What person who is near death and has tried everything else has never tried AA?
WTF are you even talking about?
Right. You did not say any of those things you quoted in red plainly.
However, as someone who’s been in the program as long as you and has such fanatical devotion towards it, I was making some extrapolations as to what you practice.
If you haven’t turned your life over to your higher power and had he/she/it heal you then I seriously doubt the effectiveness of the 12 steps. Maybe you did it yourself? BUT if you did, doesnt that shatter the basis of the god based 12 steps?
But you’ve clearly swallowed the AA line that the slightest drop of alcohol would make you a relapser and/or spin you off into the darkness again. As there’s no support for that claim outside of the Big Book and it’s a keystone of the belief system, I’d contend it’s hurt more people than helped; instead of a more forgiving attitude based on biochemistry and science, AA’ers are conditioned that the smallest slip - a swish of alky-based mouthwash, or an extra Percocet before bed - is a jump into damnation. Having “slipped,” they willfully slip all the way, chugging down vodka on their minty Listerine breath.
AA works for every person it works for. No more. No less.
I realize that this thread has veered off into witnessing for and against the AA 12 step way, with sizable sidesteps into if “go or go to jail” counts as “going of your own free will.” But there was an actual question in the op.
Is there a consensus on this point?
Can we at least agree that alcoholism does not require having “to have booze all the time or every day?” If alcohol use is out of a person’s control and continuing despite its having adverse consequences on his/her life, it counts as alcoholism even if its use is spaced very far apart. Yes?
Whether you think AA is a cult or a godsend is immaterial to whether or not you believe that is an accurate statement.
If alcohol *ever *gets into the driver’s seat in your life, you have a problem.
If alcohol gets into the driver’s seat in your life some continuing percentage of the time you drink, up to every time, you are an alcoholic.
Now, that’s a bit of an analogy that requires defining “driver’s seat,” but I don’t think it’s hard to agree that if alcohol takes control of your actions and leads you to behave in ways you would not without it, if it takes you to situations and conclusions you would not reach without it, it’s “in the driver’s seat.”
But no, having ethanol in your system continuously is not a requirement, nor even an indicator of being an alcoholic.
Is there any court that specifically requires people to attend AA meetings, which will not provide any verification of attendance rather than a licensed alcohol treatment program which will provide feedback to the court/probation officer?
I know there are Federal court decisions that have held that such mandates are unconstitutional and at least one one that prohibits government funded treatment providers from requiring attendance at AA meetings
I don’t know. But either way, they require you to get an evaluation and they almost invariably decide you need treatment of some kind, which usually involves “sobriety support” meetings, which for many people effectively means AA.
The treatment program makes you keep records of your attendance and have someone at the meeting sign a slip each time (the group leader? I’m not sure. Is there even a group leader in AA?). I don’t know that it’s actually verifiable since the program is supposed to be anonymous, but if they found out you were lying you’d be screwed. A friend of mine who got a DUI had me sign a couple of the forms for her because you can only disguise your handwriting so many different ways (she did go to most of the pointless meetings but she actually had important things to do like work, so she faked some).
IME, different groups do this differently. Some groups have one person designated to sign the sheets; over time, the court/probation recognizes them and accepts their signature as legit. (Some may use a rubber stamp that is in the possession of one person or is kept with the group’s stuff, which serves the same function without breaking anonymity.) Others have the chairperson sign them after the meeting. In practice, however, most probation officers don’t have time to verify that every one of their, ah, clients has attended all of the meetings they claim on the sheet and as long as you don’t do anything to call attention to yourself, they’ll accept whatever is there.
In terms of the actual topic (remember that?), ISTM that a certain amount of AA-derived definitions of alcoholism have less to do with science or clinical experience and more to do with the idea that misery loves company. The AA member who may have had one nightly drink and who still has his job and his family becomes a brother (or sister) in arms; it’s not the amount, it’s the behavior, after all, that makes you an alcoholic. He’s no different than the guy who drank himself into liver failure. For some people, at least, it’s about being able to identify with someone who still has his life together and less about feeling like a loser.
It what? I’ve attended my share of 12 step meetings and at no time was I told to stop therapy, medical treatment, medication, meditation, exercise, or prayer to deal with my illness.
Are there AA groups out there that advocate not seeking medical attention? I’m skeptical.
Keep in mind that AA was developed to address already terminal patients, people hospitalized and dying from alcoholism. It’s not a diversionary program like traffic school. It’s not even drug court. It’s more like hospice.
The reason people recommend it to those with minor drinking problems is that many people with major drinking problems started out with minor drinking problems and developed from there. However, as getting out of denial is the first step, it’s obviously not going to work for anyone who doesn’t have a problem.
Which is the point, right?
AA appeals to people who want to stop drinking. Being an alcoholic does not equal want to stop drinking.
Please excuse what may be an ignorant question but I know very little about substance abuse disorders such as alcoholism. Are there any decent studies demonstrating how well different treatment approaches for alcoholism work, or possibly better yet, whether certain approaches are more effective based on some characteristics identifiable at outset of the treatment decision?
Or is witnessing as good as it gets?
I can find a few articles, like this one but there has to be a more extensive literature out there.
What if a person who is alcoholic lives in a society where alcohol possession is highly illegal? I guess what I am saying is that if negative consequences are socially determined it could be a weird case where a guy who drinks a case of beer a month is an alcoholic but a Russian guy whose main food group is vodka is not.
That thinking comes from the experiences of the founders, who were deadend drunks, probably a few weeks away from drinking themselves to death if they didn’t shoot themselves first. At first they had trouble accepting members who were not “last gaspers,” and put together the program to help men who were. (They couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea of women being alcoholics, either. It’s all very “middle-age, Protestant white guys in the 1930s.”) They knew that for them it was absolute abstinence or else they were back in the game, and assumed that was true for all True Alcoholics. And it is true for many. A man’s got to know his limitations, and Gus and I avoid that first drink because we don’t know if we can say “No thanks” to the second because alcohol impairs our judgement. It’s simple prudence and a good way to start the process of getting off it, but some people take what AA has drummed into their heads as an excuse to take the second drink, believing themselves doomed.
But I am not sure if everybody understands addiction. Some people on this board seem to treat alcoholism differently from heroin addiction. Would they tell a recovering junkie she was brainwashed by the program if she were afraid of relapsing if she took one little hit?
You think you are being clever and snide, but a truism, by its very nature, is true. AA helps some people and doesn’t help others. That’s no different than any treatment for a illness. If a depressive doesn’t respond to Prozac his doctor tries him on something else. If an infection isn’t stopped by Amoxocylline doctors have other antibiotics that might work. AA is not a magic bullet and it’s not for everyone. So what? Neither is anything else.
That is one of the most ignored judgements around, unfortunately, because AA is ubiquitous and free. The government doesn’t have to pay for it, like it would if you were sentenced to a month at Betty Ford. And few drunks can afford Ford because they are broke and don’t have insurance. And the other free programs are few, far between, and worse, far apart. As a newbie I was an exception because I still had my driver’s license and was there by my own free will.
I won’t even comment on what AA says, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to classify someone as an alcoholic if they drink once a year, but when they do they get blotto drunk; even though they started off the night not intending to get drunk at all. Because they have a demonstrated problem making decisions about the alcohol.
Likewise, if feel you need to drink a single beer every day, but don’t get drunk (since it’s only 1 beer), again I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say you are an alcoholic.
I guess what I’m saying supports statement about consistency; but that’s not what I meant. I think alcoholism is defined more by your behavior and decisions you make regarding alcohol.
I’ve long felt that it’s the compulsiveness that makes someone an alcoholic. As said, someone who does things like binge in college may well not be an alcoholic; they may just be foolishly self-indulgent or fulfilling a bet/dare which isn’t the same thing. Of course this makes alcoholism harder to identify, since from the outside someone who is foolishly self indulgent looks rather similar to someone being compelled by an addiction.
At least in LA county, one of the requirements of that alcohol treatment class is that you also attend AA. So the court may not directly order it, but it still ends up being required.
As a former roommate told me:
One 1.75 liter bottle. Every single day.
I don’t understand why groups like AA cooperate with the government in mandating DUI offenders and such to attend their meetings. The idea of AA, at least as I understand it, is so that people that suffer from the same addiction can get together, share stories, and form bonds with each other fairly certain that the members aren’t going to blab all over the community about your issues.
If I know that the new 22 year old guy sitting in the corner is forced to be there by the judge, and likely isn’t an alcoholic at all but just a dumb kid caught doing something stupid, then I don’t feel as comfortable sharing and he would seem like an intrusion to me.
This, absolutely.
I will say however that I personally define alcoholism as addiction to alcohol. What is addiction? A psychological need that causes stress and physical or mental discomfort if it is not experienced.
So, if you are addicted to drinking alcohol every weekend, and you become irritable, unhappy, etc if for whatever reason you can’t have your drink, then yes, on a certain level you are an alcoholic.
I work out on a boat for 28 days at a time, and several of the guys, the very first thing they will do when our hitch is up and we are back on land, will hit the bar in the hotel and get wasted. They go 28 days without alcohol, but they are alcoholics by my definition. They need that drink when they first get to land and can’t stand waiting for it. They look forward to it and talk about it with fever.
Heres one that I didn’t use to believe but I do now. They say with an alcoholic the disease continues to progress regardless if they continue to drink or not. A guy might stay sober for 20 years, have one drink at a party and within a month drink himself to death. Fairly common story.
Can you provide us the evidence which changed your belief?