Of course I can admit that’s good. I can’t admit that AA helps people achieve that at rates greater than other treatments, any treatments or no treatment at all. I can’t admit that everyone who goes to AA isn’t drinking to excess if - and I thought this was your point in the OP - Alcoholics Anonymous is an anonymous organization. If their entire structure and philosophy precludes such tracking or investigation of members’ medical status, which is what your claim was upthread.
I said that “good” means “people who used to be drunk all the time and could not seem to control it no matter how hard they tried, and now have learned to stay sober, and turn their lives around for the better by sharing and comparing their experiences with other similarly afflicted people, drawing strength and inspiration from their fellow sufferers.” And I might have added “And now find their lives much better.”
Yes, you are right, I can only say with certainty that that is what it means to me.
Only I have heard literally hundreds of AA members say something along those lines over 18 years.
I extrapolate how other people are likely to feel based on my own feelings and common sense ALL THE TIME! :eek:
I am a male and have never had breast cancer, but I am willing to bet that with the exception of a few suicidal and pain-freak women, 99% of women who are told they don’t have breast cancer are happy and relieved. How irrational of me to assume that, without having run or at least looked up a survey to confirm my supposition!
And when thousands of people voluntarily get together at a regional round-up of AA to attend meetings, go out to dinner with friends (without drinks or wine), hear talented speakers describe their own journey to sobriety, dance, play games and celebrate the fact that they have achieved years of sobriety after years uncontrolled self-destructive drinking. . . . . how absurd of me to assume that something good has happened to these people without a scientist in a white coat having defined, quantified and studied their emotions.
I am not trying to be a smart-ass, but I have trouble understanding the sentence: " I can’t admit that everyone who goes to AA isn’t drinking to excess . . . . ."
It may be I damaged my brain with those years of boozing 
but I am having trouble with that double negative.
Rhetorical style, riffing on the “can admit” that you set up for me. Let me try it with less style and more clarity 
:
Of course I can admit that’s good. But admitting that’s good doesn’t tell me whether or not AA helps people achieve that at rates greater than other treatments [or interventions, or support groups, if you don’t like the word “treatment”], any treatments or no treatment at all*. I can’t tell whether or not everyone who goes to AA is or isn’t still drinking to excess if - and I thought this was your point in the OP - Alcoholics Anonymous is an anonymous organization. If their entire structure and philosophy precludes such tracking or investigation of members’ medical status, which is what your claim was upthread, then there’s, as you said, simply no way to know.
Elaboration:
I feel like you’re trying to have it both ways. You’re saying people shouldn’t fixate on the oft-quoted and seemingly low 5% success rate of AA, because the structure of AA precludes us from tracking people, not to mention the pitfalls of trying to define “success”. I agree with that. Then you spend much of the rest of the thread telling us what a success AA is, because of your experiences and the experiences of people in AA that you’ve talked to. Well, if I can’t judge that AA is not a success because I can’t track AA members, then you can’t judge that AA is a success…because you can’t track AA members, either!
I mean, I’m glad it’s worked for you and all those people you’ve talked to, but I’m absolutely certain that you haven’t talked to all, or the majority, or even a scientifically selected sample of AA members. So if I can’t judge success rates, neither can you.
*That is, maybe Treatment X works better than AA, or maybe Treatment X and AA work equally well, because ANY treatment works, or maybe no treatment at all works just as well as Treatment X and AA, because there’s an entirely different factor - genetics, money, luck - that is really what determines who can master their alcoholic tendencies and who can’t.
:: post snipped ::
Check the studies I linked to upthread. It appears that the best treatment option is A.A. with some sort of outpatient treatment. It appears that no treatment is the worst option.
Slee
I heard that success in AA is measured only one day at a time by one person at a time. Seems to me that Charlie Sheen is saying that it only had a 5 percent success rate for him, which means that he is sober for the first 3 minutes of the meeting. Or is it the last 3 minutes?
That’s not a reasonable argument there. Starting businesses is a requisite for having a business five years later. AA isn’t a requisite for controlling drinking.
Why they aren’t there doesn’t matter. What matters is if AA’s success rates are better than no treatment. Would you say that a headache medicine that works the same as no treatment is useful?
Your individual experiences only account for you. The whole “hire power” thing sounds a lot like an endorsement for theism. If you didn’t buy it, good for you, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t selling it.
Laudable, though I question how many take your enlightened view?
Again, your personal diversion from the core teachings doesn’t mean they aren’t promoting it.
I imagine he doesn’t drink during the meeting, so his buzz is probably wearing off near the end.
Charlie Sheen is exactly the reason for the second “A” in AA. Why on earth should Valteron or anyone else let Charlie Sheen detract from the sobriety they can have with AA? That would be almost as much of a travesty as Two-and-a-Half Men. It was kind of the whole point of of the OP.
Let me be repetitive again:
AA’s structure precludes “tracking,” etc. because it does not attempt in any way to do what treatment does. It doesn’t sell itself or promote itself, or claim to cure people. It simply is there. You can come to it or you can not come to it. (The courts are a different matter.) There is no basis to even approach the issue on those terms. Is that so hard to grasp?
It’s like telling someone, “You say you can’t get yourself to exercise unless you have an iPod and now you exercise everyday with an iPod, but you can’t show me that you couldn’t have gotten yourself to exercise without an iPod, so therefore, I say the iPod doesn’t really ‘work.’” It’s pointless, and that’s what the OP is saying. You’re applying an irrelevant framework of perspective.
Couln’t have said it better myself, guizot. I still can’t say it better. Which is why I keep on droning enlessly with interminable posts. 
Let me see if I can get it even simpler:
AA was founded in 1935 Bill Wilson was in Akron, Ohio on business. He had a horrible history of alcohol abuse. He was mystified as to why he could not stop, no matter how much he wanted to. He was terrified as he walked towards the hotel bar. But instead, he ducked into a phone booth in the lobby and phoned a clergyman (aha, you see, is IS a religious scam in disguise :rolleyes:) said he was a drunk and asked to speak to another drunk, if they knew of one. At first the woman who answered the phone thought he was saying he was drunk. They finally got this sorted out and they recommended a Doctor named Bob Smith, who also had a terrible drinking problem. Both of them were sober at the time and wished to remain so. They sat and talked most of the night and did not drink. And they noticed one amazing fact. The only one who understands the demons, terrors and fears that prey on the mind of an alcoholic is another alcoholic. And together they can help each other if both of them wish to remain sober.
If you want an explanation of AA, that is the best I can give. Essentially, nothing essential has changed in that formula since they hit on it in 1935.
That is how it works for me and for every other AA I know. One day at a time. End of story.
Alcoholics Anonymous refers to their “recovery program” in This is A.A.: An Introduction to the A.A. Recovery Program, a pamphlet, and goes on to say that:
They might not use the word treatment but I can’t help but think of it as a treatment program. It’s designed to “arrest” an illness that can’t be cured.
If you’re interested, in the 19th century there was a temperance group formed exclusively by former drunkards (they didn’t call 'em alcoholics until later) known as the Washingtonian Movement. They named themselves after G. Washington because they wanted to emulate his virtue but not his drinking habits of course. The Washingtonians were different in that many members spoke openly to great crowds of people about their experiences with pernicious rum and whisky.
If you persist to think of it in that way it will never make sense. A lot of the language in their literature is metaphoric anyway. It’s obviously not literally an allergy in the way that one gets a rash or something. More important than the discourse of the literature are the actual things they do to stay sober. The way it’s been described to me (someone correct me if I’m wrong), it’s a way to take moral responsibility for one’s actions, so as to arrive at a kind of relief from a lifetime conscience which has driven the compulsion to drink. It’s a way to feel comfortable in one’s own skin, without liquor. Some of the things my friends say sound surprisingly similar to Buddhist principles. You may have a knee-jerk reaction to that, and perceive it as a form of religion, especially since they use the word “God,” but really, for them that word is more a placeholder for the idea of morality.
I am a recovering alcoholic and I don’t currently go to AA but I have and have the utmost respect for it as an organization. We aren’t ever going to convince any opponents of the ideology of it. I don’t believe all of it myself. What I can tell you are the facts.
-
People to discuss the poor success rates of AA as evidence of something against it. Let’s not forgot the control groups. The dirty little secret in the addiction business is that the vast majority of people relapse within the first few months let alone the first year or over five years no matter what they try. It usually takes multiple tries. Sometimes dozens or even hundreds or tries. You can fail and go back to AA and hardly anyone will hold it against you or you can try something else. It is almost completely free after all and that isn’t true for other types of treatments.
-
The movies show people going into fancy rehabs and coming back out a new person ready to face the world based on ‘real’ treatments. Do you know what you spend much of your structured time in rehab doing even for the ones that cost $10,000 a week or more? You see doctors to go over medical tests, see a social worker, go to some fluff counseling sessions, go for smoke breaks, and then to AA or NA meetings inside the rehab. They bring volunteer groups in from AA to hold them and you have to go because nothing better is known. Studies on experimental addiction treatments often have AA attendance as a key measure of their own success even if they use medical drugs because again, addiction specialists don’t have anything better to counter that part of recovery. There are secular recovery groups for people that hate the idea of God but they aren’t nearly as widespread (see the point below) and the basic idea is the same anyway.
-
AA is everywhere. This is a really big one. Nothing else as widespread exists for the same purpose in the world. A big part of breaking an addiction is simply learning to occupy your time some other way and breaking down the isolation that has been built up. You can pay a therapist to listen to you but they won’t do it multiple times a day 365 days a year but AA meetings run morning, noon, and night in almost every area of the country. The government couldn’t even fund such a thing if it wanted to yet AA does it on its own through almost no leadership. In early recovery, one of the biggest obstacles for many people is learning to be accountable to someone else and just showing up and not using for some period of time. Once you ask for a temporary sponsor, he/she will check on you if you start missing. You can drink or use drugs before and after the meeting but not during it and those accountable hours are something many people with addiction problems really need. Just showing up is a success on its own for many people early on and is less time they have to do more damage.
If you are about to freeze to death in the cold and you find a group that is giving away free houses with no obligation, you really shouldn’t criticize the colors they painted the walls. You still get something freely given with no strings attached.
I have read about the Washingtonians, and in AA we say that they came very close to discovering the winning formula, but somehow just missed it. They had a lot of the same ideas, but became a temperance and quasi-political movement. Their objective was no longer just to help their members remain sober. I think that was their downfall.
AA by contrast has NO opinion on outside issues. They have NO opinion on prohibition. If someone wants to build a bar right next to where AA meets, they have NO opinion on that. They are not for or against the legalization of marijuana, or the raising or lowering of the drinking age. In a manner of speaking every member of AA has to be intensely selfish to succeed, namely, he or she has to put their own sobriety and recovery first and become convinced that they deserve a life of swerenity, happiness and peace.
I have often said in AA meetings that there is little or nothing in their philosphy of life that is new, in the sense that everything we believe has already been said by other great thinkers. This is not a criticism of AA. When I say it, everone at the meeting nods and agrees with me.
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” is another version of Buddhist thought.
“The Roman philospher Epictetus said: 'We are not bothered by what happens to us but by our reactions to the things that happen to us.” Two thousand years later, Victor Frankel, the famous psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, said it in another form: The only real control you can have in life is your choice to love or hate, to be happy or sad.
AA says we cannot really control what happens to us in life. We can control our thoughts about life and our reactions to it. When we accept that we are powerless over almost everything in life, we become truly free to be happy.
“Live one day at a time” is just another version of what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not worry about tomorrow, tomorrow can worry about itself, you have enough on you plate to handle today.”
The more you stay in AA, the more you realize that it has very little to do with not drinking (even if that is an indispensible first step) and that 99% of it is about learning to live according to truths that wise human beings have been preaching for milenia.
I don’t know how it was done for this survey, but if I were in charge, I would pick something like “X years being sober after beginning to attend AA meeting = success”
That’s the way the success rates of cancer treatments, for instance, are calculated. If you don’t have a recurrence after X years (I believe usually 5 years) it’s counted as a successful treatment, even though there’s no guarantee that you won’t ever have a cancer again. I’m not sure why a similar method couldn’t be used with alcoholism.
Given that the pamphlet in question is designed to convey information about AA to a broad audience (alcoholics and non-alcoholics) I seriously question your assertion that it is metaphoric in nature.
I don’t care if it’s religious in nature but God as used in AA literature is hardly a metaphor for morality. If God was just a metaphor, why would step #5 include admitting to God, yourself, and others that the nature of your wrongs? It makes no sense to admit to morality. Have you actually read their literature or are you simply going by what others have told you?
It wasn’t the temperance part that broke 'em up it was the prohibition. I know a lot of people lump them together but they’re really two separate and distinct opinions. As an organization, even from the beginning, they were sided with the temperance crowd and some of their members made a living giving speeches at various temperance events throughout the nation.
Temperance = moral suasion. I’m going to persuade you not to drink.
Prohibition = political decision. I’m going to make it so you can’t drink.
Prohibition was a very controversial idea even for many Temperance advocates. Dio Lewis, teetotaler and never a Washingtonian, was a famous Temperance advocate in the 19th century who was vehemently opposed to prohibition on the grounds that it robbed men of their rights. Jack London, author and raging alcoholic, was a staunch prohibitionist.
Yeah, AA is different from the Washingtonian’s in a variety of ways. Given how popular the movement was in the 19th century it’s amazing how quickly they sank into obscurity. My thesis is on temperance/prohibition in the south and while I don’t concentrate on periods after 1919 I don’t believe the founders of AA had ever heard of the Washingtonians. I think the biggest similarity between the two organizations is the fact that they are both made up of people negatively affected by alcohol consumption.