Neuroqueering Addiction, Sobriety, and Recovery

What if addiction isn’t a disease, but a way we’ve learned to cope? What if sobriety isn’t just about abstinence, but about sensing ourselves, how things make sense, and what makes sense? What if recovery isn’t a rigid path—but a way to reconnect with something alive, relational, and yours to shape?

In this episode, I share the story of my own unconventional sobriety outside of AA and traditional recovery models. I talk about why those spaces didn’t work for me, what did, and how receiving late diagnoses of ADHD and autism gave me the language to understand what I’d really been doing all those years: self medicating. I wasn't addicted- I was adapting. 

This is the beginning of an ongoing conversation about neuroqueering addiction, sobriety, and recovery. To make more room for complexity, difference, and care. To give us more options by shifting from the pathology paradigm to a diversity one. 

If the traditional path has never quite fit you either, I hope this episode helps you feel more seen and less alone.

I have an upcoming live class on August 24 where we’ll explore these ideas in community. Find out more/sign up

 📬 Reach me anytime at amy@rebelling.me

Ghost Walk- post I read from in this episode

SOBERBIA on Blogger and SOBERBIA on Substack

🖤 Thanks to Nick Walker for his work and the concept of neuroqueering, as well as the pathology and neurodiversity paradigm.

NEUROQUEER: AN INTRODUCTION 

THROW AWAY THE MASTER’S TOOLS: LIBERATING OURSELVES FROM THE PATHOLOGY PARADIGM

Transcript

Amy Parrish 
Hi y'all, welcome back to Rebelling. This is Amy. And today I'm gonna talk about neuroqueering, addiction, sobriety, and recovery. As someone who has been sober for about 12 and a half years now, ⁓ without doing traditional recovery, I feel like it's really important for us to talk about alternatives.

when it comes to taking care of ourselves. And one of the alternatives to me is doing sobriety and recovery differently

And so what I'm thinking about today, and this is gonna be an ongoing conversation as all of our conversations are, because I feel like we're learning together.

But in this first part, I wanna talk about some ideas that I'm having about it, share a little bit about my own story. And just, this is for us to get the conversation started. And what I'm wondering is what are we missing about addiction, about sobriety, and about recovery?

How can we add to the ways we think about it? So there are more options.

What I knew when I quit drinking is that I was not interested in traditional recovery.

I knew that I needed something different to be able to quit, that I needed to be able to do it my way.

I went to an AA meeting back in my early 20s, that was in the early 90s, and it didn't feel like what I needed.

I thought about going to AA when I was in my thirties, but it felt, it just didn't feel like what I wanted. And with two little kids trying to get to 90 meetings in 90 days, it just felt impossible.

It just felt like something that I was not drawn to enough to try to make it work.

And so I didn't go. And I knew from basically from the very beginning of my drinking, I started when I was 14, that I shouldn't drink because of the history of alcoholism in my family.

AA seemed like it was missing what I needed. And I needed soothing and trying to get to meetings and follow this protocol and be on a script and call myself an alcoholic and all these things. It didn't feel like recovery to me. And so I didn't go.

And instead I woke up December 7th, 2012, hung over, unable to get out of bed. And I had this vision of what my life was going to look like if I kept drinking. And that vision showed me that I would end up alone and that my children would be ashamed of me and not want me to be their mom anymore.

And I quit. And I decided that I was gonna quit and I was gonna trust myself to create my own options. And it worked. I've been sober for 12 and a half years.

There were a lot of things that I did differently that didn't match traditional recovery.

The biggest thing that helped me when I first quit was not taking it one day at a time. It's funny. I didn't, you know, I didn't know I was AuDHD at the time, but I took that one day at a time thing literally. And so I thought that meant that every day I was going to have to decide whether I was going to drink or not. And man, that shit did not work for me. I knew.

that I could not be trusted to make that decision every day. I was already doing that. It wasn't working. But when I got the word forever in my mind, that worked for me. But because of the traditional rhetoric, saying forever just didn't seem like an option in that way.

but forever gave me the freedom to never have to make that decision again. The answer was always no and always is still no.

I didn't go to meetings. It was something I didn't want to do. ⁓ Social things are hard for me. I waited tables for 30 years so I can make small talk. But to show up and talk about me, to connect with a room full of strangers, like even thinking about it right now makes my stomach jump. I don't.

It just wasn't, I just knew that was not what I needed.

And so I did know that the connection was something that I needed. And so I decided I would sort of make up what felt like my own meetings, that I would blog about my sobriety.

And I started a blog a couple weeks after I quit and I decided I was not going to be anonymous. I wanted to be myself, me out there writing about something that I had struggled with my whole life.

And, you know, me not being anonymous, was, I lost a friend over it.

But for me, I felt like I had been hiding my whole life. And so I didn't want to hide anymore.

I also didn't claim the identity of alcoholic. I lived that identity for 27 years and that was not who I was trying to be. I didn't want to call myself alcoholic and claim that identity. I wanted to claim the identity of sober.

I wanted to claim the identity of a person who was taking responsibility for their life. I didn't need a banner of shame. I really felt so strongly about that, that I had already lived in that identity of alcoholic and I didn't.

It didn't help me feel like I could get better if I was always holding out the thing.

that made me suffer.

I really think that the steps rush in to take power away from us when really what we need is a sense of agency and not shame. And especially for neurodivergent people.

That sense of agency is so important. The ability to shape and make things how you need them to be and to be honored as an individual while also trying to participate in community feels really important.

Putting this label of alcoholic on myself, like I was already steeped in my badness. I was already broken down and I knew I needed something else. And that meant turning towards myself rather than turning my life over.

That meant not erasing myself.

I also.

did not want to.

Convince myself that I had to live in fear of relapse for the rest of my life that I would always be you know sick I wanted a sense of security not a prison of fear

I blackout drank for 27 years, but I don't believe I was addicted to alcohol.

I was self-medicating.

I believe I was using alcohol as a coping mechanism. I was using it to self-regulate. I was using it to feel better, feel more functional. I was using it to manage stress, sensory overload, to deal with my emotions.

And I did it so that I could shut my brain off.

And I remember getting drunk the first time, blackout drunk.

and

how good it felt

to just black out.

And it was what I needed. I just needed quiet.

when I drank, I could forget I was a person. I could forget about it all.

and I black out drank for 27 years.

I'm going to read something from my blog, Soberbia from October of 2022.

What would she think about Would me at 23 be like, wow, you're 51? We actually lived? she be shy, ashamed of me now like I was ashamed of me then?

or would her shoulders sag with relief?

What about 31 year old me, the one who woke up in cold puddles of pee, mattress soaked, so drunk the night before that I wet the bed again? What would she think?

Would her mouth fall open when she met My starting to gray hair. Would she recognize me, yet see a stranger? What would this 51 year old today me do or say if I went back in time to meet myself there and then?

Would I be horrified, detached, loving, still in denial?

I like to think I would rush in to save myself, save her, save all of me. That I would trample all the time traveling rules and tell her all the things I know now and together we would stop all the damn suffering. We'd build a reputable, solid, lively life that I would be proud of much sooner than right now. Alas.

Impossible, no matter how hard I wish I could make it true.

This makes me sadder than almost anything else, that I can't rewrite bottomless suffering I did while I waited to wake up from the things my life did to me.

the things I did to me.

The drinking was definitely a practically impassable coping mechanism. And quitting is definitely a glorious hallelujah miracle. And then there's all the things that are still here, even though you don't drink anymore, you still have the things.

This caught my attention.

when I was looking for an from my blog to put in this episode because it calls drinking a coping mechanism. And it was amazing to me how clearly I understood that drinking was self-medicating right after I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism.

It was immediately like, oh, yeah, yeah, yes, I knew this. I knew I wasn't addicted. I knew I was using it for another reason. I wasn't physically addicted to alcohol.

I was trying to cope.

And I think there are so many of us out there who don't fit the typical version of addict addiction.

and that we either don't drink anymore, but also don't get the healing that we need, or we don't.

Quit.

I will never forget when I first started seeing my first therapist and she's asked me about detoxing from alcohol. And I said, what? didn't detox. She said, you could have died. I'm like, yeah, but what do you mean? I didn't drink every day.

I didn't drink in the morning. I didn't.

I wasn't at the mercy of alcohol.

I was at the mercy of not understanding who I was so that I knew how to help myself.

the ways my therapist talked about addiction that didn't make sense to me. And then when I said that, it was framed as denial and avoidance.

The denial in general of any experience that doesn't line up with the narrow frame of traditional recovery and AA. ⁓

And so for me, it made total sense that I just decided to quit and it worked because I wasn't addicted. I was self-medicating and that difference is really important.

And so for over 12 and a half years, I have been trying to figure out how to neuroqueer addiction, sobriety, and recovery. But I didn't have the word neuroqueer.

But that word, it is exactly what I've been doing. My unconventional sobriety and recovery has been me neuroqueering experience.

And I wouldn't have that word if I had not spent the time since I quit believing that there is a different way to talk about my experience and that what happened to me doesn't have to keep happening.

Veering off of the path of experts and common knowledge is what brought me here.

Listening to myself even when someone or society told me something that I knew wasn't true for me

is how I have stayed sober and in recovery.

for so long.

And that's why we need to talk about it.

Traditional Recovery and AA are the loudest, biggest voices in the conversation.

and I want there to be a chorus, it doesn't need to be a solo.

My diagnoses led me to what I needed, words to describe my experience. And the identity feels like it gives me the right to do that.

It feels like foundation under a new idea that lacked the vocabulary to give it structure. And now I have the structure so it can become more and more coherent.

That's how I am going build out the ideas about neuroqueering, addiction, sobriety, and recovery.

We have to shift the paradigm from pathology to diversity.

The pathology paradigm says that addiction is a defect, a moral failing. This thing about you needs to be fixed, cured, controlled, and that it is a lifelong disease that is never fully cured. So you always have to live in fear of relapse. Also, there's only one way to do this. And if you don't do it this way, you aren't really sober in recovery.

The pathology paradigm is about what's wrong with you. Like you're the problem.

and your behavior needs to be corrected.

The diversity paradigm says addiction is a response to context, pain, or unmet needs. Addiction is not a moral failing. It is an adaptation used to survive.

It doesn't blame the individual. It looks at what contexts made the behavior seem necessary. It allows for doing things differently and doesn't rely on doing things normally. It's about willing.

It's about being willing to not have all the answers.

And so just like sharing this idea became coherent because of words and because words matter, I want to change the way we talk about it. I want to change the way we talk about addiction, sobriety, and recovery. And one way we do that is by using different words.

And so we shift pathology-based terms like addiction, like sobriety, like recovery.

to a more neuroqueer.

way of talking.

So addiction becomes self-medicating or self-soothing.

it's not a disease needing control.

It's a strategy needing context and care.

sobriety becomes sensing and sense making.

There's the absence of the substance and presence with sensation.

Recovery becomes reconnecting.

so it goes from a fixed you're never well from, that you're always

in danger of getting sick?

It goes to reconnecting.

It goes to being a living relational journey towards yourself and others.

And while AA has helped millions, it's often built on binary, moral, and behavioral assumptions that don't make sense for neurodivergent needs.

or nonlinear healing.

That's why alternative or neuroqueered approaches are so important.

AA is built around a specific structure with widely recognized rules, norms, cultural expectations, though the organization itself emphasizes it has no formal rules. Still, if you've been to an AA meeting, there are a lot of rules.

Neuroqueering, this experience.

making it about.

self-soothing.

sensing and reconnecting.

It invites us to reimagine the entire framework, to move beyond moralism, binaries, conformity, normalcy, and move into a place that has complexity and consent and self-trust.

And so we can instead.

ask what would healing look like if it were designed with neurodivergent, queer, and marginalized bodies and brains in mind?

This would honor the way we have coped without shame. Make room for nonlinear growth, make room for sensory and relational needs, and let us have that deep desire to reconnect with ourselves on our own terms.

Neuroqueering doesn't reject structure, it rejects rigidity.

It doesn't oppose sobriety. It expands it.

And at its core, it's not about getting back to normal, but about building something that is honest.

liberatory and alive.

I have all the, all the.

different feelings about this. I'm really excited about it. I'm nervous about it. I'm hopeful. And I also...

feel like if I had had this idea of

A way to quit drinking?

at any point in

My drinking?

Maybe I could have quit sooner.

One of the heaviest weights I carry is what if I had known what would be different? And I can't, there's nothing I can do about that now. And it's something that's really hard for me to think about.

And so what I'm going to do instead is talk out loud about giving us different ways to do things so that we don't have to suffer.

and disappear for so long.

for me, neuroqueering addiction, sobriety, and recovery, it means taking these concepts out of the rigid pathologizing and moral frameworks, especially because they fail to account for neurodivergent, queer, and marginalized experiences.

I want to approach these as personal, contextual, and relational processes rooted in care, connection, and agency.

And the way I'm being curious and courageous is by being willing to take the chance of building this rather than making it, finishing it, and then telling you what I made and asking you to do what I say. To me, life is constantly being created and being able to live in a world of curiosity, imagination, and willingness to learn.

is what will help us remember our humanity. And so instead of polishing it up and putting it out when it's ready to go, I'm gonna make this with you in front of you.

I'm really excited to brainstorm and evolve ideas in real time. I'm excited to make it up as we go along, to be in the both and of me and us, which to me is the ultimate aliveness.

And I think I'm going to do, I'm going to put together a class about this because I would like to, I would like to be able to be in live space with other people talking about this. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to put it together and have it out. It'll be sometime at the end of August because one of the things AA and traditional recovery

do get right is the aspect of community.

And I really would like to see what it's like to imagine addiction, sobriety, and recovery as an ongoing learning rather than a one size fits all. And so I would, I'll lead the class and hold the space, but we will learn from each other too. And I'm trying to get to the pulse of shared wisdom that creates a sense of belonging.

And I think by talking about neuroqueering, addiction, sobriety, and recovery in a class setting, we can put ourselves in the place where we actually belong, not at fault, but in connection.

That was a...

That was a lot of... ⁓

That was great to talk about. I really wanna talk about this more. I really appreciate you listening and I really would love to hear from you, Amy at rebelling.me, if you have thoughts or anything to share. And yeah, I really wanna give a lot of thanks to Nick Walker for neuroqueering and ⁓ also the paradigm, the pathology paradigm and the diversity paradigm. so

Yeah. Thank you so much for listening and try on the new words for size and see what they feel like. See if, if addiction becoming self-medicating and self-soothing, see if sobriety becoming sensing.

See if recovery becoming reconnecting. See what that does.

when you think about ways that you wanna be closer to yourself and to heal.

and I look forward to seeing you next time. Bye.

Hey y'all, in the episode, you heard me talk about addiction as self-medicating or self-soothing. And I realized that it makes more sense to me to call addiction adaptation. And so it's kind of funny because I said, like, I'm going to be learning and building in front of you. And so this is me doing exactly that.

It really seems like to me that if we switch addiction to adaptation, it can be a bigger umbrella that can hold self-medicating and self-soothing, but also other things too. So when I talk about the different ways of talking about addiction, sobriety, and recovery

I'm gonna talk about addiction as adaptation. And then I'll continue to talk about sobriety as sensing and recovery as reconnecting. Thanks again for listening and for learning with me. See you next time.