Robert F. Kenney Jr. cured his addiction to heroin through a spiritual transformation and ongoing faith. Here is his story in an interview with Jordan B. Peterson on his podcast on June 5, 2023[i].
Kennedy self-medicated
Peterson: You said something interesting too. You said that as you proceeded through school, you started to self-medicate. And then you actually were able to perform in school. So can you elaborate a little bit more about what happened there?
Kennedy: I could not sit still at all and I couldn’t concentrate and I started that after my dad died. I became addicted to heroin and that allowed me to concentrate. I went from the bottom of my class to the top of my class. So I could sit still and read. So I don’t know. I think I would have probably been diagnosed, if I was a kid today, I would probably been diagnosed with ADHD. And then, you know, dosed with Adderall or Ritalin or Concerta, and that probably would have the same effect, I suppose. I don’t know, but I imagine it would have.
Peterson: And you got tangled up with drug use on that front. How old were you when you started?
Kennedy: I was 15.
Peterson: You were 15. And you were arrested at one point, if I remember correctly. And then, and so how did that all sort itself out?
Kennedy Gets Free Of Addiction
Kennedy: I got sober in September 1983. I was arrested. I went into a twelve-step program. And I go today, I go to be in meetings every day still 40 years later.
Peterson: Why do you still do that? What good did it do you?
Kennedy: Well my obsession, the obsession that I had, by the way, while I was an addict, I was not happy in that situation. And I knew it was bad for me and I was trying earnestly, sincerely to quit constantly. But I couldn’t. And I had what I considered iron willpower. I gave up candy for lent, when I was 12 years old. And I didn’t eat candy again until I was in college. I gave up desserts the following year for lent, and I didn’t eat another dessert till I was in college. I was doing sports I was playing rugby in college. I was trying to bulk up and I started eating desserts again and candy. I felt like I could do anything with my willpower. But the addiction, the drug addiction, was absolutely impervious to it.
Then, I came in ’80 and ’83. You know that the purpose of the twelve-step program ultimately is to use a discipline of service to induce a spiritual awakening. If you look at addiction, that’s kind of a shortcut to spiritual sustenance. All of us have kind of a God-sized hole in us that we’re trying to fill. And addicts, addiction is the habit of trying to fill that hole inside of you with things that change the way you feel about yourself. With things that are outside of you, whether they’re drugs or sex or.
I mean, my mind was really kind of like a formulation pharmacy. I could turn anything into a drug, including ice cream or rock climbing or kayaking or falconry, or whatever. If you look at addiction that way it’s a search. The people that are addicts are searching for some spiritual connection that they don’t have.
The Only Cure For Addiction Is Spiritual Transformation
Peterson: It’s been known for years among alcohol researchers, whether they’re religious or atheistic alike, that the only certain pathway to alcohol addiction treatment is generally through something approximating spiritual transformation. Now no one knows why that is but the ideas that you laid out are part and parcel of the theorizing around that. And so was AA, and has it continued to be a stepping stone, for you to something approximating spiritual development? And have you remained within that framework, or are you going beyond it on the religious side?
Kennedy: You can’t live off the laurels of the spiritual awakening. So you have to kind of renew it every day. You have to every day. My inclination, because when you first get sober, your life, addiction makes your life very small. It’s about isolation. Your defects of characters become larger and larger. I mean, I was a bundle of appetites when I was an addict and I was just feeding them all the time. That’s how I was dealing with that emptiness inside of me. In doing that you become so totally selfish and you end up cutting off all your relationships. All addicts end up in isolation whether it’s in jail cells or coffins or in bathrooms all alone during parties or wherever.
The twelve-step program is about renewing your connection to community. God talks to us probably most eloquently through other human beings. Every human being, even somebody who gives you the finger when you’re driving on the street, is God talking to you. And you have to look at it that way and say, what am I supposed to learn from this experience? AA is a way of working the twelve-step program. I don’t want to talk about a particular one. It’s a discipline that constantly reconnects you to the community.
Kennedy’s Struggle to Stay Clean
I think most addicts have the same reaction I do, is that when you come in, your life immediately gets better. One, because you’re not high all the time and people start trusting you. You become trustworthy. You gotta stop lying and doing all the other stuff and your life just very quickly gets bigger. Your inclination is once you get moving again and the cash and prizes start kind of flowing, your inclination to say, thanks God I got it from here. And then take the wheel to the car and drive it over the Cliff again.
So the question with alcoholism and addiction is about abuse of power. It’s abusing whatever power you have, whether it’s good looks or whether it’s connections or education or wealth or whatever. We all have some power and if you’re an addict, you’re going to abuse that and take it to serve your self-interest rather than the truth and God.
So the challenge is once all the good things start happening, you come in on your knees and hopeless and saying OK I’m ready to turn it all over. I’m gonna turn my life over to a spiritual power, whatever you wanna call it. and then once all this stuff comes back you take that back and then abuse it again. So the question is how do you live with power when the power is really flowing into your life? And not abuse, not have to wait, for God to discipline you, which is called humiliation. But discipline yourself through humility. That is a discipline, and in order to live that way you have to wake up every day and say reporting for duty sir. And give up control every day.
Growing up a Kennedy
Peterson: Has that also helped you? One of the things that I’m very curious about is the pros and cons of growing up as a Kennedy. You’re part of a dynastic family with a tremendous public name and so there’s opportunities there and pitfalls, obviously, and I suppose the pitfalls would be associated with the kind of pride that you just talked about, that ability to take things into your own hands and to act instrumentally. Has the twelve-step ethos and that search for spirituality that you described has that also helped you deal with the perils and pitfalls of being part of the Kennedy clan?
Kennedy: I don’t think it matters where you are but I think you know part of my family gives me more access to power. Which means more access to power that can be abused. And also it gives me resilience, a short recovery time, and more opportunity to entertain the illusion that I’m actually in charge of my own life. And that I’m responsible for the good things that happened to me. People say you’re born on third base and you think you hit a triple. You can convince yourself that you know the things that that are good things that are happening to you are because of your own merit. That’s not entirely true. I knew when I got sober that I had to have a spiritual awakening because I knew I had to have a profound spiritual realignment. I didn’t want to be the person I was. I didn’t want to be sort of white-knuckling it and feeling like I wanted drugs all the time but was resisting them.
Transformed by Faith
I wanted to be one of those people who got up every day and kiss your wife and went to work and was not thinking of heroin all day. You know that was a curse to me. And so I knew that I had to have some kind of profound spiritual realignment. I knew a lot about history. I read the lives of the Saints. I knew that people like Saint Augustine who led a debauched youth and then had this alignment and walked away from it all. Saint Francis of Assisi, the same thing. Saint Paul of Damascus who had a different kind of power abuse but had also been transformed by a spiritual awakening.
I had a friend who was one of my brothers best friends. A brother who died of this disease of addiction. But he used to take drugs the same way that I did and also my brother did and he then became a Moonie. He joined the Unification Church and he would still hang out with us and became a follower of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. He would still hang out with us but he no longer wanted to take drugs. He would sort of chatter about his own stuff and about what he was doing, etc., and he was completely untempted. Like the obsession had completely disappeared and I knew that he had had that same obsession that I had. I used to think about him when I got sober.
I think, I mean, this is going to be uncharitable but I was thinking at the time that I’d rather be dead than be a Moonie. But, I wish somehow I could get whatever it was, that to be able to distill whatever it was, whatever power it was, that he had gotten from that experience. To be able to just change so that he no longer wanted it, without becoming a religious nuisance.
History of Twelve-step Program
My path to that was through the twelve-step program. The 12 steps are induced. The way that they work is they induce. Bill Wilson was the first guy. There was another group before AA called the Oxford group that had eight steps. Those eight steps were designed, that were very similar to the twelve-steps, they were designed to induce the spiritual awakening. And he had a spiritual awakening.
His desire for alcohol was completely lifted, it was obliterated, just abolished. It was like he never had it. Then he went along with his life and he was a businessman and once he stopped drinking became very successful. He put together a deal to buy the Firestone Fire Company that took him to Akron, Ohio. But he put all of his money, his worldly possessions into that deal. When he was in Akron, the deal fell apart and he had no money to get home, no money to move, he had blown everything. His life was in tatters. He had left his charmed existence since he had got sober, and all of a sudden the world turned against him. He had the sudden compulsion to drink again.
He was standing in the hotel in Akron and he heard, he could hear the laughter coming from the lounge and the clinking of the ice in the glasses, and it was calling to him, just was demanding that he come back into that bar. He had this intuition, which is the central revelation of the twelve-step philosophies. He realized the only way that he was going to stay sober that night was if he found another alcoholic to help. And he went to the phone book, he took out the Yellow Pages and he started calling the Salvation Army hospital. He talks to sanitariums and local preachers and he finally found a guy named Dr. Bob Smith, who was a hopeless alcoholic, and who agreed to meet him for 15 minutes. They ended up spending the whole night with each other and that was the first AA meeting.
Daily Meetings For 40 Years
That was the beginning of it but it was what they did – they created a twelve-step switch, a way of reconnecting to the community. You get rid of your other defects that have kept you out of relationships. You clean up all the mess you’ve made in your past. And then the rest of it is about helping another alcoholic every day. So you have to do that service in order to maintain your spiritual condition. It’s conditional upon you helping somebody else every single day. That’s why you know, I don’t like going to meetings. When I first got sober, I said to a guy, “how long do you have to keep going to these?” He said, “Just keep coming until you like it”. And I’ve been coming 40 years and I still don’t like it.
But I go because I don’t want to live with the consequences of what will happen to me if I don’t go. I go for the same reason I brush my teeth. You know, I don’t like brushing my teeth. I don’t look forward to it. I don’t enjoy it. I have to get my butt out of bed to go do it. But I do it because I don’t want my breath to smell, my teeth to fall out, and my gums to rot. Going to that meeting every day, which I don’t want to do, is like my mental floss hygiene.
[i] Jordan B. Peterson podcast, #363, June 5, 2023. Rekindling the Spirit of the Classic Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy. The transcript begins at the 1 hour and 35-minute mark. The transcript of the dialog was cleaned up to make it easier to read. Repeat words, unused phrases, unnecessary conjunctions, and phrases such as “you know” were removed.
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