Why Tell Our Story?

By John M.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.
William Faulkner

What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood…. People work to get rid of symptoms instead of searching out the cause.
Alice Miller,  Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth

Our liquor was but a symptom. So we had to get down to causes and conditions.
Alcoholics Anonymous

In the epigraph above, I’m not sure if Faulkner was right or not. I’ve searched online trying to find a consensus among successful writers about whether a drive or compulsion to write is an inherent part of a writer’s DNA such that they cannot not write, that the story within them HAS to come out.

My search reveals that there is no consensus here, and some writers like poet Louise Glück, Stephen King, Virginia Woolf, and a few others say something similar to Faulkner. But many other writers express themselves within the wide-ranging, freely chosen desire to write — or not. In fact, procrastination or the anxiety of the “blank page,” or, in other words, an incessant wish to avoid writing, seems to fill the biographies of many a famous and successful author.

Yet, it seems to me that, when combined with psychoanalyst Alice Miller’s insight, as expressed in her quotation above, regarding the inescapable emergence of a symptom from the depths of repressed causes, there might be some truth to the notion that an addict’s or alcoholic’s story must come out if healing and recovery are indeed possible.

The Big Book implies as much, and the final header I chose to commence this essay with is in the middle of the Alcoholics Anonymous text at a location that I’ve always regarded as “the pivotal point” of my understanding of AA’s insight: something was deeply amiss with the way I viewed myself and my relationship with the world long before I took my first drink. My history of drinking was a response to this!

I do not want to make too much out of the point that we as a human species may have an intrinsic or involuntary drive to tell our story. Yet, humans seem to have always told stories. The still popular The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer go way back in history to around 850 BCE, and historians consider The Epic of Gilgamesh to be the oldest surviving literature, dated from around 2100 – 1400 BCE.

And one could argue that early prehistoric cave drawings are a type of storytelling and perhaps indicative of our earliest ancestors’ propensity or drive to share their hunting experiences, where they and their prey are depicted. But were these cave paintings ancient forms of “art for art’s sake,” or for some religious purposes, or to communicate a certain utility to their fellows? Still, the existence of cave drawings does not categorically prove they were painted by an involuntary need to “get their story out.”

In recent health and well-being literature, both Alice Miller and physician Gabor Maté write that repressed thoughts and feelings will “out” themselves somehow, whether a patient wishes it or not. The very titles of their books indicate that there is no running away from some kind of bodily and mental “disclosure.” Miller wrote The Body Never Lies about the long-range effects on the body and the mind due to child abuse and childhood trauma: pent-up anger or rage will manifest itself in various debilitating diseases, including cancer.

Gabor Maté has written persuasively about how childhood trauma plays itself out as alcoholism and various other addictions in The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, and, like Miller, he also writes about how emotion and life-endangering stress play a huge role in the onset of numerous chronic illnesses in When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress.

Add to these psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s book about post-traumatic stress and the inevitable and inescapable effects on mind and body in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

Now, whether there’s an innate drive to communicate (beyond basic survival needs), leading to the development of art, literature, and other forms of expression (like AA storytelling), I don’t want to dwell on the inevitable “necessity” of communicating one’s experience with alcoholism. However, when a member of AA shares their story of alcohol abuse and recovery, I do want to emphasize the importance of telling our story and its crucial role in understanding the addict’s or alcoholic’s “plight,” as Miller puts it, which has its own protocol that seems to demand insight and clarity.

Whether the alcoholic experience “must” or “should” be shared is a topic of ongoing debate. Miller, Maté, and van der Kolk argue that “symptoms” suggest underlying conditions that have been repressed or caused by biological factors beyond our conscious control. However, others argue against the notion of repression, citing the lack of concrete evidence to support its existence.

In my personal journey of understanding the past and its place in my alcoholism, I believe childhood trauma played a pivotal role. I believe the Big Book to be correct in directing our inquiries into “causes and conditions.” Still, I’m not entirely convinced, in my case, that these causes and conditions were largely unconscious and repressed.

Looking into my past, I certainly was aware of particular thoughts and memories being suppressed (not unconsciously “repressed”) by me, and I recollect some deeply felt emotions getting stifled and even denied. Did I avoid confronting things to avoid facing reality? Yes, only too often. Did I numb myself with alcohol to escape self-awareness? Well, that was the whole point of drinking to excess!

So, whether a story must be shared in the manner envisioned by Faulkner (which may or may not include repressed and unconscious aspects that eventually become conscious), or if sharing our story with others simply proves to be a powerful choice for us in the recovery process, I want to now focus on why, in my opinion, telling one’s story is so indispensable to recovery that there appears to be only a fine line separating Faulkner’s statement of inevitability and others’ expressions of a freely chosen option.

(ii)

“I do not know yet,” he replied, “because I have not finished telling the story.” “But you know what happened,” I insisted…. “No,” Branly denied vehemently. “I shall not know until I tell it. That is the truth….
Carlos Fuentes, Distant Relations

I suppose that many of us (initially at any rate) believe that we typically share our story so that other alcoholics can benefit from our experiences. While this is certainly true, it might not be the whole truth.

We sometimes fail to recognize that the recounting of our own story is as revealing to us as our story may be to another alcoholic. But how can this be, since we already know what happened to us? What, in the telling itself, is helpful to us?

Is it, however, the case that we fully know the entirety of our past experiences? Are we certain that we are the sole owners of our perspective on who we are and what happened to us? More than one counsellor at the recovery centre I attended claimed that I didn’t know who I was. If that were true, how am I expected to narrate a coherent account of what occurred to me — the very me that is the subject of the story I am telling?

Let’s take a moment to consider this. Isn’t it astonishing that we frequently find ourselves remarking to an AA speaker that after sharing their personal story, they have somehow managed to recount our own? How is it possible if we all live distinct and distinctive lives, and are ourselves exclusively the ones aware of our own story, that some stranger at an AA meeting can “tell our story?”

For example, I really only began to take AA seriously after hearing numerous AA speakers recount that they never felt comfortable in their own skin even before taking their first drink. This revelation struck me deeply! This part of their story resonated with my own experiences, as I had never had the self-awareness to connect my drinking to my own inner sense of anxiety and vulnerability (other than to merely mask it).

There’s an ongoing reciprocity in the mutual-sharing world of AA that enables us to empathize with others and learn from them how to fill in the gaps of our own past lives. It’s not only the content of someone else’s story that completes aspects of our own self-understanding, but it’s often the language, the specific words other AA speakers use, that allows us to better comprehend and articulate our own story.

This was the case when I heard the many AA speakers talk about feeling uncomfortable in their own skin prior to ever taking a drink. After hearing this in meeting after meeting, I gained a new perspective on my life, and this revelation now became part of my story, my own telling, that started to give my life a consistency and even a logic that assisted me in pulling a fragmented, withdrawn, and disconnected life into a coherent whole.

AA historian, Ernie Kurtz, has summed up this kind of reciprocity between people in AA as follows: “In this mutuality between telling and listening, between speaking and hearing, lies the deepest spiritual significance of mutual-aid groups.” (1) Make what you will of the adjective “spiritual” here, the value of mutuality as deeply significant to the AA experience remains, and the openness and receptivity essential to all teachable moments of mutual sharing have been succinctly summarized by Kurtz in the opening pages of  Experiencing Spirituality: “It is impossible directly to transmit or convey experience – for experience itself attests that it must be experienced – we [therefore] turn to stories: Experience is best awakened within story.” (2)

Whether we are awakened by another alcoholic’s story or even by the telling of our own story as we seek to put together a coherent account of our life, we are connecting to others and the world around us (possibly for the first time) and, perhaps, even re-connecting to something we have lost in our past.

Recently, I have noticed that more and more people in AA meetings will share journalist Johann Hari’s pithy remark that the “opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it’s connection.” For much of my 18 years of recovery, I have heard many alcoholics say something similar about “connecting” with others, the “world,” and especially to themselves. (For much of our lives, many of us have been in a dis-relationship with ourselves.)

This insight of  “connectedness,” learned through the medium of mutual sharing, also reveals at least two things about AA’s custom of storytelling.

First, it’s the ease with which another’s story connects us together as alcoholics who have our own story to tell, whereas other formats like a lecture by a professional may simply not resonate as clearly and as deeply with the majority of alcoholics.

And second, the words exchanged between alcoholics at meetings have their own unique language (and yes, they can sometimes be clichéd for those who have heard them repeatedly). This deeply personal and highly intimate language shared among fellow alcoholics often has a profound impact on newcomers and those early in recovery who may be hearing these words and concepts for the first time. Perhaps the newcomer connects, for the first time, with something that explains precisely the nature of their suffering and offers a way out when it seemed like every other way out had ended in failure.

I’ll conclude with a quote from Ernie Kurtz, who, along with Katherine Ketcham, has made significant contributions to emphasizing the extraordinary nature of storytelling as a particularly good narrative style capable of evoking profound emotions and helping a person sort out often-confused thought processes. This is particularly evident in conveying the process of recovery from alcoholism, which AA identifies as the result of at least one alcoholic talking to another alcoholic: “From its beginnings and still today, the philosophy … of Alcoholics Anonymous is transmitted primarily by the practice of storytelling, of telling a particular kind of story, the very format of which inculcates a way of thinking that shapes a particular way of life. (3)

1. Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning, (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 95.

2. Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, Experiencing Spirituality: Finding Meaning Through Storytelling, (New York: Penguin Group,  2014), 2.

3. Ernest Kurtz, “Alcoholics Anonymous: A Phenomenon in American Religious History,” in The Collected Ernest Kurtz,  Hindsfoot Foundation Series on Treatment and Recovery (New York: Authors Choice, 2008), 28.

John is 72 and got sober in 2007 at the age of 54. Twenty-one days at the Renascent Treatment Centre in Toronto kickstarted his journey of continuous sobriety into the present day. He really only took AA seriously when he heard speaker after speaker say that they never felt comfortable in their own skin long before they took their first drink. In John’s opinion, the key to both physical and emotional sobriety is the acknowledgement in the Big Book: “Our liquor was but a symptom. So we had to get down to causes and conditions.” (p. 64).

John served as a General Service Representative (GSR) for his first home group and then for his secular home group, which he, his wife Dianne, and a few others started north of Toronto in 2012.

He has written a few articles for AA Agnostica over the years and is always happy to support this website.

For a PDF of this article, click here: Why Tell Our Story.