The benefits for recovery of hard questions
In interviews with people who have attended Resilient Recovery Group Meetings, a theme has surfaced. The theme was this: “The book asks hard questions; I like the book.”
Why people would like hard questions is not immediately obvious. But in thinking about it, I came up with a couple of benefits for recovery from being asked hard questions.
First, what kind of hard questions are we talking about?
Hard questions ask a person to speculate. They don’t have a single answer. They challenge preconceptions—or they invite a person to look closely at something they had not considered before.
Hard questions are an invitation to travel to uncharted places—to take risks.
In our recovery groups, a hard question might look like these:
If you were a child in God’s presence, what would it be like?
What did Mary feel as she sat a Jesus’ feet?
What qualities of Jesus would you like to be able to put into practice?
How could Jesus help you be radically honest?
Benefit one. Strengthening the brain’s pre-frontal cortex.
The pre-frontal cortex is responsible for making wise and well-considered decisions. It suppresses impulses and makes it possible to choose long-term rewards over immediate gratification. Addiction results in a weakened pre-frontal cortex. Over time, addictive behaviors become automatic and compulsive.
The addict isn’t in a state of comfort from which he mulls over the pros and cons of using drugs—eventually deciding that benefits of getting high today outweigh the costs.
Instead, behavior—sometimes very stupid, illegal, or life-threatening behavior—is repeated unthinkingly.
We might say the addict is driven to use.
So when addicts are asked to consider hard questions, they are working mental muscles that have atrophied during their addiction. These same muscles are the ones they will need to use when wrestling triggers and irrational urges to drugs and alcohol.
Building the pre-frontal cortex is a great benefit for someone trying to get sober.
In fact, the usefulness of a strong pre-frontal cortex isn’t just in its ability to quash urges, but in its role in openness, insight, and perspective change. We might summarize that as “awe”.
Benefit two. Awe.
By asking hard questions, the group member is invited to experience awe. Awe can be thought of as a reduction in the sense of self and the self’s concerns—a state of wonder at something greater than oneself.
Research suggests that experiencing awe can result in greater generosity, increase ethical decision-making, and prosocial values. It’s difficult to think of a better description of “the opposite of addiction” than generosity, ethical decision-making, and prosocial values. Thus, awe can be thought of as an antidote to addiction.
Researchers Keltner and Haidt suggest that awe “encourages us to take in new information and adjust our mental structures around it.” This is important because sobriety involves breaking out of stale and repetitive patterns. As Christians, we say, “you must be born again.”
I saw both benefits of hard questions at work in a group today. In the group, a number of us were wrestling with this hard question: “What aspects of being an adult does God want you to give up; what aspects of being a child does God what you adopt?” (See Matthew 18:1-5 for the context).
A grandfather discussed giving up pride. He wanted to go back to his childhood and live his life differently. He wanted God to intervene the way a child’s parent intervenes in order to protect a child.
A woman with no children wanted to return to a child-like state, in which she could be herself. She wanted to stop bending to the judgment and criticism of others. “Drugs are not me,” she said in a previous meeting.
Another woman wished that she could be more child-like by listening to and obeying what her elders had to say instead of questioning and trying to prove them wrong.
One man recognized that his drinking was an attempt to hide his feelings of incompetence and “act like a man.” He thinks God wants him to be more vulnerable and ask for help when he needs it.
We were wrestling. Wrestling with addiction and with God’s desires and our desires and what needed to change.
