Nice Pun. I’ll have to say that at my next meeting, they will get a big kick out of that… group therapy with a twist HAHA!!
Personal defects have nothing to do with alcoholism… That’s correct, they are mutually exclusive.
The twelve steps only allow for the people that use them to find a way to better themselves. Thats all… as for the other things you mention - biblical fonts etc…etc… I don’t know and have not heard that before.
By all those who said they are just suggestions and that any of them can be on a “take it or leave it” basis.
Just something I’ve noticed. I guess maybe you have to be unindoctrinated for it to be as apparent as it is. I couldn’t read it as anything but religious dressing. Subtle, but unmistakeable.
If you don’t mind - where have you noticed?
And I don’t mean where in the big book…I mean do you have a big book? Or attend meetings?
Please do not feel you need to answer this, of course, anyones anonymity is there own.
The bumper stickers, with regard to the Olde English font. And you can read the text of their publications on line. The Big Book | Alcoholics Anonymous
Gotcha - sorry I didn’t mean to imply
As someone who has been to many many meetings I can assure you AA is in all aspects a religious organization. AA has invented creative ways to sidestep this conclusion which has been well stated by a couple people here. Also well stated was the fact that faith in the supernatural is an essential core belief of the program. A person who cannot fathom supernatural intervention CANNOT experience the “miracle of sobriety” as presented by AA. In order to gain acceptance with the non-religious, AA has warped and twisted the “sacred text” to appear open minded in so far as spiritual beliefs are concerned. This open mindedness in my opinion ( as well as many others ) is simply a ruse to get members to eventually accept the “True Faith” in the form of a conventional Christian-esce God with a capital G.
This, to me, sounds like something that a person could, and should, pursue independently of their therapy. I don’t see how it’s pertinent to sobriety. As I mentioned upthread, aside from the drinking, there may be no other areas of commonality amongst members of a given group.
Learning to fill your former drinking time with other activities, be it family time, hobbies, work, or what have you, has immediate rewards that will make a person feel good about himself. Self-worth, as opposed to self-loathing (i.e., repetitive re-hashing of own or another person’s rock-bottom drinking escapades and crimes against loved ones) would seem to be a useful goal. Most working people, particularly those with families, don’t have a lot of free time and can use those hours spent in meetings in more productive ways.
I’m just trying to illustrate some of the reasons a person would consider AA’s approach to sobriety to be the wrong path to sobriety.
We do persue it independently Kalhoun - any moral human being would do as such, and I wrote that as well somewhere upthread. Without the steps or the big book AA would be just a bunch of drunks sitting in a room drinking coffee with getting better of their own devices. The steps are just a guide that people follow, and what a way to work on ones self - with a guide I mean. You are still talking about things that are independent of one another. If one doesn’t wish to go to a step meeting then they won’t, again written somewhere up thread. I have very little free time, so it is good that there are meetings on saturday morning early, and right at 5 p.m during the week, or at 12 noon…
What is sickening is that if you have ever had contact with a professional drug and alcohol treatment center you know that the 12 steps are what are espoused as the ONLY way to get better. The counselors that are “recovering” are true believers who preach AA dogma that if you do not accept a conversion you are doomed to a miserable death. I have wondered if someone could win a lawsuit if one applied for a counseling job at a rehab and was rejected on the grounds that the applicant does not believe in the tenets of AA.
Well, if you’re not going to Step meetings and working the “necessary steps” (these are more than suggestions or guidelines, as I see them. They are specific, numbered statements that have changed little, if ever, over the years), then you aren’t doing “AA.” I know of sponsors (read “spiritual guide”, to highlight another parallel to religion) who tell their charges that they “really need to work on Step 4” or what have you, and have even said the Steps need to be worked numerical order! Since there is no real organization to the group, “addiction amateurs” are free to take a person and “manage” their sobriety for them. Since you’ve already admitted you’re powerless, who are you to argue?
I’m not saying they forbid you from pursuing interests outside the group (though with the picnics and other group activities I’m aware of, they certainly encourage “AA-centric” activities). My point is that for most people, the Step “guidelines” are unnecessary (and sometimes can actually be harmful) in the pursuit of sobriety. Most people can see it as an entirely separate issue; personal growth is a natural byproduct of clear thinking. Many prefer to look at habitual drinking to excess as something they used to do; a previously enjoyed (or loathed) activity that they no longer partake in, and then move on with their lives.
I don’t have much use for guilt. I think it breaks the human spirit. For example, most drunks I know (current and former) apologized for their mistakes the next day. What possible good can come from making a list of people you wronged and apologizing to them again? I think we on the recieving end of a drunk’s lapse in judgement know that that person wouldn’t have done it unless they were shitfaced. Sometimes, as was the case with my SIL, following the Steps; the constant reminder of guilt and revisiting of lapses in judgement, can be too much for a person to bear, and they continue to drink to numb that pain; they feel they have fucked up so much, so often, and for so long that can never make amends and they figure they’re forever going to be a piece of human waste.
Rational Recovery’s Ethics Complaint http://www.rational.org/pdf_files/nasw_complaint.pdf
nice, thanks for that!
I’m excusing my myself now. {{shakes head}}
You don’t feel that there is at least a legitimate call for discussion here?
When AA members cannot preach from a position of power and they have to argue their dogma with people who know what they are talking about, their arguments fall apart. I especially like in that letter where it says federal appeals court has twice ruled that AA is unquestionably a religious organization. Does anyone know the cases they are referring to?
I feel that discussing the tenents of AA with someone who clearly does not wish to relate any sort of efficacy to the steps is barking up the wrong tree. There are people across the country and the globe who have found comfort and self-awareness by following a 12 step program. The reason it has been arounf for 80 years is because it works, it would have gone the way of the doto if it didn’t work. By the way it started off as 7 steps, more steps were added as time went on. Simply put people who don’t like the God part of it, take the God part out. I’ve seen it time after time…Most people who are athiest chose more meditation in nature, or whatever, than attending church more regular.
This makes me very sad - I’m sure it does for you too to have had to watch it first hand - but Kalhoun, I’ve seen this time and time again with more than 1 person. No one person, or step program can make another human being do something until they choose to do it for themselves. After they have chosen to do something about it, and seriously want some help, this is when the help will come, and the program works. Some people however, are constitututionally incapapble of being honest with themselves, and for them the process takes a little longer, or never comes at all.
The best part about the whole thing is you do not have to agree with me, you could feel like Evil Joe does and think that what I say is disingenuous and I have a secret agenda to pull you to my side, and reassume the place of power I am trying to hold… Buy I am not preaching dogma, and neither are the meetings I attend, that is precisely why I attend them, because they are not shoving anything down this blissfully agnostic beingsa throat.
Now see…this is where the dangerous and insulting indoctrination comes in. She was brutally honest with herself about the depths of her alcoholism. You say maybe she didn’t want help or it would have worked? I’ve never known anyone want (or need) sobriety more than her. But the dogma beat her down every time. She was powerless after the first step and the sponsor would harp on her “defects” and the wrongs she did to everyone. Her self-esteem (already nearly non-existent at the onset of her AA program) disappeared altogether because all they talked about was the personal failures, which were many. They didn’t emphasize filling her days with another activity. No one discussed the science behind addiction. But boy, she did her 30 meetings in 30 days!
As was stated before, the empirical evidence indicates at best AA does not work and at worst AA decreases the chances of sobriety. ALL evidence that AA actually does work is subjective in nature only.
The reason it has been around for years is the same reason that any religious organization stays around. Not because it is true, but because you can convert at a faster rate than you lose members. With the government and medical facilities to help in the conversions this isn’t too difficult a task.