Free Speech Allowed

[BartR]

Dave Darwin's recent post and the energetic brouhahahah over the last two weeks from Todd's um, (almost) diatribe served to clarify some of my thinking.

When I first read Jack Trimpy's book, "Rational Recovery" apart from the excellent recovery advice (for the most part) I found myself thinking that "If these people just spent less time bashing AA and more time working on not drinking they would be better off." And when I first found LifeRing, from time to time the subject of AA would come up in the chat room, be roundly censured and lambasted, and I found myself thinking, "Why so much criticism of AA? It works for some people." In a telephone call with a Lifering member a few months ago she remarked the same thing. "What's with all the AA bad-mouthing by some of those people?"

Over time, and after musing (usually while riding my bike - I have a lot of time to think then and am undistracted) at length, I don't feel that way anymore.

First and foremost is the dirth of intellectual honesty and the tardy, syncopated and outdated philosophy. AA's inconsistency, hypocrisy and circular logic are so rampant that I'll only mention two here. I find it inconcievable that by far the most common and accepted "recovery" methodology in our society, indeed the world, is AA. Seriously, is that the best we have available to offer to help people? A system who's philosophy is based on bronze-age myths? I mean this is 2009 not 2000BCE! Further, the "big book" was written almost 80 years ago. It is hardly a modern treatment modality.

This is by far this is the biggest problem I have with AA.

Second, there is a ponderous and entrenched treatment industry out there and 90%+ of the so called "counselors" in it seem to assert that this antiquated method of treatment is the only one available. I was going to give them a pass on this because I was thinking that "maybe they just don't know there are alternatives?" But these people are supposed to be the "experts" and they have an obligation as treatment professionals to know what is available. AND TO OFFER IT!!!

AND TO OFFER IT!

[SocraticGadfly]

A bunch of good points all around.

On the AA-bashing, I used to belong to Yahoo's 12-step-free e-mail group. It was my conviction *some* ppl there bashed AA to deny their own drinking problems.

With Trimpey's followers, although Lifering does not use the word, or the concept, "dry drunk," most ppl recognize they need to do more than just stop drinking/using, and I think Trimpey's a bit simplistic, if not in denial, on that.

Yet others, though, do need to vent. But, at some point, what was once venting, IMO, turns into becoming stuck or fixated on just being angry, or at least seriously risks that.

As for AA itself, with declining members, I suspect it will get into a "circle-the-wagons" mode in coming years.

[BartR]

Interesting Steve. Certainly I guess I can see how criticizing AA, instead of dealing with one's own drinking problem is, to say the very least, an issue of misplaced priorities.

And I used the word "diatribe" to describe my perception of Todd's opinions precisely because I though there was a lot of seething anger there and my perception was also that more than just venting was what Todd was doing.

Be that as it may, in my particular case I can categorically, if less vehemently than Todd, state that I believe AA was harmful and an impediment to my getting sober. And of course that is exactly why I joined Lifering.

[SocraticGadfly]

I will say I had, at least, "maxed out" in any benefits AA could offer me, as a main source of sobriety. And, on the anger issue, everybody's mileage will vary, of course.

[Jennifer]

In my case I am not averse (nor do I condone) any aa bashing, but for me, whilst I was a member of aa, I honestly had no idea that any other options were available and hence for a long time I felt that I was doomed to die a sad alcoholic death simply because I didn't get it.

Once I got access to the internet and googled "alternatives to aa" a whole new world opened up for me.

A part of this new world, of course, was talking to people whose vicious hatred of all things aa was a bit shocking to me, I didn't (and still don't hate it) but it was through discussing aspects of the 12 step programs with these people that I realised what I wasn't getting and what I needed from my peers.


To my suprise it wasn't the religous aspect that left me feeling that I would rather be drunk than continue with aa, it was the systematic destruction of my already low self esteem, the constant harping on character defects and the feeling that I was in the wrong merely by being me.

I still haven't completely managed to throw off the mindset I cultivated in my time in aa but I am finally making real progress.

So for me the honest and open (non censored) discussion of aa was a life saver.

Anyone who has other opinions and experience is of course free to debate with me or anyone else on this forum.

This is the free speech forum after all :)

[James Jameson]

Ya I agree with you Jennifer, I see all us guys, AA's included, as being brothers and sisters in arms, we are in this battle together and the enemy is not just alcohol but, also societies acceptance of alcohol as a social lubricant. I am just about getting fed up to the back theath with people every where i go pushing drink. I mean it is like as if you can not have a conversation without a glass in your hand. WHY oh why must we have this enabler.

As regards AA I have to say in their defence that while I do not agree with alot of their views I have found each and everyone of them to be full of compassion and understanding for the new member. There is a tangable love in the air when one enters an AA room and that can not be a bad thing. The main thing that annoys me when i go to an AA meeting is when people start talking in AA parables and using all those AA catch phrases. I mean life is just too complex and too crazy to be sorted out in the confines of these simplistic notions.

Thanks guys for the ideas, I just love reading and responding them, it keeps me sane and keeps my mind focused on soberity.

Regards.....................James.

[SocraticGadfly]

The "powerlessness" issue, for people disempowed long before succumbing to too much alcohol and drugs, is a big issue.

[Rick F.]

One thing I have learned from my passage thus far through an early recovery program in Oakland, CA: Women and minorities in particular do not need to have powerlessness hammered into them. Most of them have "been there, done that, got the press kit."

[Rick F.]

I wasn't angry so much as weary of the repetition, the cant, the drunkalogues. Philosopher James Carse writes of the phenomenon of "original speech" -- truths momentary and personal, things said for the first and the last time. I was hungry for that -- for the genius of others speaking directly rather than formulaically; for the experience of hearing someone pause to search for the right word before continuing, rather than simply rattling off a retold tale or a "received truth." In the end I could find little in it beyond the ritualism, and to that I seemed, and still seem, to be immune.

[SocraticGadfly]

Definitely agree on that; that was part of my "maxed out" of AA.

[Jennifer]

I think that if you suffered abuse you are perfectly justified in being angry, and yes I also feel that i was manipulated, derided, judged and abused by some less than stable members of aa, I find it difficult to get alongside this idea that every aa member beams out love and compassion, it's just not my experience.

I couldn't call my time in aa any kind of success (although I was sober for a lot of it) simply because the cognative dissonance that arose from trying to follow a path I am simply not cut out for had both immediate and lasting repercussions.

I do think that what you are doing in trying to bring the failings of 12 step programs to peoples attention is worthy, however for the sake of my sanity and sobriety I have had to step away from the anger I felt.

This is probably selfish but it is what I have to do, I do draw the line at being an apologist and advising people to go to aa and "take what you need".

[Rick F.]

Such numbers as I have seen (although of questionable "solidity") suggest a success rate not much better, if better at all, than that of a control group whose members attempt to recover on their own.

Fortunately, being an innately wary sort of person -- it's a form of PTSD, I think -- I was able to steer clear of the "Step Nazis" and "Sponsors from Hell" -- although I have seen some of them in action, which was appalling.

In the end, though, criticism of AA on the average, or even AA at its best, suffices to reveal the partiality and obsoleteness that mars its approach. I'd submit that any affinity group, or political party, or for that matter corporation, has its share of the Torquemada types. In affinity groups, in particular, it is extremely hard to rein them in -- undoubtedly one of the reasons why LSR disavows the concept of sponsorship; that's an immediate reduction in the scope of their influence, which probably even keeps the worst of them out altogether.

[Rick F.]

I think Huxley was definitely onto something in The Perennial Philosophy, when he wrote of the three principal types of temperament -- somatotonic, viscerotonic, cerebrotonic -- and their very different approaches to anything we'd term "spiritual." It is unfortunate that, despite a long friendship with Bill Wilson, he never really got the point across; but it is also unsurprising: Bill was a somatotonic's somatotonic, with the corresponding tendency to steamroller on through, regardless.

I'm not a viscerotonic, so I don't connect with ritual or the herd experience; nor am I a somatotonic, so I'm incapable of the kind of sudden Augustinian conversion experience, which Huxley aptly diagnoses as primarily a change of audience. For cerebrotonic li'l ol' me, the joint inquiry has to move along, make headway, find out new things, call its assumptions into question as needed, and so on.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that, at some point, neuroanatomy and neurochemistry will advance to a degree that makes all those metaphysical adornments look fustian and irrelevant -- much as Freud's etiology of autism is seen today.