Episode 80 -- January 18, 2021

New Year, New Perspective: Work, Success, and Self-Worth

Whether we're in the early stages of recovery or have a few years in the rearview, having a job or not having one can offer some formidable emotional challenges. Work can be a scary business for us. In his book, First Year Sobriety: When All That Changes is Everything, Guy Kettelhack helps us explore ways to deal with our hopes and fears about loneliness, success, and purpose without resorting to old patterns and self-destructive behaviors.

When it comes to growth in recovery, says Kettelhack, "Even uncomfortable feelings can end up being instructive—the pain and dissatisfaction that work-related issues can make us feel often lead to a new kind of clarity about who we are and what we want. Which can turn out to be something quite different than we once thought."

It has been edited for brevity.

Work and Self-Worth
A recovering friend informed me recently of a scientific survey of animal behavior that determined that a certain kind of shrew (living—mostly sleeping—underground) devoted less than 1 percent of its time to "work," which meant, in its case, foraging for food. What a role model! Over 99 percent of your life spent not working? Sounded great to him.

It doesn't sound so great to recovering people at the other end of the spectrum—those who think of themselves as "workaholics." With the all-or-nothing attitudes common to many of us, the wild pendulum swings between extremes that seem to characterize our feelings about just about everything: We want either to be crammed full of activity or to be allowed to do nothing at all.

Certainly there's a range of reactions in early sobriety to the prospect of work. But we all seem to slam into one universal truth about it: Work is how so many of us have defined our worth. Recovering addicts and alcoholics tend to get highly sensitive, frightened, and confused when the topic of work comes up in a Twelve Step meeting. Suddenly we may find ourselves talking longer than usual, as if out of the need to justify whatever we're doing, whether it's staying in a job we hate, being out of work and not being able to find a job, or staying on public assistance. However, just as difficult is reconciling ourselves to success—as pressing a dilemma for many of us as dealing with the perceived lack of it. It's confusing territory.

Andy, a thirty-six-year-old carpenter who does construction work for various contractors, is a big, burly man. It's not easy for him to admit to problems about anything. He says he was brought up to believe that a man keeps everything to himself; any expression of emotion meant weakness. But, in sobriety, he's starting to open up. And he's able to admit to having a particularly tough time with work in sobriety. "Before I got sober and stopped doing drugs, about eight months ago, I felt like one of the guys. That's the truth. I mean, you didn't work with guys like I work with and not drink and smoke some dope. That was part of the territory. It was part of being a man, a guy who could 'take it.'" Now that he's not drinking or drugging, but still working with a lot of the same people, Andy feels a lot of pressure. "'What's the matter?' they yell at me, 'A beer gonna screw up your poor little tummy?' I can't get mad at them, really. They're a bunch of drunks; that's why I hung out with them. Who wants to be around guys who don't get high when all you wanna do is get high? I understand that. But it still hurts."

Andy is having to find new jobs—wean himself away from the old "comfortable" working arrangements he'd once known, arrangements that are proving to be far from comfortable now. "I'm even thinking of going to night school and, like, learning engineering or something. Get into a whole new line where I don't have to work with these guys," Andy says. "But, you know, working with these guys was my whole life. They were my only friends. I still haven't clicked like that with anyone in AA or NA. It's hard admitting this, but I'm lonely."

We don't generally realize until we stop drinking and drugging how destructive so many of the external circumstances of our lives were. And it can be hard to wean yourself off them, especially when they once gave you all the security you knew. Andy is learning that his feelings of loneliness won't kill him—but drinking and drugging will. He's also able at least to give lip service to the belief that his loneliness will lift, just as he's seen other feelings lift even in his first few months of sobriety. "All I gotta do is remember how low I got when I got wasted," he says, "to stop pitying myself too much when the guys get on my back. I guess I'll hang in there whatever it takes. And take some steps to replace my old life with something new. That's what AA and NA keep telling me I can do."

Because we often identify ourselves so completely with what we "do," work issues can be very potent—potent enough to threaten our sobriety. Andy might easily have given in to his cronies' taunts and gone back to drinking and drugging. A lot of other people, faced with the same kind of peer pressure, have done exactly that. But we cheat ourselves when we give in. On the principle we've been exploring throughout this book—that even uncomfortable feelings can end up being instructive—the pain and dissatisfaction that work-related issues can make us feel often lead to a new kind of clarity about who we are and what we want. Which can turn out to be something quite different than we once thought.

Marilyn illustrates this. She was a CEO in a major advertising company—"an industry that runs on drugs and alcohol," she says—when she suddenly decided to give up her cocaine habit. "I knew it was screwing up my life, making me paranoid. 'Recovery' was suddenly becoming chic too. All the magazines were running articles about this or that celebrity who'd 'seen the light.' I moved in a very trendy crowd, so I decided I'd quit too. I started going to some Twelve Step meetings, and they did help. I even took some phone numbers, and called, late at night, when I felt like climbing the walls from wanting to do coke. But what I didn't do was make any attempt to change my high-pressured work life. That was off-limits. That was something I felt had no matter what happened to me."

Ever self-disciplined, she didn't skip a beat the day after stopping her cocaine use. She kept all her appointments, drove herself as hard as ever. "My work life was always completely compartmentalized away from my private life," she says. "I forced myself to get to work, in the old days, even when I had my worst cocaine paranoid attacks. I forced myself to be charming, efficient, persuasive—whatever I had to be. What I really was successful at was acting! I would have died before admitting I had a drug problem. I would have died before admitting I was human, for that matter!"

Marilyn began to question her approach to work when she finally got a sponsor. "I'd booked a lunch date with my new sponsor, June, at some peculiar, compulsive-sounding time. Like, okay, we can meet at 12:35 two blocks away from my office as long as I can get back by 1:12 so that I can make the overseas calls I've got to make before 2:15... that sort of thing. June was quiet; she just said okay. But when I met her, all she seemed interested in was what I did at work, what it meant to me, if I'd ever thought of slowing down and giving myself a little time to 'recover.' I felt annoyed. Why was she barging into my work life? I expressed my annoyance to her, asking her to keep out of what I felt was clearly not her business—literally and figuratively! She paused for a moment and asked me, 'So recovery is something you only do when you're out of the office?'"

Marilyn felt stopped in her tracks. "I began, at that moment, to question what exactly it was I wanted from recovery. What the work even meant to me." She sighs, and continues. "Suddenly what happened at the office seemed different to me. I began, slowly, to realize that I had never ever taken the time to ask myself a crucial question: Is this really what I want to do? I guess, until that time, I'd always thought a question like that was self-indulgent. All these old voices from my past rumbled in: 'Stop thinking of yourself!' 'Just do what I tell you!' 'You don't know what's best for you!' 'Yours is not to reason why!...' Work, for me, had become a kind of terrible prison, something I thought I had to be trapped in. I never realized that it was part of life. That I didn't turn off who I was when I walked into my office and stop living. The compartments I'd made of 'work' and 'life' were totally artificial."

This has been a life-changing revelation for Marilyn. While she still works in advertising, she's now taking steps to change the nature of her job to something less administrative and more creative. She may even, she says, get out of the industry altogether, perhaps pursuing art—a passion of hers she'd always thought of as "self-indulgent"—maybe with a view to teaching it. "Options. That's the word. I'd felt so locked into thinking I didn't have any. Or that I had only two: either work at the job I had or be a bum and not work at all. Which also translated to: either be worth something or be worth nothing. Now, slowly, with my sponsor's and the program's help, I'm discovering that self-esteem does not come from my job. What a radical awakening that is! Self-esteem comes from something inside me. I can't lay it on with a brush. It has to grow from within."

What Does "Success" Mean Now?
There's an endless range of experience in recovery—from newly sober people who have lost everything and live on the street to people like Marilyn who have managed to "hold it all together," perhaps losing little in a material sense but so much in a spiritual, mental, and emotional sense. But what seems to characterize progress for all of us as we slog through whatever the external work circumstances may be in each of our lives is a new definition of "success."

You've succeeded if you've managed to keep from picking up a drink or drug today. But that definition is infinitely expandable. "Success," for so many recovering people, even in the earliest weeks and months of recovery, grows to include the sense of connection we've been exploring throughout this book. Not only that you're connected to other people but that you're a part of a whole world and universe—a spiritual sense of being important and worthy simply because you are who you are. Out of this realization (however gradually come to), we begin to feel worthy in a way that can't be injured by ego, what job we have, how much money we make, the car we drive, or the home we live in. We come to feel in some indefinable sense that we deserve to be loved. Even more, that we are loved by other people and, perhaps, even by that strange Higher Power that Twelve Step programs keep going on about.

About the Author:
Guy Kettelhack has written several books on recovery. A graduate of Middlebury College, Kettelhack has also done graduate work in English literature at Bread Loaf School of English at Oxford University. He lives in New York City.

© 1992 by Guy Kettelhack
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