Tell Me a Story: The Role of Honest Sharing in Recovery

Abstract

The power of storytelling in recovery was demonstrated as early as the mid1930s when two alcoholics, Bill Wilson (a stockbroker) and Dr. Bob Smith (a surgeon), first met. Each had a long and disappointing history of attempts to stay sober. By sharing their drinking stories with one another, the two discovered that they helped each other achieve and maintain sobriety. Their discovery became a template for recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and for other 12-step programs that have sprung up over the decades since that time. The ability to talk about one’s addiction issues with other addicts plays an equally fundamental role in addiction treatment groups led by counselors or therapists. Tracing back to the mid-20th century, the longstanding therapeutic assumption is that in the safety of a group who shares a common problem, people are more willing to talk openly and honestly about their experiences, feelings, and behaviors. But communication among recovering addicts is more than the sharing of stories about their struggles (and successes) with their drug of choice. Although there clearly is a relationship between telling one’s story and staying clean or sober, it can be argued that it is talking itself that is the mechanism for change. Viewed through the lens of the role of communication in recovery, talking aloud about a shared condition allows recovering addicts to “hear themselves” and confront themselves whether that sharing takes place both in self-help and addiction treatment groups. Researchers who study communication have identified several different phenomena that shed light on the fundamental role that talking (especially storytelling) plays in the development of human beings. For example, the self-disclosures shared by one recovering addict increase the likelihood of reciprocal self-disclosures in the other person. Through their self-disclosures, people often discover that they no longer feel alone or different. Feeling less isolated and more connected and understood, they talk increasingly more honestly with one another. At the same time they are becoming more honest with themselves as they hear their own words. Some researchers have even gone so far to suggest that it is through the shared storytelling that many recovering alcoholics begin to see their multiple selves: the active addict self, the recovering self , and what I have referred to in my own work as the aspirational self . The aspirational