Putting the "Be" in "Belonging"

Recognition, redemption, and human existence

Nobody, as far as I know, has made a major commitment to sobriety while in the middle of a winning streak. I certainly didn’t. I got sober as an expression of desperation, an admission that my life was out of control and that I had no idea what to do.

A lot of people, with very good reason, had rejected me. I had gone to any lengths to stay inebriated, including lying and cheating and stealing for desperate short-term advantage. I couldn’t maintain any relationships of any kind. I didn’t know where I belonged, or if it was even possible for someone like me to belong anywhere.

AA rescued me with one line: the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. Put another way, the only requirement for belonging to the group was declaring that I belonged to the group! There was no paperwork, no résumé-checking, no evaluation of any kind - I said “I’m Max and I’m an alcoholic” and the room answered “Hi, Max!” back, immediately. Instant, unconditional recognition. That single word - “recognition” - has kept me sober ever since.

“Recognition” is philosopher‑speak for being seen and accepted, and it turns out to be the hidden fuel of human life. Recognition has been a topic of philosophical conversation at least since Hegel, who dramatized it in his master‑slave parable: the “master” craves superiority over the “slave”, but can’t achieve superiority unless being freely recognized as superior by the slave. You can force people to do a lot of things, but you can’t force somebody to freely acknowledge you. Put another way, we are what we say we are, as long as our peers choose to recognize us that way.

This is the push behind big public ceremonies, like marriages and graduations. Your diploma and your relationship exist way before those ceremonies happen, but through those ceremonies we publicly re-introduce ourselves as a graduate or a spouse, and the audience cheers us and acknowledges our new life in our newly-declared identity.

Graduations and marriages come with a fair amount of expectations and requirements, but AA does not. To graduate you have to pass a bunch of classes, and to get married you have to have another person willing to make a lifelong commitment to you. In AA, all you have to do is want to be there. As soon as you declare that you want to be there, you are.

There is a catch, however, one built into the nature of recognition. There’s always a hidden question anytime you are recognized as something - now that we see you, what will we see? When we declare ourselves to be something, we are declaring a commitment to behave consistently with that new identity. When people get married they read out their vows, defining exactly what their new identities as spouses mean to them, creating a public structure of accountability. The same thing is true when you walk into AA and declare yourself to be an alcoholic - you are inviting everybody to look at you with the expectation that you are now trying to get sober and to hold you accountable as such.

You might hear ‘expectation’ and balk, thinking that it means a pile of stringent, joyless rules to follow or else. There are some parts of recovery that are indeed challenging, and it does help to have public accountability to support you in those new behaviors. Probably the most challenging part is this: you have to believe that you are worthy of love no matter what.

AA has 12 steps, and steps 4 and 5 are key to this new self-image of unconditional worthiness of love. Recognition turns out to be the key to this newfound self-image: steps 4 and 5 have you list out everything that has you against the world, every source of friction and frustration you can think of, and speak it out loud while your sponsor sits and listens. This act of self-disclosure, done properly, brings out everything about your emotional life that you might be trying to hide, everything that convinces you that you and your life aren’t worth experiencing without being inebriated and half-dead. The sponsor is there for many reasons, to help you make sense of what you shared, to give you the push to share it, but most importantly of all they are there to recognize you. A sponsor is someone who has dealt with similar things and who can see everything that you shared and say “yeah, I get that, I’ve been there too”. This simple act of being seen is profound. You are no longer alone with anything that you feel. You are shown, directly and incontrovertibly, that every part of you is worthy of being seen and understood by another human being. Your problems are no longer proof of your terminal deformity - they are indeed still problems, just normal human-sized problems, problems you can deal with as others have before you.

The world outside of AA comes with more expectations, however. The amends process, steps 8 and 9, extends this being-recognized-as-sober process that has its foundation in every AA meeting. You declare yourself to be sober, different now and willing to make things right, to everyone you’ve ever harmed. You then take actions to set things right, making the apology an action rather than just another empty sound. You act in a way that would never have been possible while you were still worshipping your private misery. The broader world gets the opportunity to see you differently. You can’t right every wrong and - like Hegel’s master - can’t force anyone to recognize you as having changed, but the sheer activity transforms the meaning of every rupture you’ve lived through. Breakdowns turn into opportunities to live differently, to own your part in what went wrong, and to live life better from here on out.

Through the steps you go from instantly entering the social fabric of AA to re-entering the social fabric of the wider world, and then to generating the social fabric of AA itself. Step 12, sponsorship and service, leaves one recognized as a source of wisdom and strength and community, a recognition that would be unfathomable to the desperately-isolated person who first staggered through the doors.

If you think you’ve managed to avoid this give-and-take of recognition by avoiding groups of any kind, you’d be wrong - recognition is baked into everything from our language to reasoning to our political life. When I say I understand a word, I am inviting you to trust me to use the word in the same way that you do. When I say something is true, I am inviting you to trust me that I can justify the thing that I just asserted to you. When I say that I have rights, I am inviting you to recognize me as equally worthy of a good life irrespective of my wealth, my race, my age, or my usefulness in a market economy. All of these things are, like it or not, contingent upon our communities. The meaning of words and what counts as justifications completely depend on who we are asking to recognize us. The nature of our political community completely depends on who we recognize as being ‘one of us’. The challenge, I think, is to try and expand this circle of recognition - this definition of who counts as ‘one of us’ - as wide as we possibly can.

It can be weird to live life without clear rules of recognition - we humans tend to self-segregate and hang out with people who easily recognize us, whether that’s in a group like AA or in an identity-based community or a faith-based community etc. Each community has its own rules for what makes you ‘one of us’, what the entitlements and expectations are for group membership. The human world is bigger than any one group we are in, meaning that we have to learn how to live alongside people whom we can’t recognize on their terms and who won’t recognize us in turn.

All that’s to say: I had no idea what identity I’d be affirming when I started writing all of this, who I’d be serving by doing so, who would see me as being ‘good’ through what I’m up to here. I’m glad you took the time to read all of it, whoever you are - if you’re the kind of person who has wondered what it means to be recognized, I’m especially glad that you’re here.