What Is It Like to Be in Alcohol Addiction Recovery? A Dialectical Phenomenological Analysis

Abstract

Plain Language SummaryIn the mental health field, there is still no consensus on what it means to be in alcohol addiction recovery beyond controlling alcohol use, which challenges the development of treatments and policies aimed at promoting more than symptom remission. We believe part of this issue is due to the hegemony of strictly objective approaches that lack theoretical resources to grasp recovery experiences. Hence, we tried to contribute to recovery understanding by analyzing the recovery experiences of individuals with alcohol addiction. For this, we used the dialectical phenomenological psychopathology perspective as a theoretical lens, which consists of a study approach in psychopathology that investigates experiences of mental disorders and their typical ways of relating to the world. Through this perspective, we examined online interviews of 8 Brazilian, São Paulo state citizens, who were self-declared to be undergoing alcohol addiction recovery (or who declared that they had completely recovered). Their reports indicated that recovery was a process that featured changes in self-relation, changes in interpersonal relations, changes in time relation, and giving new meanings to alcohol use and suffering. Those transformations were also interpreted by participants’ worldviews of spiritual experience, moral reformation, and mentality change. In the discussion, we understood such changes as transformations in the way they experience an act in the world, which are developed by continued management of their own alcohol addiction vulnerabilities. Although we consider the results preliminary when it comes to conceptualizing recovery, we believe they may help future studies to develop therapeutic strategies committed to promoting patient recovery.