John Dupuy on the 12 Steps and Integral Recovery
I think of the 12 steps as basic moral and human ideas, the kind most of us picked up at home, or in a temple or a church, or somewhere along the way. Plenty of people never did pick them up, though. For someone who has fallen into the pit of addiction and alcoholism, the steps work like rungs. You climb them to start getting your humanity back, to rebuild the healthy self. So yes, they're foundational. But laying a foundation isn't the same as being finished with the building. You still put up the first floor, then the second, then the third, and keep going. Does that answer it, Erik?
The other half of the question was where integral recovery fits. When I'm working with students, if they can settle into AA or the 12 steps and make sense of them, I strongly recommend it. Some people can't, though. A number of them have been hurt or mistreated by religion and carry a lot of baggage from it, and the religious framing of AA just doesn't land for them. I can still work with those people. I have a lot of affection for AA either way. I worked the program and was part of it for years out in the field.
What integral recovery adds is the AQAL map that Ken Wilber laid out. A lot of us have been developing it since, so at this point it's really a shared project. The map tries to account for everything that needs to be included. Start with the four quadrants, which is as basic as it gets. Picture them. The upper right quadrant is your physical body, and that has to be dealt with, because the science on this is solid now: addiction is a disease. A brain disease. We can point to the organ, the defect, the symptoms. It meets the definition of disease in the Western medical sense.
That medical status is why, under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies now have to cover treatment, which is reshaping the whole treatment world. I have friends running programs, and people who couldn't get help before are getting it now. New problems come with that, but on the whole I read it as a good change.
The upper left quadrant, the interior self, has to be accounted for too. In active addiction the body takes a beating, the brain takes a beating, the neurochemistry is thrown off, and the person is genuinely sick. So of course the interior fills up with fear and dread, with craving, anger, resentment, all of it. That's why you also need interior practices, something to clean up that dimension.