Higher and Friendly Powers: Transforming Addiction and Suffering

By Peg O'Connor

An expansive alternative for those who have struggled with the "higher power" of AA's 12-step program, Higher and Friendly Powers offers a sense of human decency, moral ideals, and even a better version o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildhouse Publications
• Release date: Aug 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781736075074

Peg O'Connor

Peg O'Connor, Ph.D., is a Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, specializing in moral philosophy, feminist philosophy, and addiction studies. Author of Life on the Rocks: Finding Meaning in Addiction and Recovery (Central Recovery Press, 2016), she is a recovering alcoholic who maintains that philosophy has helped her to stay sober. Peg is regularly published in trade journals and writes a column, "Philosophy Stirred, Not Shaken," for Psychology Today, which has nearly two million total views online, with select columns appearing in the print publication.

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Peg O’Connor speaks to the heart of the struggles that get in the way of spirituality and recovery, and how to move through them. Her work is important not only for people with addiction but also in helping those who love them find their own recovery and spiritual connection.

— P. Casey Arrillaga, author of Realistic Hope: The Family Survival Guide for Facing Alcoholism and Other Addictions and host of Addiction and the Family Podcast

Peg O’Connor brings together the poignant writing of philosopher and psychologist William James and her own deep insights into addiction and recovery in this joyfully readable and timely book. Using James’ own case studies as an overall framework, O’Connor vividly describes the depths and shallows that sufferers of addiction may experience, and the many ways in which conversion and change can happen.

— Candice Shelby, author of Addiction: A Philosophical Perspective

"Peg O’Connor’s Higher and Friendly Powers shows the way to freedom from addiction without requiring belief in the God or gods of any sectarian tradition. A brilliant and important book!"

— Owen Flanagan, Professor Emeritus, Duke University

With a light touch and lucid prose, Peg O’Connor finds in the writings of William James a much-needed corrective to the heavy-handed religiosity that permeates so much understanding of addiction and recovery — in AA and elsewhere — while yet finding room for experiences of suffering, conversion, renunciation, communion, connection, and even faith. Part philosophy and part guide to life, this eclectic and deeply humane book puts the individual psychology of addiction back where it belongs, on center stage.

— Hanna Pickard, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University

O’Connor wisely navigates a course between the William James advocates in academia and 12 Step Big book thumpers, each of whom are possessive of their own intellectual history.  This book will satisfy both and allow both to learn and grow.  

— Paul Schulte, author of Cravings for Deliverance: How William James, the Father of American Psychology, Inspired Alcoholics Anonymous




HIGHER AND FRIENDLY POWERS

Copyright © 2022 Peg O’Connor Design by Melody Stanford Martin

Published by Wildhouse Publications. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission from the publisher, except in brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Contact [e-mail].

Printed in the USA

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-7360750-7-4

The whole bill against alcohol is its treachery. Its happiness is an illusion and seven other devils return.

—

William James

, The Effects of Alcohol

For my parents, Ann and Jack, who provided the wind beneath my wings and the sneakers on my feet.

Contents

Chapter One

Anything Larger Will Do to Take the Next Step 1

Chapter Two

Generations of Suffering 27

Chapter Three

The Healthy Minded 47

Chapter Four

The Sick Souls 69

Chapter Five

Conversions and the Hot Spot of Consciousness 91

Chapter Six

Willingness to Live on a Maybe 115

Chapter Seven

Fruits of the Spiritual Tree 135

Chapter Eight

Living with the Acute Fever 153

Appendix I

William James’s Own Over-beliefs 177

Appendix II

William James and Alcoholics Anonymous 185

Bibliography 195

Index 197

Preface

Intellectual giant of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Physician. Philosopher. Founder of the academic department of psychology at Harvard University. Quivering mass of fear. Contemplator of suicide. Experimenter with nitrous oxide. Big brother worrying about and cleaning up the messes of his alcoholic brother for decades. Author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, a sanity preserving and life saving book for many. Meet William James.

William James knew acute suffering from the inside. As a young man he was wracked with doubt, despair, and dread to the point of seriously contemplating suicide. For roughly five years, he was nearly incapacitated with various nervous disorders, panic, and extreme melancholia. James knew that his suffering was a full-bodied condition; it was impossible to draw the line between mental/psychological suffering and physical suffering. When James reached the point where suicide was a robust option, he understood himself to have made a conscious decision to believe that life was worth living. That belief, he would later argue, helped to bring about the fact for him that life was worth living.

James was also intimately acquainted with the suffering of others and the suffering that comes from not being able to eliminate or even ameliorate their suffering. Members of his family, including his formidable father and four siblings, suffered many of the same nervous disorders and physical ailments. It is his brother, Bob, who perhaps was in his mind as he wrote the lectures that became Varieties. For most of his adult life, Bob was caught in a cycle of bad bouts of drinking, stays at asylums for the inebriate, periods of calm and perhaps abstinence, slips, and full blown relapses. As his closest sibling in terms of relationship and proximity, William lived that cycle with Bob.

We who struggle with addiction and those who love, live, or work with us have a wonderful traveling companion in William James as we navigate the twists and turns of our lives. The big question of life, James might say, is how each of us will accept the universe. Will we do so only in part and grudgingly or wholly and heartily? Will grievance be the key of our lives? We who struggle with addiction confront these questions daily. How will we live their answers? William James can help each of us embrace our own slices of the universe and orient our lives around gratitude instead of grievance.

Acknowledgements

I have referred to this book manuscript as my problem child. It has taken a village to raise it. Without the help of astute readers and supportive family and friends, all this writing would have been a set of unruly and untamed documents on my hard drive that I would dutifully move each time I had to get a new computer. Yes, I know about cloud storage. Instead, here is a book I hope is useful to people wondering about addiction and recovery.

Over the last several years, my brother, John, has challenged and encouraged me to go further and bigger with this book. He is a viable contender for title of My Biggest Fan, though I do think our sainted mother isn’t willing to pass on that title yet. Like Queen Elizabeth II, she’s tiny but tough.

I owe special thanks to my dear friend and littermate, Owen. His helpful suggestions on an early version of the manuscript helped me to significantly reframe this project. He urged me to trust myself to write the book I wanted to write. How Owen came to suggest Wildhouse Publications seems straight out of fiction involving an island retreat, a storm, and a ferry. I’m glad he was on that boat.

I am fortunate—blessed even—to have caring, whip-smart, wickedly funny friends. They make my wonderful life possible. Whether it is walking dogs, smacking tennis balls, or hanging out in person or on video call, they are a steady and steadying presence in my life. Patty and VB, Joan and David, Amy and Dave, and Lynn my fellow GoGo, I am so grateful. My Friday tennis group has a special place in my heart, so thanks Dee, Eve, Rada, and Billie Jean. Sunday mornings found me on court with Mark, Wes, John, and Art. Susan, I appreciate the conversation that began at the net and happily continues.

I describe my bestie, MB, as the friend who in third grade would jump right into the pig pile for me and only later in detention would ask what was going on. Thanks for jumping, MB. Thanks, Susan, for starting a conversation about pups, poetry, and memoirs at the dog park. I thank Patty for a friendship started with an act of bravery on her part and that I cherish.

Thanks to Polly for coming into my life when it was time to start something new.

Clooney knows he’s my heart.

Finally, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Andrea Hollingsworth of Wildhouse Publications. She is an editor extraordinaire.

Note on Sources and Citations

Most of the quotations from William James come from The Varieties of Religious Experience unless otherwise noted. Varieties is now in the public domain, which means there are multiple editions available. I have used the Oxford Classics Edition published in 2012. Page numbers in the text correspond to that edition. The chapter titles in Varieties are descriptive and helpful, so any reader should be able to find these quotations in other editions.

Citations for James’s other works appear in the endnotes at the back of the book. Full bibliographic information appears both in the notes and in the bibliography.

I have drawn from several excellent biographies about William James and his family. Information on those texts can also be found both in the endnotes and the bibliography.

Chapter One

Anything Larger Will Do to Take the Next Step

The sense of Presence of a higher and friendly power seems to be the fundamental feature in the spiritual life.

William James

He was a hard drinking failed businessman in 1934. Barely surviving the stock market crash, watching his dreams fade away, and living off his in-laws, he had fallen into a deep abyss of depression. He had tried to stop drinking more times than he could count. Utterly desperate, he checked himself in at the Charles B. Towns hospital in New York, whose mission it was to remove the poison of alcohol and drugs and any cravings for them from a person. Would this cure work for someone like him who had failed so repeatedly and epically? This was someone who had nearly unbridled confidence in his abilities to do just about anything except this one thing. He freely admitted that he choked on the notion of God or of any being that could somehow save him from himself. His defiance equally matched his desperation, and he called out that if there were a God, let him show himself. Suddenly, his hospital room was filled with a great light and he felt himself to be a free man.

The relief he immediately felt was soon followed by a dread that he was in the grasp of a terrible hallucination. This worry was not unfounded; a standard treatment for alcohol withdrawal was the use of bella donna, which can induce hallucinations. Thankfully, a friend of his who had also stopped drinking gave him perhaps the best gift of his life, which was a copy of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experiences, originally published in 1902.

This man was Bill Wilson, who would later go on to found the program Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and write the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, better known as The Big Book. Where Bill Wilson had been riven, he became whole. So profound was the impact of James’s book that Bill Wilson and the early members of AA regarded James as a co-founder of AA even though he had died decades earlier.

William James and his great work, Varieties, helped to transform one man, and by extension millions more. Varieties provided Bill Wilson with a framework for understanding his profound experience as a conversion. More importantly, Varieties offered him a stunning portrait of how his life could be different by having had a spiritual experience. Varieties offers us contemporary readers both understanding of how we’ve come to be how and where we are and hope for how our lives could be different when we change our addictive behaviors. While Bill Wilson ascribed his deep changes to a God removing his desire to drink, James offers multiple ways—varieties—of how people make enormous changes in their lives without any God. James opens an expansive space for being spiritual and living spiritually without assuming any kind of providential God. Each of us may already have the resources within ourselves if only we can identify and harness them. This is what James can help us to do.

Habitual Centers of Personal Energy

Varieties is a gigantic book comprising twenty lectures delivered between 1901 and 1902 about religious or spiritual impulses. Reading it, Bill W. encountered S.H. Hadley who promised to drown himself in a river if his drinking ever reached a certain point. Hadley did reach that point, but was too drunk to walk to the river and instead found himself pounding a bar declaring he’d never drink again. There’s Henry Alline, who struggled mightily with drunken carousing and carnal mirth. James also introduces a college graduate who spent his 20s drinking and wasting his education and other opportunities. James offers these three men as examples of people who undergo remarkable transformations away from addictive substances or behaviors. It’s little wonder that Bill Wilson would have been completely fascinated by these examples.

What changes in a person who undergoes such a remarkable transformation? James claims each person has a personal energy that shapes her life. He writes

Let us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in a man’s consciousness, the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works, call it the habitual center of his personal energy. It makes a great difference to a man whether one set of his ideas, or another, be the center of his energy; and it makes a great difference, as regards any set of ideas which he may possess, whether they become central or remain peripheral in him. To say that a man is ‘converted’ means, in these terms, that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now take a central place, and that religious aims form the habitual center of his energy (155).

It is the habitual center of personal energy that is regenerated or redirected. Our center of energy makes us who we are because our actions, attitudes, or orientations in the world spring from that center and return to it. This is part of the reason James claims that those who undergo such an experience or conversion are twice-born. In some important sense, a person who has such a profound religious experience becomes a new person because her actions, attitudes, and outlook on life change so dramatically.

The language of habitual center of personal energy, may strike some as too new age-y, but James cashes it out in ways that are familiar and inviting. The issue is really quite simple: what do we orient our lives around? We change as people when our social relations change, whether by pruning some relations or cultivating others. As we acquire or lose material goods, we change as persons. So, too, do we change as our bodies change. As our interests, values, and commitments change, we change. Some interests, concerns, people, and commitments, however, are far more central to who we are and how we are in the world. They may be much harder to change because they are at our core and not easily accessible. Another way to express this is that core beliefs are foundational; they are the bedrock upon which we build everything else. They are the basis for just about everything we do. When any part of them changes, the impact is enormous and can be disorienting. The possibility of change may cause some of us to recommit and dig in more firmly with these core concerns. But those who