With Grief and Grace: Mourning and Resilience in the Rooms of Addiction Recovery

Abstract

Therapeutic responses to substance use disorder (SUD) have been an individual and community health challenge for many years. Mutual support fellowships continue to make important contributions. The peer-based, 12 Step meeting model has existed for nearly a century, and these meetings in general, and Cocaine Anonymous (CA) meetings in particular, are therapeutic. How specific topics are engaged in meetings is not well understood, especially topics related to emotional regulation. Research suggests that addiction recovery is quite similar to, and strongly linked with, a prolonged or pathological grief. How grief and healing matter in these meetings is an important area for research. This paper explores these interlinked processes in CA meetings to understand how they contribute to resilience. Shares on grief-related topics from more than 100 CA meetings and over seven years of data collection are analyzed. Addressing grief in these meetings contributes to improved health outcomes. Grief-related topics emerged into five (5) themes. These grief discussions contributed to the presence of four (4) dimensions of a social ecology of resilience in recovery.