#Normie
I love that every subculture, no matter how small, seems to have its own special term for outsiders.
In 12-step recovery culture, members typically self-identify as alcoholics and/or addicts. Other people with suspected substance use problems might be called "drinkers" or "one of us." And everyone else is a "normie:" a person who can use substances "normally" or "like a normal person." Normies are known to leave a restaurant without finishing their drink, let the same bottle of booze sit around their home for months or years, or decide not to use a particular drug again after one bad experience with it. Which is to say, normies are weird!
The past two posts have discussed working and workers in the addiction treatment industry– first as related to mental health and then to credentialing. This week I'm addressing lived experience. Modern addiction treatment has deep roots in Alcoholics Anonymous' models of peer support and mutual aid. Many providers and other staff are people in recovery looking to do for others what was done for them– though this is less common than it used to be.
I am a normie. When patients ask about my lived experience, I promptly and straightforwardly admit that I don't have it. I'm also up front about it in all my writings on addiction because I never want to claim more expertise than I actually have. I like identifying myself specifically as a "normie" because it locates me in the out-group of the world I work in. I also think anyone who diagnoses patients should know how it feels to wear a label their patients chose for them.
I follow a number of drug user's unions on social media. In an old post I unfortunately cannot locate, one union identified "People Who Use Email Regularly" (PWUER) as a population with whom they try to work. As satire of one of the supposedly correct, value-neutral terms used for them, "People Who Use Drugs" (PWUD), it really hits. Do you spend a great deal of time on email? How long can you go without using email? How many of your activities and relationships rely on email? (This is all my own riffing; the post was more subtle.) If PWUER sound conventional and dry, that reflects something I hear a lot: that living a life considered balanced, healthy or safe would be too boring. The term PWUER politely avoids judgment, of course– like the label PWUD.
Generally, I see normie-dom as a limitation in providing substance use treatment. Shared lived experience is a beautiful bond across substance use work– from people in recovery celebrating hard-won sobriety in AA, to drug users sharing harm reduction information and supplies because people enjoy using drugs.
Rosalie Genova
I have never felt this type of connection in the work. And sometimes it's awkward to be this deeply focused, for this long a time, on a stigmatized experience and identity that I myself don't have. But a former boss in recovery told me it was actually helpful to have normie clinicians in our program. People in recovery, my boss said, sometimes held personal convictions that what worked for them would work for their patients, that every recovery story would more or less track with their own. So despite the obvious blind spots from lack of lived experience, having that experience may bring different blind spots as well.
Being a normie also brought one of my earliest insights on addiction essentialism. Listening to the recovery community describing their own– people with addictions– I noticed they attributed many negative traits and behaviors to addiction (even in long-term sober people) that I considered basic human failings. Think lying, avoidance, self-serving rationalizations, or flaking out on commitments. This gives normies far too much credit: we do all these things too!
Last week I wrote that skill and dedication, in a treatment provider, should be measured not by credentials but by their personal understanding of addiction. This post leads up to my own answer, which is: exaggeration of the human condition. Whatever addicts are doing, people in general have always done– only in perhaps less extreme or spectacular ways, with lower stakes, or via email. And the greatest compliment I have ever received as a provider is when my patients or colleagues in recovery forget I'm a normie. Whatever our differences or our commonalities, this tells me I've found a way– without necessarily knowing how– to relate my full self to theirs.
