You are only as sick as your secrets.
Sit down, shut up, and listen.
I have to change only one thing -- EVERYTHING.
My name is (insert name here), and I'm an... alcoholic.
This is a minuscule sample of the popular sayings you'll hear at an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting. Negativity, blame, and confessions disguised as recovery inventory and amends are the common thread.
I am an addiction counselor trained at Hazelden Graduate School for Addiction Studies. I read Russell Bishop's article, "Soul-Talk: You Don't Have to Be an Addict to Recover," and I am moved to comment.
If you go to an AA meeting they will tell you the only requirement is a desire to stop drinking. They will then require you to announce and declare to the room and God that you are an alcoholic. You are an alcoholic who will never recover. You must never pick up a drink again. They proceed to put you in a no-win position of pronouncing that you are an alcoholic at the beginning of every meeting, and every time you speak at all for that matter. Even if you are announcing that the cookies are running low and you need more money for the bad coffee everyone is swilling, you must announce that you are an alcoholic. A paragraph from Chapter 5 of the AA book is read aloud.
This is what most of my clients hear: Follow us or you will fail. If you do not recover, you are a dishonest and unfortunate idiot, and you were born a dishonest and unfortunate idiot. You will die painfully, full of shame for your innate inability to be honest with yourself. Even worse, if you are mentally and emotionally ill (which is highly probable), you will only recover if you follow our path completely and do not rock the boat.
Mr. Bishop declares that he is not an expert in addiction in a clinical sense. I am an expert, and these are some of my educated and experienced thoughts.
One of the more positive mantras of AA is "Live and Let Live." It does not diminish that AA worked for one if it did not work for another. If it worked for you, cheers! If it did not work for another, does that have any relevance on your success? Why the need to force your way onto another? Most of us know the famous quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Methinks the devotees of AA doth protest too much. Perhaps Mr. Bishop has answered his own question as to the most sensitive of us being more prone to addictive behavior. ("Live and Let Live," remember?)
But Alcoholics Anonymous also pushes members into believing that any deviance from the program is a slippery slope, and a relapse is a slow death. Negative? You betcha. Many of those who end up in an AA meeting recover on their own; many are even able to practice drinking in moderation. But AA meetings would never hear from these people since members are not allowed to talk about successful moderation.
A vitally-important concept is the idea of living your life as a label that you and others place upon you. You shackle yourself to a negative label and you can only live as that person, job, or behavior. Who you are is very different from how you behave at any given moment or what job title you currently hold. Just because you are unemployed right now certainly does not mean you are forever unemployed -- at least let's hope not. If you tell a lie or keep a secret, does this mean you are forever labeled sick or a liar? If labels stuck with us, we would all be doomed for there is not one among us who has not left an office with a pen. One of the most common phrases in AA is "Keep Coming Back." This phrase can produce shame, inferring that they are somehow responsible for the program not working. Those struggling with addictive behaviors are consumed with guilt and shame already.
The steps tell members they are powerless, their life is unmanageable. They must then take a moral inventory, confess to a stranger not qualified to keep confidences, turn their will over to a God of their understanding and ask this God to remove defects of character. They then make a list of all the horrible things they have done to others, make direct amends to said people, continue to admit whenever they were angry, jealous, hurt, or full of self pity, and to sponsor a new member of the program after having a spiritual awakening.
Entrusting a complete stranger who has no training or competency in mandated confidentiality is ill-advised, and yet it is encouraged and practiced every day in AA. That is, if the person gets to the fifth step at all. The majority of people with whom I work do not make it past step three, and they are vilified in AA for not completing all 12 steps. Why stop at step three? The rest of the steps are about personal morality, confession, removal of character defects, discovering personality shortcomings, making amends, and continually turning your will and life over to the care of a higher power. The steps are negative affirmations that keep the alcoholic always in a state of blame and dependent on a higher power, the group and AA meetings.
I look forward to any comments on this and will respond with respect and dignity.
Laura Tompkins is a certified addiction specialist with a private practice in Pacific Palisades, Calif. She is also a writer, director and actor, and chef. You can comment here or to learn more about my work write to ldyluk47@yahoo.com.
For more on addiction and recovery, click here.
Russell Bishop: Soul-Talk: You Don't Have to Be an Addict to Recover
Stanton Peele: Harm Reduction: The Only Realistic Approach to Substance Use and Recovery
Stanton Peele: AA Isn't the Best Solution: Alternatives for Alcoholics
Martha Rosenberg: Phillip Sinaikin, M.D., 'Psychiatryland' Author, Explains How Psychiatry is Broken
AA's role in society - More negative than positive?
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Someone had the balls to print it. There will be more to follow. Thanks you to all who have reprinted it on their blogs.
Does Hazelton require a student to leave their mind at the door? Are students not allowed to learn and observe and have their experiences? You seem to discount Laura's patients accounts of what hell they went through in AA/NA. Do they not count? What about the huge numbers of people who feel the exact same way as Laura does that were either in AA or suffered at the hands of AA/NA members indirectly? Well they do count! Sorry, but the blue wall of silence is coming down, and not soon enough.
I am grateful to Laura for what she has written. I look forward to hearing more from her. What she is doing will actually save lives, by letting people know they have choices in addiction treatment. It is not a one size fits all for everyone.
One of the primary reasons for St. Jude's overwhelming success is our non-disease philosophy. The notion of disease literally relinquishes responsibility and control for poor habits and behaviors, rendering people powerless to change. The Saint Jude Program focuses empowering individuals to change themselves and overcome lifelong self defeating habits. The program itself is in a state of constant improvement, employing the most up-to-date scientific research and proven methodologies. The science of Neuroplasticity is the latest research that has been integrated into the program. Studies on Neuroplasticity show unequivocally that any individual can change their thoughts and behaviors and quite literally change their brain tissue as a result. In other words, the common notion that "once and alcoholic always an alcoholic" has once again proven to be completely false. It only makes sense that if you make choices that result in emotional pain and depression, that the opposite behaviors will provide a basis for happiness and relief from self imposed suffering. We all have the power to change our lives, and that is what is taught at St. Jude's!
A.A. habitually lies about its success rate. They begin every meeting by reading Bill Wilson's lie, "RARELY HAVE we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path." "Rarely fails" really means "fails at least 95 or 98 percent of the time, maybe even 100 percent of the time." Alcoholics Anonymous has a death rate that is comparable to the Bataan Death March. Literally.3 And so does its sister organization, Narcotics Anonymous.
Copied from orange papers.
Chapter 5 really pushes my buttons. I loath that piece of "so called" literature. If most were not so vulnerable and confused when they wind up in AA for the first time; they might be able to decipher the lies and criminal wording that it entails. If they follow the recommended advise: doing 90 meetings in 90 days and still dont get it, chances are they end up feeling like one of the UNFORTUNATES. If that isnt brainwashing; I dont know what is. I learned ways to avoid being the chosen one to read Chapter 5. I could no longer bring myself to recite what I believed to be nothing but self defeating, insulting and humiliating. Thank you for letting me share.
A.A. shills and hidden propagandists routinely plant untrue articles and stories in the press and media to sell their Big Lie, articles which push strange ideas like:
Doctors in A.A.; the profession's skepticism persists, but MDs in Alcoholics Anonymous say the 12-step program could benefit all physicians, by C. Thomas Anderson, actually declares that Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12 Steps would be great for all doctors if only they would quit thinking scientifically and analytically, and just "come home" to the cult.
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A.A. repeats the same lies over and over, using the same propaganda technique as Adolf Hitler with his Big Lie about the evil nature of the Jews.
The single most important issue about Alcoholics Anonymous is the question of how well it works to save people from alcoholism, and A.A. habitually, routinely, lies about its success rate, and always has.
A.A. tells everyone who will listen that it has the only treatment program for alcoholism — that it is the only "time-tested", "proven", method of recovery — but their Twelve-Step program does not work. Rather than even concede that the program might have some problems, the A.A. true believers just shove the program on every victim they can find, using therapists, counselors, judges, and parole officers as their enforcers, while simultaneously avoiding any and all scientific testing of the effectiveness of the Twelve-Step program. When some testing does occur, like in Project MATCH, and gives results that they don't like, they just deny and ignore the results of the test.
This is a review of Ken Ragges take on AA, and what Ragge points out "if people don't know that the bearer of yesterday's message is drinking himself to death today" it doesn't matter. It was not about honesty but doing gods work.
If they didn't have faith in (be obedient to) God and work to bring others into the Program, they would be in serious danger of drinking.
This goes back to Ebby Thatchers conversion to the Oxford group, in order to keep his experience real he needed to carry the message to others. Though in the end Ebby died drinking.
Ah, yes...the Oxford Group. Aka Alcoholics Anonymous. Thank you Eddy123! What a great read. It's like a good horror film...terrifying and hilarious all at once.
Evidently, if people don't know that the bearer of yesterday's message is drinking himself to death today, it doesn't matter. The messenger can do God's work, bring others under God-control and "give to others that which has so freely been given." That is what the early AA members were doing with the radio interview cited at the beginning of this chapter. There was no question of honesty. They were doing what God told them to do. And they were afraid not to. If they didn't have faith in (be obedient to) God and work to bring others into the Program, they would be in serious danger of drinking. To avoid that danger, individual Alcoholics Anonymous members, and AA as a whole, have been very obedient ever since.
http://www.positiveatheism.org/rw/revealed.htm
Needless to say, I would love to find an alternative treatment for my addiction. Talk of success in other programs sounds encouraging and raises my optimism. But this is what gives me the greatest reservation. I have yet to see any empirical evidence of high success rates in other programs. We can talk all day about the logical fallacies in the 12-step programs and walk away satisfied that we have “thought the problem through.” But none of this meets the acid test. Where is the long-term proof that these other programs work? Before I risk reliving the shame, unaccountability and loneliness that defined my life before AA and CA, I will need more than the proof of good debating skills.
The NIAAA’s 2001–2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions interviewed over 43,000 people. Using the criteria for alcohol dependence found in the DSM-IV, they found:
* Twenty years after onset of alcohol dependence, about three-fourths of individuals are in full recovery; more than half of those who have fully recovered drink at low-risk levels without symptoms of alcohol dependence.
"About 75 percent of persons who recover from alcohol dependence do so without seeking any kind of help, including specialty alcohol (rehab) programs and AA. Only 13 percent of people with alcohol dependence ever receive specialty alcohol treatment."
If you have a life worth living, you're not likely to throw it away.
Sometimes people who are very lonely need to feel that they have some semblance of a life by attending a fellowship that is only that...a social contrivance.
The best we can do is hope for them that they develop a true social support team that does not expect them to minimize, or negate their power.
Good Day Laura,
I hope this gets to Laura Tompkins, if not, I hope it can be forwarded to her. I have been reading your blog and am quite fascinated by your progressive growth in the addiction counseling field! CONGRATS LAURA!!! I wouldn't have expected anything less from you. I hope this reaches you, because I want to say hi, it has been a very long time, and I am in agreement with your views. I'm sure you remember that was part of my story; involved in AA for a few years, (now, sober for 20), and integrated into society, yet appear to still be ostracized by those in the AA program. I could really go on and on about the discrepancies with the spiritual principles and actual practices, or resentments, forgiving, etc, and yet, I have seen actual practice of the opposite of this. Thank God I am free! There is one private practice in the Twin Cities, called AA alternatives, and she is doing pretty well. I hope you are well, and continue to shine as you always do! Blessings and Peace Laura!
Your old friend and classmate from Hazelden,
Rob Odegaard
Respectfully,
Rob Odegaard