greyline

I did a search at iidb for "alcoholics anonymous" and got zero hits (although infidels.org has many). So I wanted to talk about AA and 12-step programs.

The first time I read the 12 steps, many years ago, I was stunned by the number of times God (or Higher Power, depending on the version) was mentioned. Even without knowing what I now know about the way AA works, I thought it sounded suspiciously like a religion. Having heard vague references to AA's good works, I thought that in reading the 12 steps (purely out of interest - I didn't require its services) I would discover the secret that alcoholics need to know to stop drinking. Yet I noted that not one of the steps actually gives advice on how to stop drinking.

I have an atheist acquaintance who has been going to AA for 20 years and swears by it. I don't understand how an atheist deals with the 12-step philosophy, which requires a "higher power". Someone I know uses the ocean as her higher power. Now, while the ocean is certainly physically stronger than a human, I don't understand what use there is in "turning her will and her life over to the care of" an inanimate thing.

Considering the pervasiveness of 12-step programs in America, and the fact they are often the only offered treatment for addicts (whether the addiction be for drink, drugs, sex, shopping or food), as well as the fact that law-breaker addicts may be forced into AA treatment despite its religious nature, and that AA is notoriously unsuccessful in stopping people from drinking, my question to the infidels out there is: Is it okay for me to lose all respect for 12 step programs?

12 STEPS for reference:
Step 1:
We admitted we were powerless over things we believed we should control, and that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step 2:
Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Step 3:
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of our Higher Power as we understood this Higher Power.

Step 4:
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Step 5:
Admitted to our Higher Power, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Step 6:
Were entirely ready to have our Higher Power remove all these defects of character.

Step 7:
Humbly asked our Higher Power to remove our shortcomings.

Step 8:
Made a list of all the people we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9:
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Step 10:
Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Step 11:
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with our Higher Power as we understood this Higher Power, praying only for knowledge of this Higher Power's will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step 12:
Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to other people who feel stuck; and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Oxymoron

I don't know too much about it, but it does seem that the nature of the "higher power" is very much down to the interpretation of both the local AA and the victim as an individual. Could be "family and close friends", for example? Not sure about the ocean, but whatever works... (or doesn't).

It all sounds a bit hocus-pocus to me. But then again, I've never been so addicted to something that it threatened to destroy my life; by the time you are in that position, you are not going to be so discerning. The trick if you want to maintain intellectual integrity is to try to avoid getting there, I guess.

greyline

A second topic I was going to mention, but didn't because my post was getting too long, is the disease concept of alcoholism. I'm in total disagreement with AA here: alcoholism is not a disease and doesn't have "victims" (since you mentioned the word ).

All the evidence I've gathered convinces me that alcoholics are making a lifestyle choice. They drink because they choose to drink. They have the ability to stop buying that bottle or raising that glass to their lips, but they choose not to exercise it.

This impacts on the way alcoholics view themselves, and on which methods of "treatment" will be successful.

I have to say that the notion of being "powerless" (per step 1) over their own fate and doomed to a life-long struggle with an incurable disease is a truly terrible way to indoctrinate people who seek help managing their lives.

Oxymoron

I agree. There is always a choice. But then maybe that is the difference. Maybe certain substances, in certain people, just destroy any belief they might have that there is a choice. And so they become victims of their own Victim Complex, to abuse an appropriate-sounding term in a pleasingly yet disturbingly self-referential way.

In other words, an alcoholic may believe themselves to be powerless, victims, whatever, which certainly means that this is very real to them, perhaps as real as any other belief they might have.

I do agree that AA's complicity with this mistaken view is odd. However, maybe telling people that they are in the sorry state that they are by choice rather than as the result of an addictive substance just results in depression, lack of motivation to change, and suicides. In order to accomodate The Truth and start dealing with it, people have to be in a certain frame of mind, and maybe alcoholics just aren't capable of being there.

Hazel-rah

Beginning with Step 1, participants are turning over responsibility for everything they do or don't do to something external. At no point does any change occur internally; nor is there accountability within the individual.

Sounds exactly like religion. If it's good, Goddiddit. If it's bad, the devil made me do it. Never is it: I made the choice and every action I have taken to get in this position--and every action I take to get out of it-- is my decision. Even if alcoholism is a disease, there's never any personal, internal action required to seek treatment and a cure, as there is for cancer or any other ailment.

So a supposedly cured alcoholic will never recognize that he has the willpower and discipline to stop drinking. It will always be God (or whatever HP he decides on), and not him. To me, that's not a cure.

Toto

1. You didn't find any topics because the search function is not working, or your are looking in the wrong place. This has been discussed in Church State Separation / Secular Activism.

2. This is not a "non-Abrahamic" religion. It was founded by Christians and is promoted by Christians as a sort of soft sell of Christianity to a secular age.

3. There are some 12 step programs and some AA meetings that are secular and downplay the "higher power" bit. There are also non-higher power based programs, like Secular Organizations for Sobriety.

4. If it works for some people, don't knock it. But don't be taken in by the hype that people need God to get their lives straight.

Deacon Doubtmonger

This is intended for those who don't wish to posit a sky-snot as a higher power. One AA writer once mentioned you could use a bedpan as a higher power, and another noted you could use the AA group itself -- that "GOD" stood for "Group of Drunks."

See also Rational Recovery.

greyline

Excuuuuuuuuse me.

I did look at the list to decide where to start the topic. There are many non-Christians involved in AA so I don't see it as a Christian religion regardless of its origins.


Actually, I will knock it even if it works (and its success rate is appalling): the main reason I knock it is because people can be forced into AA meetings by a judge, in order to stay out of jail, get access to their children, etc.

Jackalope

I'll have to agree with greyline here. The "success" rate is lower than placebo. I worked in a "social model" detox while I was doing undergraduate fieldwork. Both the lack of any real treatment and the huge number of returns we saw were enough to make me decide I didn't want to work in substance abuse.

Aquila ka Hecate

I'm an ex member of AA.

Since the age of 29 I have been to meetings, working the programme and not staying sober.

Only when I got a chance to rely on myself alone did I finally defeat my problems.

As an ex drunk and drug addict, I've got to say that AA turns my stomach-it's not just a religion, it's a cultish religion (hyperbole, anyone?).

Listen to the next 'recovering addict' that you hear telling their story on air sometime. The words and phrases they use will almost certainly be from a stock of such used by these cult members.
I know them all by heart.

I have a suspicion that what brings some people around in AA is the cameraderie, the sense of belonging together to a body of people who are fighting this thing-but of course, if that's all it is, no real change will be effected.

The change has to be at a far greater depth than that-and no,it's got nothing to do with a god, or higher power of any sort.
It has to do with me, on my own, taking charge of my life for a damn change and deciding I didn't like being a slow suicide.

The hammering of the 'if you don't work the program you're going to slip' and '90 meetings in 90 days' mantras is gauranteed to cause some people to fail-it's a sort of escape clause for them.

Frankly I think it's high time AA and other 12-step programmes were outed as the dependance-encouraging cults that they are.

Sobriety is about responsibility-personal responsibility, not reliance on some surrogate daddy.

Terri