William Moyers wrote a bestselling book called Broken in 2006 which chronicled his journey in sobriety from alcohol and crack cocaine addiction. In 2014 after years of sober living, he found himself addicted to painkillers prescribed after dental surgery. He had made (and continues to make) his living as the Public Relations Director for the Betty Ford Recovery Organization. His just released 2024 book, Broken Open, describes his relapse and subsequent recovery from painkillers.
I found this section of the book relevant to our work exploring shame as a key fuel that often underlies our addiction… and if we ignore this pain our addiction may find another way to ignite itself from what remains unconscious and thus unhealed. . It also is a reminder that we are not ‘all or nothing… that , within us , we can think of ourselves as having different parts, each with deeply held different beliefs and conflicting behaviors and coping strategies.(See website section ‘Healing Our Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde Divided Selves) We can learn that all of these parts need the compass and direction of our Higher Self … the essence of who we are ; that ‘unsuspected inner resource’ (Big Book Appendix 2 Spiritual Experience p.567) patiently waiting to help us practice imperfectly spiritual principles in the whatever circumstance of Now – Bruce M.
In her wonderful book The Gifts of Imperfection, researcher Brené Brown describes a crisis that reflects my experience. Writing about the tension between living authentically, which includes admitting and even embracing one’s imperfections, and living for approval, which entails hiding or denying imperfections, she arrives at an illuminating conclusion. When you exchange your personal authenticity for others’ approval, she writes, “You stop believing in your worthiness and start hustling for it.”
I’ve been skeptical of my worthiness for a great many years. Dr. Brown’s insight has helped me recognize that this self-doubt is connected to some moment, or series of moments, wherein I began to trade my authentic self for a version of me that would earn the acceptance and approval of other people. While I can’t pinpoint the place in my life where this self-abandoning hustle started, I know it was early. When I was in second grade, I gave away all the nickels in my coin collection to the other children on the playground. Years later, strung out on a Harlem street corner, I bought ice cream for all the kids on the block. I noticed early on that people responded when I gave them something. They patted me on the back, they laughed and smiled. People liked me when I could make them feel good.
Those early lessons stuck. From handing out my nickels as a boy who hoped to make a friend to signing books and smiling when I felt like screaming, I’ve pretended and performed for most of my life, hustling to be what people want when they wanted it. External validation, acceptance, applause, recognition—I’ve been chasing these things since childhood.
My hunger for this approval followed me into sobriety. It matured with me as I became more in control of my passions and impulses. My choice to publicly share my status as a person in recovery and make it central to my professional life meant that my personal sobriety included performing a public role. I turned out to be good in the role—so good that people gave me standing ovations. They paid me lots of money for my inspiring story. They validated me. They invited me to speak and share my opinions. They looked to me for words of wisdom and an image of hope, and they thanked me when I delivered.
The aspects of my worthiness-hustling personality that contributed to my opioid addiction and kept me within its grasp—my failures of courage and honesty, my self-doubt, my impulse to protect myself by trying to control how others perceive me—remain part of me. The Big Book calls these “defects of character” and suggests that they’re symptoms of an alcoholic’s or addict’s disease. While I certainly see the way my addictions affected my thinking and influenced my behavior, I’m unwilling to ascribe all my dysfunctions to the effects of the drugs I took or the booze I drank. Rather than calling them defects and working to purge these impulses and attitudes from my life, I’m learning to see and name them as the less helpful parts of my personality. I’m coming to understand and accept how many of these unruly aspects of who and how I am were part of that hungry hole in my soul way before my first hit on a joint or my first beer or line of coke.
For a long time, I’ve felt ashamed of these parts of my personality. And while my hustling and achieving have occasionally earned me temporary respites from that burden, I’ve also found shame to be a remarkably nimble and sticky force in my life. Fueled and fed by my deep fear of disappointing people, my shame jumps effortlessly from one perceived failure to another. In this story, even before I thought about popping a pain pill, shame attached itself to my affair, my inability to embody the man portrayed in Broken, my divorce from Allison, my worn-down teeth, my imperfect parenting skills, my failure to please my parents, and the dubious value I suspected I provided my employer and my colleagues. When the oxycodone I was prescribed after my dental surgery offered me a brief chance to rest from laboring under the weight of this heavy wad of sticky shame, I took it.
Then I took some more.
The painkillers erased the pain in my mouth. They also removed, for a few hours at a time, the deeper pains I had been carrying for decades. I’ve since learned that opioids—the painkilling pills that so powerfully captured me—have a unique capacity to relieve emotional pain. They do this as effectively as they address acute physical pain. This is part of what clinicians describe as the “profoundly reinforcing aspect” of opioids—a key reason people like me find these drugs so attractive and so hard to let go of.
At first the pills provided relief from the anxiety that drove me to constantly demonstrate my value, from the shame of doubting my worthiness, and from the persistent fear that I would somehow be exposed as an imposter or a fraud. Then, of course, they became themselves yet another source of shame and fear, soon compounded by my inability to stop wanting them.
Finding myself on the wrong side of the fence and far from the safe center that had kept me from death and given me everything good in my life was terrifying. The idea of failure—of losing the respectability and status I had acquired—filled me with shame. Perhaps more than anything else, this is why I suffered in silence for so long as I struggled with the painkillers. It’s also why I later hesitated to share my ongoing use of Suboxone with people I suspected would judge me as being un-sober. I worried that, rather than embracing me as a person who continued to desire and pursue recovery, some would consider me a still-active opioid user—someone who fell outside the boundary that divided the saved from the lost.
Following my revelations on the stage at the Betty Ford Center, some people doubted my recovery status. A few months later, someone accused me of being under the influence. One person went so far as to suggest that I should stop giving speeches and publicly representing the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation until I had clocked at least a full year of sobriety—presumably from a date they would assign.
That experience of being judged and found lacking wasn’t a first for me, and it very likely won’t be the last. It’s also not unique to me. The man I consoled that night at the Elks Lodge shared the same experience. I wonder how many others experience slights or even hostility, or fear that they will receive such treatment, from their fellow travelers if they stray from the conventional path.
Some might argue that there’s a place for healthy shame or fear in recovery because the stakes are so high. If that’s the case, I believe it’s a small one and must be specific to the situation. Fear of legal consequences can keep you coming back to the safety and support of meetings. Shame and guilt about a past action or present behavior can generate energy for change. Healthy fear of what returning to active use will do to your body or your wallet or your marriage or your ability to keep your kids might be enough to give you another day without drinking or using.
You can get sober out of fear, and even stay that way for a while, but you can’t build a sustainable recovery from addiction based on the power of fear—not fear of shame, not fear of disappointing people you respect. Fear itself will eventually fail you. When your fear of failure outweighs your faith in your essential worthiness, it will make you hide behind some kind of show. You deserve better than that. You deserve to be whole.
As I continue to learn about shame and reflect on the role of fear in my recovery, I’ve begun to think about another well-worn recovery slogan in a new way. When the phrase “Fake it till you make it” functions in your ears as it was intended—when that advice encourages you to get up every day and do things that support your healing even when you’d rather stay in bed—I think it’s useful. If, however, you’ve been faking your happiness or your identity or your actions or your commitments for longer than you can remember, it’s time to stop pretending. You will never “make it” by “faking it.”
If you sense yourself hustling to demonstrate your worthiness from behind a mask, know that you can return to the authenticity that comes with honesty at any moment. Start by talking openly with someone you trust. Take it from a person who has faked and fumbled for way too long: don’t pretend to be what you aren’t, even if it’s a person you used to be or a way of life that once seemed to fit like a glove.
My battle with shame continues. I am tempted daily to discount or doubt my worthiness. Hustling for approval and validation has become second nature to me, so slowing and stopping these things requires time and patience. Detoxifying from shame and fear can be a long process. Flushing my system from the effects of these persistent poisons continues to be a challenge for me.
That said, I am getting better at recognizing when the frightened, furtive, and shame-averse aspects of who I am are trying to run the show. I’m also working to understand them and become more skilled at countering or quieting their voices. I’ve even begun to offer these unruly parts of me a little compassion—after all, they’ve worked hard trying to keep me safe for many years. I hope this book is evidence of my ongoing aspiration to live a life of authenticity, even if I have more work to do. And even though asking for help is still hard for me, I’m relieved to know that I don’t have to walk this road all by myself. I’m deeply grateful for my family and for the mentors and friends and fellow travelers who love me for who I am and who continually invite me to set aside the hustle and be a healthier, happier, and more whole person.