to fulfill your obligations to other people, or if you don't care whether you succeed at work, then you are more likely to sustain an addiction. The exercises at the end of this chapter will give you a chance to explore how your values contribute to or oppose addictive involvements.
VALUING THESE THINGS HELPS COMBAT ADDICTION
*ACHIEVEMENT—accomplishing constructive and socially valued goals, such as participating in athletics, running for office, getting an education, succeeding at work, or providing for your family
*Consciousness—being alert, awake, and aware of your surroundings; using your mind to make sense out of your life and experience
*Activity—being energetic in daily life and engaged in the world around you
*Health—eating well, exercising, getting health care, and choosing an overall healthy lifestyle
*Responsibility—fulfilling your commitments as well as doing what the law obliges you to do
*Self-respect—caring for and about yourself and, by extension, all people
*Community—being involved in the communities of which you are part (your town, school, work organization, religious group, neighborhood, political party) and contributing to the welfare of these groups—and the larger world
How Do Values Fight Addiction?
To say that your values influence your desire and ability to fight addiction is to say that you act in line with what you believe in and what you care about. Such values can be remarkably potent. For example, I heard a woman say, "I used to smoke, and sometimes I think of going back to it. However, now that I have small children, I would sooner cut my fingers off with a kitchen knife then start smoking again." Even if this woman fell to temptation and smoked one cigarette, it is highly unlikely that she would relapse entirely.
In her memoir, Room to Grow, actress Tracey Gold described her life-threatening anorexia. When she appeared on the Today show to discuss the book, host Matt Lauer asked her the standard disease question: Was she over the disease, or was it still with her? "It's my Achilles' heel," she said, "but I have two small children, and I could never fall all the way back."
Observing this new sense of identity and resolve in new parents should make you think, quite sensibly, "This person couldn't be an alcoholic or a drug addict; she cares too much about herself and her family." But in the alcoholism and addiction field, we are told that if we believe these people have really become much more resistant to addiction, we are deluding ourselves. Likewise, when you observe some rock star, actress, or athlete enter a drug or alcohol treatment center, you are discouraged from thinking that you could never let yourself go wrong like that. It is always worth maintaining your empathy and humility. At the same time, it is also valuable to appreciate that you wouldn't put yourself in a position like that, not when you have kids, satisfying work, and basic self-respect.
As a society, and as individuals, we need to grasp that there is no more important facilitator or antidote to addiction than our values. For example, people who value clear thinking will shy away from regular intoxication. Likewise, a responsible person highly concerned for his family's well-being would not allow himself to shop or gamble away his family's money. People who are focused on their health will be reluctant, or refuse, to drink excessively or to take drugs.
A prime example of a person whose values helped him to overcome an addiction is my uncle Ozzie. As you will remember from the introduction, Ozzie quit smoking forever based on what seemed like a chance statement by a coworker that Ozzie was "a sucker for the tobacco companies." We are now prepared to answer the question of why Uncle Ozzie quit.
Remember that Ozzie was a committed union activist. The most important value governing Ozzie's life was the desire to maintain his integrity and independence from his employer, who symbolized for Ozzie the entire capitalist system. As a shop steward, he regularly demonstrated the strength of his convictions by pressing worker complaints and defending fellow union members, even though he felt he was punished by being sent out on service calls to the worst neighborhoods.
Intentionally or not, Ozzie's coworker's statement that he was a sucker for the tobacco companies hit Ozzie in his value solar plexus. This colleague made Ozzie see a connection between his anticorporate values and his smoking, producing the revelation that smoking ran counter to his overwhelming desire to be free from company control. When Ozzie realized that smoking compromised the most important element in his self-definition . . . well in that moment smoking didn't stand a chance. After finishing the last pack he purchased, Ozzie never smoked again.
Where Do Antiaddiction Values Come From?
Children learn values from the people around them. Most importantly, they learn values from their parents or the people who raise them. But people also learn many values from their peers and the groups that they belong to. The process by which people learn values is called "social learning." And these values sometimes have a remarkable impact on people's lives—particularly when it comes to alcohol, drugs, and addiction.
Research regularly demonstrates the power of shared values in relation to alcohol. In the 1950s a sociologist noted that he had never seen anyone drunk in New York's Chinatown. Intrigued, he undertook a study of this community.2 The sociologist perused the arrest records in the local precinct between the years 1933 and 1949. He discovered that 15,515 arrests had been recorded in Chinatown, but not one of these arrests included an observation of drunkenness. After further examining drinking styles, attitudes, and social occasions in Chinatown, the sociologist, Milton Barnett, wrote:
The children drank, and they soon learned a set of attitudes that attended the practice. While drinking was socially sanctioned, becoming drunk was not. The individual who lost control of himself under the influence of liquor was ridiculed and, if he persisted in his defection, ostracized. His lack of continued moderation was regarded not only as a personal shortcoming, but as a deficiency of the family as a whole.3
Pretty powerful stuff! In this day and age, social shaming might seem outdated, ludicrous, even psychologically damaging. Nonetheless, within Chinese culture—a very large group worldwide—it has been a very effective technique for training children.
Few other communities are as unified in their values as Chinatown was in the 1950s. However, ethnic and religious groups still convey strong values about substance use and abuse.
One group long noted for its distinctive drinking style is the Jews. In 2000 an exhibit entitled "Drink and Be Merry: Wine and Beer in Ancient Times" came to the Jewish Museum of New York. The exhibit pointed out that Jews had, since antiquity, developed a ritualistic, moderate approach to alcohol consumption that contrasted with the periodic, orgiastic use of alcohol by neighboring tribes.
When the claim is made that Jews have historically been moderate drinkers, objections are always raised that this is no longer true. For example, whenever I mention this fact to an AA member in Los Angeles or New York, the person starts listing Jewish alcoholics he or she knows who attend their AA group.
Two upstate New York researchers, Barry Glassner and Bruce Berg, heard the same claims—and believed them. Both reported that they personally knew an alcoholic Jew who hid his drinking. Both had read accounts that traditionally low Jewish alcoholism rates were rising. They consulted with experts, one of whom claimed that the Jewish alcoholism rate was growing alarmingly.
However, after conducting intensive interviews designed to elicit hidden alcohol problems, the researchers failed to uncover a single Jewish alcohol abuser among a random sample of Jewish respondents.4 Not one respondent they questioned had been intoxicated more than a few times. Only a quarter of the sample had even heard rumors of Jews with drinking problems—generally stories about distant relatives. The accuracy of these self-reports, ironically, was upheld by the very alcoholism expert who had issued an alarm on Jewish alcoholism to the investigators. The so-called expert on Jewish alcoholism reported that in a city of about ten thousand Jews, he knew of five Jewish alcoholics. Even this microscopic number was questioned by the other experts the researchers consulted, who said they knew at most of one or two Jews with a drinking problem.
All in all, the Jews and the Chinese are striking examples of how groups around the world determine behavior toward powerful intoxicants such as alcohol.5 And although it may be true that these groups do not hold sway over their members as they did in earlier decades in America, they nonetheless demonstrate how powerful, enduring, and decisive socialization by family, religious, and cultural groups can be in insulating people throughout their lives against addiction.
How do these groups teach the value of moderation? Glassner and Berg identified four factors or techniques that enabled Jews to avoid drinking problems (and which in fact closely resemble what we saw of Chinese American techniques):
1.Learning moderate drinking in childhood. Jews in the study usually had their first drink as children, "in the home as a part of religious ceremonies (Jewish tradition includes wine drinking at weekly Sabbath ceremonies and holidays, notably Passover) . . . only about 5% of the sample recalled their first drinks as (occurring) outside the family and later than childhood."
2.Insulation by peers. As adults they associated almost exclusively with moderate drinkers, often other Jews. When they observed others drinking badly, they rejected those people. As one subject in the study said: "This one guy was making a real ass of himself. He'd had too much to drink and it made everyone uncomfortable. I guess our friends just are not heavy drinkers. . . . I think he eventually got the message, because he was one of the first to leave."
