John Dupuy on Addiction, Wilderness, and the Limits of Treatment

John Dupuy runs Integral Recovery and iAwake Technologies, and he wrote "Integral Recovery: A Revolutionary Approach to the Treatment of Alcoholism and Addiction," which took the 2013 USA Best Book Awards. He also practices Integral Christianity Contemplative Practice, an effort to keep Christianity moving as a living, evolving spiritual tradition. In this conversation with Erik Lenderman, he talks about how he came into addiction counseling and where the work has carried him.

His first real exposure to treatment came near the end of grad school, when he worked at Thunder Road, an adolescent treatment center in Oakland, California. The approach there was old-school: AA, the 12 steps, all of it. What he liked about AA was that you could bring up God and spirituality openly, say the word, and nobody would push you out the door for it.

Then he and his wife (they weren't married yet at the time) felt pulled somewhere else. They landed in Southern Utah and spent long stretches wandering the deserts, the mountains, and the woods, happy just to be outside. When the money and the supplies started running thin, they discovered there was a whole industry built right there in the same country they already loved: Therapeutic Wilderness. They walked into the interview and got hired on the spot, partly for their backgrounds and partly because the love of the land was obvious. That turned into roughly fifteen years of the work.

The reason he ended up focused on addicts and alcoholics was simple arithmetic. About 85 percent of the kids arriving at these programs came in because of drugs and alcohol. Not every one of them was an addict, but he'd put the figure around 60 percent of that 85 percent. And what the field was calling treatment back then struck him as thin.

There's no question the wilderness itself does something to people. Weeks out under open sky, hiking the canyons, cooking over a fire, living alongside a small group who start to feel like brothers and sisters: that can change a person in deep and lasting ways. But Dupuy is clear on one point. However powerful it is, immersion in the wild is not, by itself, treatment for addiction.

So the work found him more than he chose it. It wasn't something he had set out to do. It was sitting there in front of him, waiting.