Addiction Recovery within Relational and Communicative Systems of Meaning and Possibility

Abstract

Addiction recovery is often understood as something an individual achieves through willpower and/or treatment. Whilst it is important to recognise the personal effort and agency involved, attention shifts here toward how recovery also emerges within relational and communicative systems of meaning and possibility. From this framing, recovery is understood as realised, supported, and enacted within such systems and where experiences such as stigma, compassion, belief, and hope are held between us shaping conditions for human living. This topic is relevant to systems science as it explores how systems theory may be applied in practice to understand ways of relating with people that can enhance wellbeing and flourishing in everyday life.

What might be meant by relational and communicative systems of meaning and possibility? How might such systems be noticed within the context of addiction recovery? These questions are explored through first-person action research grounded in the author’s experience of working in communities, alongside second-person action research within a co-operative inquiry with mothers in recovery over a two to three year period. Finally, the enactment of the researcher within the research process itself is reflexively considered. If meaning and possibility emerge within relational and communicative systems, then what might this invite within the practice of research itself? What if researchers understand themselves not as standing outside what they study, but as relationally situated participants whose ways of attending, interpreting and responding also participate in shaping what becomes meaningful, imaginable, and possible? The author reflects on how such understandings were sensed and enacted within her own research practice of this topic.

This research contributes to systems science by extending understandings of human flourishing and ecologies of humanness, inviting attention to the relational and communicative systems of meaning and possibility we co-create together and from which our being and becomings emerge.