What It Was Like, What Happened, What It Is Like Now: Liminal Spaces and the Pedagogy of Recovery

Addiction recovery is frequently interpreted through biomedical or punitive frameworks that overlook its cultural, ritual, and pedagogical dimensions. This article offers a theoretical and interpretive analysis of peer‐led, meeting‐based recovery communities in North America, particularly those organized around mutual‐aid traditions such as Alcoholics Anonymous and related social‐model practices. It argues that these settings function as ritual pedagogies, patterned systems of learning and moral practice through which participants reconstruct identity over time. Drawing on anthropological theories of ritual and liminality alongside perspectives from adult learning, recovery meetings are examined as environments of recurring liminality rather than singular rites of passage. While the familiar narrative sequence of what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now parallels classic tripartite models, recovery does not reliably culminate in stable incorporation. Instead, participants often move through cycles of instability, relapse and return. Within this framework, testimony, understood as structured first‐person narrative sharing, functions as a central practice; sponsorship operates through relational mentorship; and shared texts and meeting formats serve as portable curricula that stabilize participation across time and space. These processes are sustained through a structural ethics of care that enables repeated reentry and ongoing transformation.