Community Recovery

Since coming into the NA Fellowship I have realized that the one thing addicts have in common  is a sense of alienation, of not being fully part of one’s family, one’s community,  and disconnected from one’s peers. Often they have suffered a trauma which is at the root of these feelings. It seems to me that this experience may be paralleled  at a community level and the communities most at risk of drug and alcohol related problems  are those most alienated from  economic and cultural processes.  William White et al ( Arthur C. Evans, Roland Lamb & William L. White (2013) The Community as Patient: Recovery Based Community Mobilization in Philadelphia PA (USA), 2005-2012) have claimed that communities that have been victims of  what they call “historical trauma” become particularly vulnerable to a wide spectrum of personal and social problems. They describe historical trauma as a “physical or cultural assault on a people via attempted genocide or sustained colonization.”  Such trauma erodes indigenous sources of cultural and personal resilience leaving communities, community institutions, neighbourhoods, families, and individuals  particularly vulnerable to drug and alcohol related  problems.  Over time, learned helplessness and hopelessness in the face of such problems can become part of the community culture.

The authors continue by  exploring the multiple functions drugs and alcohol play in these communities:    “They serve as a relief from emotional distress, an escape from feelings  of powerlessness, and a trigger  for the discharge of anger.'
Furthermore: “They become symbols of cultural protest and the focus-point of subcultures, some-times creative, but mostly criminal, within which those most disconnected from mainstream community life find mutual support. They spawn underground economies and careers. They serve as instruments of financial exploitation by predatory industries, and they serve as tools of personal and cultural pacification.”

The result of this is a weakening of  family, kinship , neighbourhood, and natural community ties as well as  social institutions (churches, schools, workplaces, civic organizations) which traditionally meet social support needs. This create an environment in which personal and social problems flourish and  personal and collective capacities to respond to rising problems are diminished. Traditional support structures are replaced by alternative social structures, from gangs to mutual aid groups to cell phone and internet-based social networking. Furthermore there is an ever growing need for increasingly industrialized and commercialized health and social services agencies and agents of social control ( police, courts, correctional, and child protection agencies). Reliance on these agencies creates a vicious cycle which further  hastens the dissolution of family, kinship, neighbourhood, and community ties.

From the above we see how personal issues and community issues become interrelated and intertwined when dealing with addiction. At present we have two distinct and separate approaches to the drug problem. On the one hand we have rehabilitation centres, hospitals and institutions , as well as mutual aid organisations like Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, treating the problem at the level of the individual. On the other hand we have government departments, NGO’s and other agencies looking at the problem at the communal level.White et al argue "that the healing process can and should move beyond individuals and families to encompass whole communities" and the creation of  naturally occurring healing environments that "simultaneously elevate personal family and community health." I would argue that we need to start looking at the problem in a more holistic way. Just as community problems feed individual alienation, and vice versa, individual recovery can be the beginning of community recovery, and vice versa.


Anne Wilson Schaeff argues that our society is driven by addictive behaviour. The obsession with extracting fossils fuels with no regard to the environmental damage  and our fixation with material wealth and possessions as a measure of success certainly mirror the behaviour of an addict. Here again the lessons of addiction and recovery at an individual level could perhaps hold some  solution to our societal addictions. (Are we as a society able to learn the lessons of addiction, or will we like an addict in denial have to reach a rock bottom, a point of no return before we are able to make changes?) It seems possible then that exploring and attempting to understand  individual experiences of addiction and recovery  can give us insight to the processes at community and social level.