There’s another up-and-coming one in Evangelical Christian circles- “Celebrate Recovery”, which AFAIK, is essentially a Rick Warren/Purpose-Driven 12-Step program.
AA does claim that its program is infallible.
(from here.)
In other words, AA itself is infallible; if you can’t stay sober, it’s your own damn fault.
When I was involved with it, there seemed to be a lot of fast-and-loose definitions of “sobriety” with a fair amount of No True Scotsman thrown in. If you ask five people to define sobriety, you’ll probably get five different definitions that can range from “no mood- or mind-altering substances of any kind, including caffeine and nicotine” to “no alcohol, but popping the occasional Xanax or smoking the occasional joint is OK”. As long as they were sober according to their definition, they were sober. And if someone could not stop drinking, he was pitied because “he could not be honest” according to the paragraph I quoted above. Or if he managed to stop drinking and stay abstinent without AA, he must not be a “real” alcoholic because if he were, he would “need” AA to stay sober.
To go along with Qadgop’s point about the difficulty of designing a study that can objectively measure treatment effectiveness, there is also the confounding effect of underlying mental illnesses and other emotional and physical problems. For example, not long after my first child died, I stopped going to meetings for a while at my therapist’s suggestion. She felt that I was risking further trauma if I did go because I wouldn’t have a lot of support from people who couldn’t understand what I was going through, and that tough love wasn’t really appropriate; being told to “just get over it, already!” wouldn’t be helpful and would probably make things worse. So I went through counseling only, still didn’t drink, and went back when I was ready to go back. I left for good in 2003 and haven’t missed it. So I’m one of the data points that a study won’t pick up.
“Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living that demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional or mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.”
People in denial as mentioned in the above quote usually die of alcoholism. In the quote they use a different term, rigorous honesty.
If you can’t get honest you won’t recover. Alcoholism is the only disease that tells you, you don’t have a disease. Breaking through to the truth or ‘Step One’ is crucial.
AA never claims to be infallible. It only saves people that want to be saved. I have seen people die that never got it. I have also seen many recover like myself and see people with 20 plus years on a weekly basis. I still see people that were newcomers with me that are still sober and some that are not and some that have died. We all don’t make it.
I have nothing but good to say about AA. It saved my life. I would be dead today If I had not been introduced to it years ago.
A very dear friend kept making excuses to not stick with AA. She also made excuses not to quit drinking. Over the years, she would maintain “moderate” drinking, then every few years she’d go on binges & go into the hospital to dry out. Then it got to be about once a year. Then every six months. One therapist allegedly told her that she was in “the fourth of five stages of alcoholism” so she told me that since she wasn’t a “fifth-stage alcoholic” she could control her drinking.
Well, I guess she’s in the sixth stage now because she died of liver failure in Decemeber.
If AA helps someone, God bless it. If some other program helps someone that AA doesn’t, God bless it. If a person can actually control drinking, so be it. But dammit all I want is for people with substance abuse problems to get help somewhere & stop making excuses.
I’m really glad this worked out for you, but alcoholism is not, by any means, the only disease that tells you, you don’t have a disease. Denial is a pretty common factor in a number of psychological disorders.
Also, I have a really hard time accepting that rigorous honesty is all that it takes here. You can be honest with yourself and still make terrible decisions. My father is rigorously honest about his alcoholism. He told me when I was a child that he knows he is an alcoholic, he has no intention of changing and I’d better just learn to accept him for the way he is. He told me that alcohol is always going to come first in his life. He has no delusions about his situation. He just refuses to change.
I guess I’ll be the first to say it then. Indifferent to bad. While it does certainly get people off of alcohol, it merely replaces it with another delusional altered state of religiosity. While that state is perhaps less directly physically harmful to the person and their family and friends, it is not addressing the problem properly in my opinion. The issue is that the person is unhappy and unable to function without a crutch. We should focus on helping people learn to function properly, teaching willpower, self reliance, reliance on family, friends, or other recovery members to enable them to live free of the need for such a support. AA does a sort of weird hybrid, teaching that everything bad you did was your fault, but only a supernatural force of some sort can fix you. I don’t think that is a net benefit to either the individual or society in the long run.
Cite? Are there statistics that show this?
I think getting sober is a little like potty training a child. The last thing you try works. But the things you try before the last thing may or may not contribute to the last thing being successful.
Very few people get and stay sober with their first try. But each try they make gives them more tools that they take from try to try until something works. Maybe AA isn’t successful for you, but participation in it during one of your tries stuck something in your head that made you successful when you went alone.
Sobriety have LOUSY success numbers. When we sent my sister into rehab, when we spent two years searching for something that would work - NOTHING works really well. Nothing works even 30% of the time. There were people at her rehab center making their eighth trip through rehab.
AA’s “path” is pretty infallible if it is followed. Since to follow the path means that you stop drinking. If you continue drinking, you are not following the path. Its very circular. (I’m not a huge fan of recovery logic…it is, in my experience, vastly superior to addict logic…but by and large for a lot of people, its still broken.)
There are no cites, just my experience of being in the halls for years. We don’t keep track. It is not federally funded, it is anonymous and well we don’t keep figures but usually post the obituaries. No one has ever asked me to fill out a questionnaire in all the years I have been going.
You either get it or you die. I wish it wasn’t so cut and dry. I go to about 15 funerals a year and hear about a dozen more. I don’t live in a big city either.
The Tommy Syndrome in a nutshell. “This path worked for me, therefore it must be the only plan that works.”
The following is supposition and opinion based on anecdotal evidence from 22 years of not drinking; the first 5 of which involved AA (though I suspect that less than one year might have sufficed), the rest (when I’ve thought about it all) based on the simple principle of “why bother having a drink, would it improve my life any?” So far, the answer is no. And yes, I still occasionally miss the taste of scotch.
I’d venture to guess, based on my own experience and on observation of others, that the piece of AA that really works has already been quoted in this thread.
I don’t believe it’s the program as laid out in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, or as interpreted by members of AA, that works though. I suspect it’s the decision to what it takes to not drink. So I’d reword that quote to something like Those who do not recover are people who do not singlemindedly set themselves to doing whatever it takes to not drink until not drinking itself becomes the habit. The people who recover are those who actively work to change their thinking and thus their behaviour.
In other words, AA, when it works at all, probably works because it is a hazy form of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. It might work much better if all the god mumbo jumbo were stripped away.
I am an Atheist and have been going since about the middle of January.
I mentally switch off when a member mentions ‘God’ in their ‘share’ but overall I definitely benefit from going because it reminds me that I shouldn’t/can’t drink.
It might depend on where you are though. I live in a more secular society than, say, the US. Here religion is very much in the background something like AA needs to be able to work for people who are not overly religious.
It is not cult-like. You do have to hold hands in a circle at the end and say a short prayer-type-thing, but I keep my mouth shut for that and nobody is bothered.
Nobody is the least bit bothered when I mention I am an Atheist.
There are two other Atheists that attend AA in the Isle of Man (although I’ve only met one. The other goes on a different day of the week)
In short - there’s uncomfortableness with the Higher Power thing (as, for most people, it is God. The “It can be anything” argument I find a bit weak) but that is more than cancelled out by the benefit of talking to people with something significant in common with you.
What it actually teaches you is that you, yourself, are not powerful enough to fix yourself, on your own. You’ve probably tried and failed time and time again. I agree that a supernatural force is not going to help (because none exits. But the psychology for those who believe it does probably helps) but there are ‘natural’ forces that do help. For me it helps just listening to people’s stories and talking to them directly. Simply being with other people who have the same problem has power.
It is also a massive confidence boost. Some of the people there have been sober for 3, 10, 20 years. Knowing that people who’s lives got bad enough to cause them to go to AA meetings have been able to go 20 years without drinking.
And all of those people are happy. They seem like they can handle anything.