Well, its a bit hard to keep the seperate tracks clear. On the one hand, you have people swearing up and down that AA sucks because it doesn’t work. But we also seem to slip a bit towards the notion that it has religious elements in it, and, as everybody knows, any spiritual element is precisely the same as the Spanish Inquisition and the Taliban. And therefore it sucks because it has a spiritual dimension, and anybody who believes that nonsense is an irrational baboon who hates reason and science.
You could have just read the post I was responding to.
Yes we have covered many aspects of AA including effectiveness and religion. People have shown previously AA’s effectiveness is in doubt but, admittedly and frustratingly, AA’s methods make any study difficult.
If you want to be religious/spiritual knock yourself out.
Psychotherapy, I hope you would agree, should be a rational, science based endeavor. Religion should have no place in it. A regimen for a “cure” that includes something magical happening at a few points is not what I would call a well thought out or reliable means of therapy.
But what if it “works”? Then what do you do? Suppose believing in God would help you get sober, but once you get there, you don’t need to anymore? Would that be “wrong”, somehow?
It would be like pharmaceutical companies putting sugar pills in all their medicine bottles and saying the placebo effect “works”. Well, yeah, the placebo effect has been demonstrated and seems to work sometimes. In the end though they are relying on the person’s belief to do the fixing rather than actually fixing the person based on observation and testing and science that showed a given medicine was effective in its own right apart from the beliefs of the person taking it.
To my mind, AA does not work by placebo effect )assuming it works at all), but through induced social pressures.
The “confession” and “submission to higher power” aspect of it “works” much as public confession “works” in other settings - it makes the individual more malliable to the will of the group. That’s why such techniques crop up in religions, cults and other such behaviour-modification settings, such as the Communists, throughout history - such techniques are historically reasonably effective in modifying behaviour, regardless of doctrine. That is, the “higher power” could be Christ or Chairman Mao, doesn’t really matter in terms of effect.
Normally, I’d be against use of such techniques - not because I think they don’t work, but because I think they smack of brainwashing. The one exception I’d make is for something like a serious addiction. In that case, the will of the individual is already under assault, by the addiction. Indulging in a little groupthink may, again assuming it works, be much the lesser of evils.
I was a blackout drinker from the time I was 12 until I was 47. Tried quitting a million times. Then I started going to AA. I haven’t had a drink for 4 years, 11 months, and 2 days.
Excellent advice. Couldn’t agree more. The problem is: what do you do when your doctor’s professional opinion is that you should abandon all reasoning, self-reliance, and responsibility for your behavior, and allow God (or some other “force” other than your own mind) to work His magic?
What do you do when you realize that following this medical advise also leads to the eventual procurement of an untrained layperson (an AA sponsor) to advise and direct you on any matter amateur this adviser sees fit. This advice could include anything from deep breathing and long walks, to leaving your wife and stop taking medication prescribed by a doctor (maybe the same doctor who sent you to AA. The irony!)
Some will counter this by offering more anecdotes that they “have never, EVER, heard of a sponsor directing a sponsee to leave his wife, or stop taking crucial medications!!” Well, here is my anecdote: I have heard of such things happening. More than once.
But dueling anecdotes don’t matter at all. Because even if it had only happened once, or even never at all, the issue remains: how can a licensed medical doctor ethically advise you to let an untrained, un-licensed, amateur tell you what to do concerning matters of vital importance to your physical and mental health?
How can a licensed medical doctor advise you that the best treatment course for your serious mental/emotional issue is to “Let go, let God”? How can he/she say it’s a disease, not an issue of character, and then out of the same mouth tell you the only way to address it it through spirituality, not medical science?
What to do if your doctor advises this? I’d say get a new doctor, but most of them are so steeped in this 12-Step, disease theory, pseudo-science that you might not be able to easily find one.
Let me help you out with that. If you go to AA and someone tells you God wants you to pull down your trousers, soak your pubes in lighter fluid, and set them ablaze, don’t do it. Probably not God.
If, on the other hand, he tells you that God wants you to know that the hole in the center of your soul that you’ve been trying to fill with alcohol doesn’t have to be there, that if you stop picking at the scab, it will heal over. That you can’t get back what you’ve already lost, but you don’t have to lose any more. And sometimes, you actually can get some of it back. That probably isn’t God either.
I think this is right on, Malthus. This is the way that AA “works.” I spoke with my sponsor about my discomfort with the cult indoctrination overtones that pervade the 12 Steps. He thought about it for a few days, and replied, “This is true. When I first came to AA, my thinking needed a little reprogramming.”
I attended AA 3-4 times a week for over a year. Once I got my life and my senses back, though, I stopped going, and the obsession with alcohol did not return. This was a direct contradiction to what I had learned at the meetings, which was that without regular meeting attendance and practice of the Steps, I would surely drink again. The indoctrination still lingered in a couple of ways: I felt guilty about not going to meetings, and any emotional unrest I experienced I would blame on my “disease” which I was now allowing to progress untreated. Eventually I found the Orange Papers website which helped disabuse me of the superstition that AA is rife with.
AA started as an offshoot of the Oxford Group, which was a cult. The founder adapted the Oxford Group indoctrination practices when writing the 12 steps, replacing “defeated by sin” with “powerless over alcohol.” AA dogma uses fear of relapse as the prime motivator for following the superstitious, shaming, and unpleasant Steps, culminating in Step 12: go out and get some fresh recruits. Hence I agree with Malthus that AA indoctrination is the lesser of evils, i.e. still essentially evil. In AA I experienced anti-intellectualism (your thinking is what got you here), woo-woo (Higher Power), and hypocrisy (medical to moral bait-and-switch).
I am grateful I found a home group with mostly unorthodox, irreverent members. It’s like a small group in a church – the we-ness is comforting. The intro to the TV program Intervention goes something like “Thousands of people struggle with addiction. Most need help to stop.” I found help in the rooms of AA, good people who listened and shared their experience and tips on how not to drink. Eventually the cognitive dissonance led me to extricate myself reflexively before I became a superstitious, guilt-ridden, indoctrinated wreck.
A.A. is all about accepting responsibility for your actions. Heck, a major part of the 12-steps are all about accepting responsibility for your actions.
As far as I can tell, if everyone in the world did those simple things, the world would be a hell of a lot better place.
Then there is the last step:
So, the responsibility extends to helping other alcoholics.
There seems to be a huge misunderstanding about A.A. and personal responsibility. A.A. does work on the assumption that alcoholics have no control over alcohol while under its effects. A.A. does not excuse the behavior of the alkie. It does not give the alkie a pass. It simply states that if an alkie starts drinking they cannot control their drinking. I have total control over alcohol until I drink it. However, if I drink, I do not have control over alcohol. I will keep drinking till it is gone or I pass out. If alcoholics had control over alcohol while drinking then there wouldn’t be a problem.
As for abandoning reason, I think you have that backwards. I tried everything I could think of to stop drinking. Nothing I thought of worked. It is that way with every alkie I know. They all tried their best thinking and it didn’t work. So I did the rational thing. I found people with the same problem who did solve it and did what they did. Instead of repeating the same damned mistakes over and over again, I found people who did something that worked and listened to what they said. Sometimes the rational thing to do is realize that you don’t have the answer and find someone who does. Along the way, I took what I learned from them, thought about it a great deal, and modified it so that it fits me better. The underlying ideas are generally there, I just took what I needed and left the rest.
At the same time, all the meetings I go to are all about ways to rationally deal with day to day problems. Personal and business problems are discussed, ways to handle them and how to *think *about these issues.
On a side note, there are many different meetings and each meeting is different. There are some meetings where everyone sits around trading war-stories. I avoid those. There are mens and womens stag meetings where you can discuss gender specific issues. There are open discussion (open to the public), closed discussion, step meetings, newcomer, gay, step studies, speaker meetings and a bunch of others. I find that open discussions work for me. It took a while to find a couple groups that I like. Like any other situation where people are involved, there is a personal preference involved. What works for some other people may not work for me. I Love Me, Vol. I, a serious question. If someone is diagnosed with a disease, say depression, do you think that it might help that person to talk with another person who suffers from the same disease on how to manage the day to day effects of that disease? Someone who has experience in how to live with the disease? This is on top of talking to a doc and taking their recommendations. Would that make any sense to you? Or do you believe that the doctor is the only person who has any good information?
Whack-a-Mole the NIH also recommends A.A.
Slee
*Fully expects Whack-a-Mole to freak yet again because of the word god.
I’ll admit my eyes glazed over a few times during this thread, so apologies if this or a similar question has been answered or otherwise discussed.
It kind of seems that AA is more analogous to specific diet programs than to medical treatments. There are some crank diets, obviously, but most programs do work if you actually stick with them. Is it reasonable to say that the Ornish program, as an example, doesn’t work if the problem is that people have difficulty sticking with it?
I don’t know. We know that people have difficulty losing weight no matter which program they try, and we know that losing weight is a pretty simple idea: Stop eating more than you need. Just like the way to end alcoholism is a pretty simple idea: Stop your problem drinking.
I find it annoying when people say that eating less “doesn’t work,” no matter what method they are using to get to the “eating less” stage, because, of course, eating less will work. It’s the sticking to it that is the difficult part.
So, let’s say that the Ornish program has a higher drop out rate than other diet programs. Does that mean the program “doesn’t work” or does it mean that people don’t do it right?
There certainly isn’t one answer - or even one best answer for all addicts. I have family members who are avid (addicted?) AA members and I personally bristle at their “lingo,” tho I suppose it’s better than dealing with them when they’re drunk. I really don’t like it when they try to push it on me though.
As many here have pointed out, there’s no way to do a controlled study to accurately get at success rates for AA or any other addiction program. But who cares what works for the “most” people? The best thing is do for addicts is to be sure a variety of interventions are available so people can find their own, individual solutions.
I, myself, tend to disagree with the idea that people are “powerless” over their addictions. In fact you are the only one with power over your addiction. You’re the expert about your own situation and what will work for you. And I don’t like hearing people define themselves by their addictions. Why this need to force people to label themselves “alcoholics”? Everyone is a lot more than that.
What addicts - or others fighting negative behaviors - are dealing with is ambivalence. Everything we do has good and bad elements and we constantly weigh these to decide whether the behavior is worth continuing. Other successful addiction-treatment/behavior-change strategies, such as Motivational Interviewing, guide people in a client-centered way to identify this ambivalence and make proactive decisions about how we will proceed. Some people need lots of meetings for the booster vaccine effect. Some people go to lots of meetings and relapse anyway. Others wake up and snap one day and never go back.
I don’t have a stake in this AA fight, but geez, maybe learn the importance of a random sample before you go bashing the research process as a bunch of guys with Ph.D.s collecting anecdotes.
