The trail through the park was packed with gravel—good for drainage during the season of high water—but the recent rains had overwhelmed it. The Fraser River, swollen with glacial melt, pressed against its banks a hundred meters to the south. We came around a bend and stopped: a puddle, shin-deep and wider than anyone could jump, stretched across the path and into dense underbrush on either side. No way around. No easy way through.
We were a group of learners and colleagues gathered for a day outdoors, and most were wearing jeans and running shoes. The puddle would have soaked them to the knees. I did not want to turn back so soon. I did not want them trundling through cold water either. We stood at the edge, stuck.
Then Andrea spoke. She could see a small log, she said, on the far side of the puddle. It might be light enough to drag into the water. It might be high enough to walk across. And Andrea, alone among the group, was wearing high rubber boots.
During the years I had known Andrea, one theme kept emerging: finding healthy community. Like many people who have struggled, she was grappling with belonging, relationship, connection—searching for a community of safety and trust. I had tried to provide opportunities for her to explore these themes, and I had felt that the results were modest at best. Building healthy community is hard, especially now, in our age of digital distraction and seemingly endless distress.
But here she was: uniquely prepared, uniquely observant. She splashed across the puddle, hefted the log by one end, and dragged it into the water. The log was exactly the length of the puddle. It was slightly bent and came to rest with the curve arcing above the deepest point. A perfectly placed pathway.
But the log was not wide, and its bark was slippery with rain. The risk of injury was real. Andrea volunteered to stand in the middle of the puddle and hold the hand of the first person to cross. Then, she suggested, the first person could station themselves on the far side and reach partway across to support the second person as Andrea brought them over. We could support each person—holding a hand, steadying a shoulder—from both sides of the puddle. Andrea would be the central figure, holding on and handing off.
And it worked. Even with Erol, a learner with a developmental mobility impairment. He edged slowly across, shuffling his feet, holding tight to Andrea’s supportive hand. Like many people with mobility impairments, Erol had often been treated by those around him as fragile, delicate, damaged. He had fought hard to defy this treatment. I was not surprised to see him forge steadily across the unsteady log.
While all this was going on—the sloshing and sliding, the holding and grabbing, the careful crossing—the group was quiet, focused, attentive. They helped one another with mindful clarity. They were emotionally and cognitively engaged. They applied physical skills together, toward a common improvised goal larger than any individual aim. No explicit leadership from me. No predetermined steps. We crossed the log together, as one collective unit.
I crossed last. Andrea grabbed my hand and helped steady me on the slick bark. As I nudged myself carefully to the other side, I wondered if any one of us could have made it across alone. The log was too slippery, too precarious. But together, we did it easily, without fuss. We continued along the path and through the park.
What the Research Actually Shows
The crossing that morning returns to me often when I think about what heals in addiction recovery—and why so much of what we prescribe misses the mark.
Contemporary research on Alcoholics Anonymous—the network of peer support groups founded in 1935, organized around twelve steps of personal admission, spiritual surrender, and amends-making—demonstrates significant results. A 2020 Cochrane systematic review found that “AA and Twelve-Step Facilitation programs led to higher rates of continuous abstinence than other established treatments” (Kelly, Humphreys, & Ferri, 2020). Among those who engage consistently with AA, abstinence rates are substantially higher than among non-participants—though self-selection complicates the comparison. People who stay in AA may differ from those who leave in ways the research cannot fully account for.
And yet the research reveals something the programs themselves rarely emphasize: the mechanism of change appears not to be the twelve steps themselves. What makes AA work for those it works for is not primarily the Big Book—the foundational text—nor the surrender to a higher power, nor the structured sequence of admissions and amends. It is belonging. The actual predictive factors are social support, recovery-oriented networks, and purposeful contribution to others (Kelly & Yeterian, 2011; Pettersen et al., 2019).
This is what Andrea discovered on the log: she mattered because she contributed. She belonged because she was essential to the crossing. Not because she followed instructions. Not because she completed steps. Because the community needed her, and she showed up.
The Geography of Escape
To understand why belonging heals, it helps to understand what addiction is responding to. I have spent decades mapping what I call the geography of escape—the terrain that trauma and early deprivation create in the nervous system, and the directions people travel to get away from unbearable experience.
Five patterns emerge repeatedly:
Elsewhere: The flight response, chemically maintained through hallucinogens or dissociative behaviors. The nervous system learned: leave. The substance facilitates departure.
Inward: The freeze response, deepened through opioids or sedatives. The nervous system learned: disappear. The substance provides numbing.
Onward: Hypervigilance maintained through stimulants. The nervous system learned: stay alert. The substance keeps the alarm running.
Backward: The fight response expressed through alcohol and defiance. The nervous system learned: push back. The substance unleashes what was forbidden.
Sideways: Cannabis deferring confrontation. The nervous system learned: not now. The substance postpones what cannot be faced.
These patterns tend to form through embodied, relational experience during critical developmental windows—though the relationship is not deterministic. Availability, peer influence, individual neurobiology, and learned reinforcement all play roles. A child who could not physically flee may have learned to flee through consciousness. A child who could not fight back may have learned to collapse. These adaptations were not failures. They were the nervous system’s best available solutions to impossible situations.
And here is the point that research increasingly supports: if the pattern formed through embodied, relational experience, it reorganizes most reliably through embodied, relational experience. This is not to dismiss cognitive work, medication, or structured programs—all of these can help, and for many people they are essential. But insight alone often struggles to reach the deeper structures—the brainstem, the limbic system, the body’s learned responses—where these patterns are organized. Understanding why you flee does not stop the flight. The nervous system changes most reliably through encounter: through direct experience that contradicts its predictions about danger and connection.
This is why the log mattered. The crossing was not a program. It was an encounter—bodies in space, hands held across water, each person supporting and being supported in turn. It was relational, embodied, immediate. It was the kind of experience that reorganizes.
What AA Gets Right
AA understands something that most clinical approaches miss: recovery happens in community, not in isolation. The sponsor relationship, the home group, the rituals of introduction and witnessing—these create belonging for people whose belonging has been fractured.
The genius of AA is that it offers acceptance without precondition. You can show up broken, ashamed, still shaking from the last drink. You do not need to be fixed to be welcomed. You do not need credentials or money or articulate insight. You need only presence. For nervous systems organized around unsafe connection—which is to say, most addicted nervous systems—this is radical. The group offers evidence that contradicts the old learning: you can be seen and not destroyed.
Andrea and Erol both spoke, later that day, about what the crossing meant to them. Andrea felt—for the first time—that she was a valued and essential member of a community. She made a unique and important contribution. We made it across because of her. Erol, for his part, reflected on his equality with others, his sense of strength and agility, his well-earned physical empowerment. No one treated him differently, and he did not need them to. He felt whole.
These were new feelings for both of them. They did not come from steps. They came from being needed, from being trusted, from being held by a community that could not cross without them.
What AA Gets Wrong
But AA’s framework carries problems that limit who it can help.
The powerlessness paradigm: The first step—admitting powerlessness over alcohol—may have made sense in the program’s origins, but contemporary research shows that personal agency and self-efficacy predict sustained recovery better than surrender (Kadden & Litt, 2011). For people whose lives have already been marked by powerlessness—those marginalized by poverty, racism, disability, or abuse—the insistence on admitting more powerlessness can reinforce rather than heal disempowerment.
The higher power requirement: Six of the twelve steps reference God or a higher power. The program claims flexibility—“God as we understood him”—and in practice, many modern AA meetings accommodate secular participants. Atheist and agnostic AA groups exist in most urban areas. But the original texts remain theistic, and in many communities the spiritual framing is more than nominal. For secular individuals, atheists, and those from non-Christian spiritual traditions, this can create an uncomfortable dissonance: the belonging feels conditional on beliefs they do not hold. What heals is community. The theology, for many, is a barrier to accessing it.
The relapse framework: AA’s approach to relapse—returning to “day one,” resetting the counter, beginning again—contradicts what neuroscience tells us about recovery. Abstinence creates lasting neural reorganization that does not disappear with a single drink (Heinz et al., 2020). Every period of sobriety matters. Every reduction in use is meaningful progress. The binary of recovery versus relapse shames people for being human.
These problems matter because they shrink the circle of who can belong. The very mechanism that makes AA work—community, welcome, contribution—is undermined by requirements that exclude people who cannot or will not accept the program’s framing.
Pathways Beyond the Program
For those who find AA’s structure helpful, it remains a valuable option. But it is not the only path, and for many, it is not the right path.
What heals is not the steps but what happens between people who share them. What heals is not the Big Book but the sponsor who calls to check in. What heals is not the higher power but the experience of being welcomed despite everything.
If belonging is the mechanism, then any community that offers genuine belonging can serve as a pathway.
Movement communities—climbing gyms, running groups, yoga studios, martial arts dojos—allow the body that learned danger to learn safety through shared physical challenge. I have watched people with decades of addiction find belonging in climbing communities, not because climbing is magic but because the group catches you when you fall.
Creative communities offer another path. Art collectives, writing circles, music ensembles, theater groups: creation is inherently relational, the work emerging from between people, belonging forming around the shared making.
Service transforms the relationship from burden to contributor. Volunteer organizations, mutual aid networks, community gardens—these offer what Andrea discovered on the log when she went from someone seeking community to someone essential to it.
Nature immersion groups—trail crews, birding clubs, forest bathing circles—provide communion through shared attention to the non-human world. The nervous system down-regulates in natural environments, and the silence of watching becomes its own form of connection.
For those who want recovery-focused community without theistic requirements, secular alternatives exist: SMART Recovery, LifeRing, Refuge Recovery. These programs offer evidence-based frameworks that respect individual agency while maintaining the communal element.
Recovery residences—sober living houses, Oxford Houses, community recovery centers—create the density of belonging that one-hour meetings cannot. Living alongside others in recovery means belonging is not scheduled but continuous.
The common element across all these pathways is not program or philosophy. It is the experience of being welcomed, being useful, being connected. Of mattering to people who matter to you.
The Relational Container
I facilitate many structured activities—programs, exercises, interventions with intended outcomes. But crossing a puddle is not an activity I would think to design. It happened because of the log: conveniently located, spontaneously glimpsed, creatively used by someone who saw what others could not see.
Andrea did not find community by following instructions. She found it because the conditions allowed her to contribute something only she could offer. She was wearing the boots. She saw the log. She knew what to do. The container—the group’s trust, the years of relationship, my presence as someone who had facilitated many such moments—made it possible for her contribution to land.
This is the paradox of belonging: it cannot be prescribed but must be provided for. You cannot program the log into existence. But you can create conditions where logs can be seen and seized. You can cultivate communities where each person’s unique offering can emerge. You can hold space for the improvised solution that no one could have designed.
For Erol, the crossing mattered because no one treated him as broken. The group did not simplify the challenge or carry him or exempt him from risk. They held his hand and let him walk. This was the relational evidence his nervous system needed: you belong here not despite your difference but alongside it.
What Individual Effort Cannot Do
Some people reading will feel the weight of what community requires. They will think: I have tried to find belonging. I have shown up. I have not been welcomed.
This is real. Belonging is not entirely within individual control. Toxic communities exist. Exclusive communities exist. Communities that profess welcome while practicing rejection exist. The failure to find belonging is not always a failure of effort or willingness. Sometimes the communities available are genuinely inadequate. Sometimes geography, poverty, disability, or discrimination constrain what is possible. The person living in rural isolation, the person with agoraphobia, the person whose social anxiety makes walking into a room of strangers feel like walking into fire—these are not minor barriers. Neither is neurodivergence that makes group dynamics exhausting, or severe mental illness that destabilizes social engagement, or an abusive relationship that controls where you go and whom you see. The nervous system cannot be forced into belonging. Some people need individual therapy before they can tolerate a group. Some need medication to stabilize enough to show up. Some need one trusted person before they can risk a room full of strangers.
I do not want to add to the burden of those already carrying enough. The article you are reading is not an accusation. If you have tried and not found belonging, the failure is not yours.
What I can offer is this: the search does not have to be heroic. It can be small and tentative. A text exchange with someone who checks in. An online community where presence is possible from a distance. A single person who knows your name and asks how you are. The nervous system does not require a group to begin learning that connection is safe. It requires an encounter—any encounter—that contradicts its predictions about danger.
For those who can access community but do not know how to begin, a few practical notes: You do not have to announce yourself or explain your history. You can show up, observe, leave early. Most communities allow peripheral participation before central belonging. The goal at first is not to be seen—it is to see. To notice whether the people in this room seem kind to one another. To register whether the environment feels safe enough to return. You can try three meetings, three sessions, three gatherings before deciding. You can leave one community and try another. The search is iterative, not singular. And the search itself—the act of looking—is already a form of agency that contradicts the passivity addiction requires.
The Afternoon
Later that afternoon, as we walked back through the park, Andrea and Erol walked together ahead of the group. They were talking quietly—I could not hear what about—but their postures had changed. Andrea moved with a kind of buoyancy I had not seen in her before. Erol walked steadily, without the guarded hesitation he often carried.
The puddle was still there when we reached it again, water still deep across the path. But now the log was placed. We crossed easily, one by one, hands extended to steady each other. It was simpler the second time. The way had been made.
This is what I want for people in recovery: not a program to follow but a community to belong to. Not steps to complete but hands to hold. Not powerlessness to admit but contribution to discover. The log appears out of nowhere, at just the right moment, and leads us to our own discoveries—but only if we are together, only if someone is standing in the middle with a hand extended, only if the group is willing to wait while the slowest member crosses.
What heals is not any particular system or set of steps. What heals is the fundamental human experience of being seen, being welcomed, being useful, being connected. Andrea found it on the log. Erol found it crossing beside her. The research confirms what the puddle taught: the mechanism of recovery is belonging. Everything else is just the path we take to get there.
For a deeper dive into running in particular, see the page below.
Running as Nervous System Medicine
Trauma Responses and the Power of Movement
The trail climbs through second-growth fir, and I settle into the grade. My breath finds its rhythm—not the shallow panting of the first kilometer but the deeper cadence that comes when the body st…
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