Disturbing the ‘spoiled-unspoiled’ binary: performances of recovering identities in drug-experienced youths’ friendship narratives

Abstract

In existing recovery studies, binary distinctions between ‘spoiled’ identities defined by drug-related practices and relationships on the one side, and ‘un-spoiled’ drug-free identities on the other, are dominant. Similarly, in contexts of youth drug-treatment, substance-using friends are generally viewed as ‘bad company’, while non-using friends are considered as recovery promoters. This article, however, joins the growing chorus of qualitative researchers beginning to question critically this ‘spoiled-unspoiled’ distinction. Based on 30 qualitative interviews with 15 young people recruited from a Danish drug-treatment database, we investigate how drug-experienced youth perform recovering identities vis-à-vis their still-using friends. Employing a performative approach to identity formation, we demonstrate how such identity processes play out, and the dilemmas and ambivalences they entail. For example, while drug-using friends are regularly positioned as ‘bad company’, this is often accompanied by sentiments such as loss and frustration. Our analysis suggests that young people in recovery are easily trapped between societal expectations related to factors such as education on the one hand, and comfortability and connectedness with friends on the other. However, by means of carefully balanced ‘borderwork’, participants did occasionally manage to integrate using friends into their recovering identities without positioning them as ‘bad company’ per se. On this basis, we discuss whether breaking bonds with friends who still use drugs is imperative for any process of recovery, and argue that treatment programmes should focus on reconfiguring drug-related friendships, while taking seriously the notion that recovering youth are not necessarily interested in abandoning relations with drug-using friends.

Keywords:

• Young people
• friendship
• drug use
• recovery
• identity
• borderwork

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Graduate School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark. The authors would like to thank their colleagues for supportive and critical comments. Sincere thanks are extended to the young people who agreed to participate in the study, for their interest in the project, and for their willingness to tell their stories.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 Despite interviewing all participants twice, the study design is not longitudinal, and exact follow-up data on their levels of use has not been obtained. Also, in terms of data analysis, the intention with the two interviews was not to use them as ‘waves’ in the analysis. Rather, the intention was to strengthen the quality of the data, i.e. by having enough time to dwell on and delve into the experiences and descriptions brought in the interviews.

2 According to Danish research regulations, no further ethical approval is required.