It depends on what you think the mechanism of success of the program is (again, assuming it can work). If I’m right and the mechanism is in effect behavioural modification through “cult like” social pressure, no amount of coercion to do well is gonna work - success requires buying in to the “cult” and thus truly caring about the social pressure.
The only advantage of court ordered AA attendance is making the option available.
You aren’t guaranteed to learn anything if you are forced to go to school. You’ve got to want to learn.
Social pressure is an interesting idea, but I’m not sure I see how it fits. One of the defining aspects of addiction, after all, is that the addict continues the behavior despite social consequences. If someone’s addicted to the point of hurting their relationship with family and employer, would they be swayed by social pressure from the AA group? I guess it all depends on particular circumstances.
“cult” implies some degree of worship of an individual. Yes there is Bill W, but he’s worshiped as much as George Washington.
Read nada.
The social aspect is powerful though IMHO. It isn’t forced though. For many of us it was simply our only hope of acceptance at one time when everyone else important to us saw us as simply losers.
When the courts first began ordering offenders to attend AA meetings there was quite a lot of resistance from within the AA establishment. A lot of people felt it went against AA’s non-coercion policy - that people are supposed to come to AA of their own free will - and also that it was at odds with their insistance on anonymity because people that were forced to be there might not feel obligated to respect the anonymity of others. In the end though, they relaxed the rules somewhat in hopes of reaching a greater number of people.
Judging from my own experience, they don’t really fit the definition of a cult. Their approach to the issue of God is distinctly non-sectarian, somewhat unitarian, largly agnostic. There was nothing of the give-your-heart-to-Jesus-and-your-money-to-us message that I’d associate with christian cults…in fact such things would have been anathema to most AA’s. It’s more of a club atmosphere - only a cult if one considers the Odd Fellows, or the Rotary a cult. And although I have not been involved with AA for many years, I can say that they helped me very much during a very difficult & trying time. I’ve always been a supporter and advocate of AA.
SS
Really?
Religion suffuses AA. While they may not explicitly push a particular religion god and spirituality are all over it.
I’ll post this again from their own book with a chapter dedicated to addressing agnostics:
Look at the twelve steps themselves. Seven of the twelve require god/spirituality to save you (i.e. magic). It’s like:
Step 1: Admit you have a problem
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
If it is important to “work the steps” how do you avoid it?
No. The AA program is spiritual, but it is distinctly non-religious. The chapter you quoted from is entitled* We Agnostics*
Notice the “we”. And remember…An agnostic does not deny the existence of a higher power, only declines to define it.
Agent Orange was napalm. Mr. Orange was a Tarantino character.
I’ll admit the wording of the disclaimer does remind me a bit of the Zone diet, where results were only guaranteed if you bought and consumed their products. The reasoning was that non-Zone versions of the same food, like lasagna, would have a different/higher calorie count and different/higher amounts of sugar, fat and so on. So if you made do with something affordable, or Og forbid had fresh fruit, you weren’t following the program and nothing was their fault.
But I’ve never heard anyone deny someone else’s sobriety because it happened outside of AA. Like “He’s not really sober, because he didn’t go through AA.” “He’s either sneaking it or he’ll snap any minute.” Do AAers ever go on like that? I don’t mean in terms of discouraging people from joining other groups, but flat-out refusing to accept evidence that anyone could achieve sobriety any other way?
From the cited research
I can understand why you would find “…The fact that the AA group did the worst is troubling…” At least, troubling enough to share your doubtful worry to us. I am curious, however, why you did not share with us that they found “…No statistically significant differences between the three groups…”?
If a scientist sees no significant difference between the three groups, why is a placement as “dead last” of any consequence worthy of mention? If they didn’t think it was important, why should it “trouble” you? Did they miss something?
Anecdote follows, warning, warning…
My old man used to joke to other AA members “My Higher Power can whup your Higher Power!”
Nit: Agent Orange was a defoliant. {/hijack}
Ooh, that’s right.
Without getting into glib slogans, what is the difference between religion and spirituality?
That’s open to debate…but in this context religion could be understood as institutional structure, dogma and practice while spirituality may be taken to mean personal involvement in the growth and development of the self*
*Religion vs. Spirituality: A Contemporary Conundrum
Schneiders, Sandra Marie
Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality - Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2003, pp. 163-185
To make sure I understand you, are you saying that the evidence suggests that AA is useless, and I am mistaken in thinking that it is worse than useless? If that is your position, then I concede.
Oh, I very much doubt that my point eluded you, its not that complicated. Even less that you actually believe the twisted, mangled wreckage you handed back bears the least resemblance.
You used the expression “dead last” to paint the data in the darkest colors, as though the failure of AA’s efforts and methods were stunningly apparent in comparison to the vast array of other options, being clinical psych and nada. But the scientists who actually did the work found no real difference, and said so. Your sophistic spin on it left that nugget of context unsaid. Which is not so much fibbing as misusing the truth.
Which is fine, so long as you don’t get alll bent out of shape when you get called on it.
Humor me, what does this mean? Explain to me what these wonderful scientists, who you admire so much, actually said about the effectiveness of AA. I’m slow, so use small words.
Yeah…except the 12 Steps invoke a power greater than yourself:
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We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
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Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3.** Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.**
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5.** Admitted to God**, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
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Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
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Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
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Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
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Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
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Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
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Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
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Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
SOURCE: The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous | Alcoholics Anonymous (PDF)
Those are direct appeals to a higher power which goes beyond simple spirituality as you just defined it. Note the capitalization of “Power,” “God” and “Him”. That denotes an entity rather than a concept.
I’m not using the term in a disparaging way - more from the POV of analyzing why the system might work.
To my mind, the importance of AA is that it has the form of a ‘cult’ - namely the social acceptance/social pressure to conform in the name of some higher power - where the only item of conformity at issue is – sobriety. It does not have the usual content of a ‘cult’, in that the nature and identity of this ‘higher power’ is deliberately left vague.
To my mind, as a non-believer, this demonstrates exactly why AA can “work” and totally differentiates it from such things as astrology. When Astrology is examined critically, there is no “mechanism” that withstands logical scrutiny to explain why it works - it is simply magic, which one must accept or reject. AA is different.
There is a well-established-in-other-contexts mechanism in the case of AA - group acceptance and group pressure. This is exactly the sort of thing that gives new religions their strength - their willingness to see the good in the apparently unredemable, those who other established institutions view as ‘human garbage’ not worth bothering about … this fosters (in such individuals) loyalty, acceptance of the group’s mission, and consequently willingness to abide by the group’s dictates – which, in the case of AA, is as far as I know wholly focussed on the benevolent issue of creating sobriety.
This also explains why court ordered AA would not work. A person forced to join will not necessarily display the same loyalty, acceptance of the group’s mission, etc., any more than making a person go to church under threat of prision is likely to make them a good Christian.
I am someone who has been to drug treatment in the 1990’s and have been to many, many AA meetings. I liked and disliked AA. It taught me a lot of good things in life.
My problem with AA is that they believe that they are the solution, and that there is no other. Consequently, there seems to have been very little research into drug addiction. I was a crack cocaine addict. The desire to use that drug everyday is something that cannot be understood except for those who have been addicted. I needed therapy, and medicinal help to get over the desire to use the drug. There are thankfully other therapies.
Another thing about 12 step meetings is you are in a room with other people in the same boat and sometimes people start dating each other or fall back into usage. AA is very sexually repressed, the problem with the 13th Step (sex with another member in early sobriety) or the 13 steppers, who are the dickheads who pick up girls at meetings (check, addict girls are not the best.)
I also hate being a part of a group. There are always different people and different rules in their group, and some groups were like a fraternity. There were two different groups in my AA club in Mississippi. One was about 60% black. That meeting was fun, especially on Sundays (better than church). The upstairs group was Ok, but a bit more snobbish, more drunks and less addicts who didn’t like the drug addicts in their meetings. Two yahoos told me that I was not allowed to talk about my struggles with drug use, since it was ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. Like I said, there were two groups and one can be a member of one group. I don’t like the group mentality and feel that AA is open to whoever wants to come.
I went to NA once, and those folks were weird. They turned off the lights and lit candles (I hate candles by the way) and passed them around or something. I thought they were going to sacrifice a virgin child. These were heroin and crack freaks (like me). That’s another thing, I want to stay away from the druggies and the drunks. People go back out all the time. I do like the N.A. Book, I called it the New Testement with better stories of drug freaks and their stories.
They say that there is a God, and to be in the program you must believe in a Higher Power. However, if you are atheist, you can choose something else to be your higher power (family, children, job, skills etc.)
I really disliked being in a group, and I really disliked having a sponsor and go to those meetings. One sponsor told me “not to think”. I like to think. I need to think. That was the problem of my getting into this addiction in the first place, by not thinking of how precious my life is. I also do not believe in faith. I believe in facts. Let me see it and feel it and I will believe it. If not, I wont.
AA is sort of a Seinfeld-ian religion of nothing. There is a God, this God could be Jesus or Allah or Buddha or Lady Gaga, but on the other side of the coin everyone was in agreement that God is the one who is saving them from doom.
Bill Wilson tripped on LSD after he founded A.A. He was also addicted to nicotine and was probably a sex addict. He is of course an icon of AA-ers everywhere. Some people actually worship him. He was a flawed individual. I saw a picture of him and Dr. Bob in the treatment center and it was a picture based on a photograph with Bill looking slightly down, unsmiling and grim. I asked the treatment doctor, why not have a picture of a happy Bill Wilson? It is also interesting how many treatment people lead unhappy lives.
I am thankfully off the cocaine. For me, the geographic cure was a success as I moved to China. I have seen it here, from an African in Guangzhou who I was buying some smoke from. I just went, “oh no man, no, thank you, no. That shit will make you go Rick James and paranoid. No thanks.” I still drink once a week. I smoke green and sometimes tobacco. The green stuff is my morning cup of coffee and keeps me balanced. Drinking I should not do, but about once a week I get hammered because I like it and it is more or less acceptable here.