[lgas]

I think there is a lot of similar language/perspectives etc in the recovery world -- as a prominent example, many years ago I was dismayed when a friend of mine joined AA to discover that one of the steps was admitting to being powerless over your addiction -- I was certain at the time that this was exactly the opposite of what a healthy approach would be, to wit, repeating the mantra that you can and do have control, and fostering that belief.

However in the many years since I have had more exposure to AA and other recovery programs and I've discovered that while there are other programs (such as SMART recovery) that take drastically different approaches, in practice AA is really the only program with a significant success rate.

I known people that entered a recovery program, "got better", and moved on with their lives successfully and I know people that first got started with AA 25+ years ago and still attend meetings at least weekly today. Not to gatekeep addiction but I think the people from this first group are not "real" addicts in some sense, and for those people you are probably right and continuous self-labeling would be harmful.

But for the people from that second group, I think it's true -- there's literally no hope that they will ever live a happy health life outside of a program that keeps their focus on their addiction/recovery every day. Any significant loss of focus will result in an immediate and precipitous downward spiral. For these people "sober addict" isn't something that's damaging their self perception, it's something that's improving it, because they're comparing it to the only other option they have which is "active addict".