by M. Scott Peck, MD
Genuine communities of a sort frequently develop in response to crisis. Strangers in the waiting room of an intensive-care ward suddenly come to share each other’s hopes and fears and joys and griefs as their loved ones lie across the hall on the “critical list.”
On a larger scale, in the course of a minute a distant earthquake causes buildings to crumble and crush thousands of people to death in Mexico City. Suddenly rich and poor alike are working together night and day to rescue the injured and care for the homeless. Meanwhile men and women of all nations open their pocketbooks and their hearts to a people they have never seen, much less met, in a sudden consciousness of our common humanity.
The problem is that once the crisis is over, so—virtually always—is the community. The collective spirit goes out of the people as they return to their ordinary individual lives, and community is lost. Yet community is so beautiful that the time of crisis is often mourned. Many Russians speak with great feeling about the brutal days of the siege of Leningrad, when they all pulled together. American veterans still remember the muddy foxholes of World War II, when they had a depth of comradeship and meaning in their lives they have never since been quite able to recapture.
The most successful community in this nation—probably in the whole world—is Alcoholics Anonymous, the “Fellowship of AA.” In June 1935 Bill W. started the first AA group in Akron, Ohio. Today, a mere two generations later, there are AA groups—and Alanon groups and Alateen groups and Overeaters Anonymous groups and Emotions Anonymous groups, and other such groups—in every hamlet of the country. Through the community of AA and similar fellowships modeled on it, millions upon millions have received healing, millions upon millions have found meaning in their lives. And all this has been done with virtually no organization, the founders having brilliantly sensed that excessive organization is antithetical to community. There are no dues, no budgets, no buildings. Yet no other phenomenon has had such an impact for good in the nation.
As with the victims of a natural disaster, AA starts with people in crisis. Men and women come to it in a moment of breaking.
They come to it because they realize that they do not “have it all together,” that they are in need, that they can no longer go it alone. Yet it would be a mistake to think of alcoholics as a truly special breed. Because it has become a safe place in which to reveal themselves, all men and women in genuine community sooner or later confess their brokenness. We are all wounded. None of us really has it all together. None of us can really go it alone. We are all in need, in crisis, although most of us still seek to hide the reality of our brokenness from ourselves and one another.
The men and women of AA can no longer hide their alcoholism; they must confess their brokenness. Crisis is a built-in condition of the AA community, and in that sense alcoholism may be a blessing. The men and women in the Fellowship of AA have chosen with great grace and wisdom to augment this blessing. For they early developed the tradition of referring to themselves not as “former alcoholics” or “recovered alcoholics” but always as “recovering alcoholics.” What they mean by this term is that the crisis is omnipresent. Recovery is never complete. The danger of relapse is always there. So also is the need for community and the omnipresent opportunity for psychospiritual growth. Recognition of the continuing crisis of alcoholism is part of the genius of AA.
The remarkable success of AA suggests that if we recognized that crisis is an everyday event in our lives, it would make community a matter of routine. It may seem strange that we should want to look at our lives as an everyday crisis. But I am reminded of the Chinese word for crisis, which consists of two characters: one represents “danger” and the other “hidden opportunity.” Certainly we should like our lives to be ones of daily opportunity. Moreover, there is a profound although little understood reality of psychological health. Contrary to what many might believe, the healthy life is hardly one marked by an absence of crises. In fact, an individual’s psychological health is distinguished by how early he or she can meet crisis.
The word crisis is fashionably used these days in the term “midlife crisis.” But long before this term was invented the phenomenon was recognized in women as a frequent element of the menopause. While it was common for some women to become depressed during menopause, it was hardly inevitable. What happens to a psychologically healthy woman, to cite an admittedly oversimplified example, is that one day in her mid-twenties, perhaps, she looks in the mirror, sees the beginning of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, and thinks to herself, You know, I don’t think that the Hollywood talent scout is going to come around. That same woman in her mid-thirties, when her youngest child starts kindergarten, muses, Maybe I ought to start doing something other than make the children the sole focus of my life. So she begins the difficult process of developing a second career. Then, in her mid-fifties when her periods cease, with the exception of hot flashes (which can be annoying enough), she is likely to sail easily and happily through menopause because she had negotiated the crisis twenty years before.
The woman likely to get into serious difficulty, however, is the one who tries to put off the crisis, who holds onto the fantasy that the Hollywood talent scout is still going to come around, and who does not work on developing any significant interest in her life beyond her children. Is it any wonder, then, that around the time her periods stop (which is also the time when no amount of makeup can hide the wrinkles and her children have departed home, leaving her not only with an empty nest but also an empty life style) she should fall apart?
I use the above example not to stereotype either women or the problems of midlife. While the flavor may be different, the problems of midlife are as intense for men and can be handled equally well or equally poorly. These are not easy problems. But they demonstrate the point that the healthy life consists of meeting and resolving crises as early as possible so that we can get on to the next one. Oddly, the best measure of psychospiritual
There is a dreadful form of psychiatric disorder that compels its victims to lead destructively histrionic lives. The far more common curse, however, is for us human beings to fail to live our lives with a proper sense of drama. Here those people with an active religious bent have another advantage. Secular people have plain ups and downs in their lives, while we religious get to have “spiritual crises.” It is much more dignified, or so it would seem, to have a spiritual crisis than a depression. It is also often the more appropriate way of looking at things. But, in fact, all psychological problems can be seen as crises of the human spirit. In my practice of psychotherapy, more often than not I have to work quite hard to teach people a sense of their own importance and dramatic significance.
We do not have to manufacture crises in our lives; we have merely to recognize that they exist. Indeed, we must recognize that we live in a time in which our need for community has itself become critical. But we have a choice. We can keep on pretending that this is not so. We can continue refusing to face the crisis until the day when we individually and collectively destroy ourselves and our planet. We can avoid community until the end. Or we can wake up