I’m grateful for a really good night of sleep. I’m grateful for really good coffee. I’m grateful for a Tuesday at the library. I’m grateful for getting a little lost sometimes. I’m grateful for seeing that some things already happened. I’m grateful to be sober today.
First things first: This being Tuesday, the “Anyone Anywhere” meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous will be taking place at 7pm (edt):
We’re going to be starting on Chapter 3 tonight, the deftly-titled, “More About Alcoholism,” which kicks off with this pretty, stirring and accurate summary of the whole enterprise1:
Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think they are bodily and mentally different from their fellows. Therefore, it is not surprising that our drinking careers should have been characterized by countless vain attempts to prove we could drink like other people. The idea that somehow, someday we will control and enjoy our drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.
Big Book, p. 30
It’s an “open” meeting, meaning that it’s “open” even to non-alcoholics! Anyone who’s interested in learning more about AA is welcome! Also, I personally think it’s completely cool for people to watch and listen to meetings with their cameras off. AA is a set of tools, not a set of rules. I just made that up—but I think it’s right. Anyway, hope you can join us!
It is certainly true that I spend too much of my day on the Twitter. It’s where I first started doing the gratitude list and there is actually a really lovely recovery community there. One of the things that is interesting is that it does open a window (or maybe cleans the window) on some of the criticisms of AA. After the belief that AA is too religious, I think the thing that comes next on the list is difficulty with the concept of “powerlessness” and also the disease model of addiction, itself.
First, when you start to read some of the stuff put out by AA critics, I’m struck by the dubious methodology of the “evidence-based studies (roughly none of their results are replicable by others for starters.) 2 But at the core of their philosophy is this:
I was able to quit, therefore there can't be something called addiction and it can't be considered a disease.3
At a minimum, this poorly reasoned statement is probably proof of something completely different. I think the fact that some people have an easier time resolving their substance use issues suggests the possibility they maybe had a lighter, milder case; maybe the genetic pre-dispositions weren’t so dominant, maybe there weren’t the same environmental factors, maybe there was a chance to nip things in the bud that I missed. So little is actually known about this disease, but based on my experience with approximately all of the other diseases out there, there are gradations and variations of everything and some people tolerate things better than others do and some have it worse. Why would we assume that every case of addiction or alcoholism is the same?
The Big Book recognizes there are “types” of problem drinkers (pp. 20-21) and suggests that some people will be able to resolve their problems with less difficulty than others. The Big Book sets apart “hard drinkers” who “may have the habit badly enough to gradually impair them physically,” but also have the ability to stop or moderate for a “sufficiently strong reason.” Big Book, p. 21. But in Bill’s catchy phrase:
But what about the real alcoholic?
She may start off as a moderate drinker; she may or may not become a continuous hard drinker; but at some stage of her drinking career, she begins to lose all control of her liquor consumption…
Big Book, p. 21
The common mistake, I think, is to conflate the specific words of the First Step, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable,” with some general admission of worthlessness and helplessness. The admission of powerlessness in the Steps relates specifically to alcohol and it is reflected in the Big Book’s typology of alcoholics: the real alcoholic has no defense against the first drink. Perhaps we can control our gambling or our online shopping or whatever, but whatever our “substance of choice,” that is what we are powerless over.4
I think viewing the Big Book’s framework of alcoholics and parsing the words carefully has a couple of consequences.
There are definitely people who can recover without the full-boat AA spiritual awakening. We should be happy for them and their recovery should be something we all celebrate and learn from, rather than taken as a proof point about the validity or not of AA.
There are definitely people who need the full-boat AA spiritual awakening. I am one of those people and for those of you who both read the footnotes and worship at the altar of statistical significance, I also have at least SIX friends who fit in this category. We should be happy for these people and their recovery should be something we all celebrate and learn from, rather than taken as a proof point about the validity or not of AA.
I think a lot of the criticisms of AA really stem from misunderstanding that we don’t all suffer from this disease in the same way and what worked for me might not work for you. Maybe it’s because we’re alcoholics that causes this to be such a black and white thing, but I think recognizing that this is a highly-individuated disease is really important. The Steps are tools, not rules. The things that fed my addiction were different than the ones that fed yours—-there are similarities and commonalities to be sure, that’s one of the ways we know it’s a disease. But the way I work Step Three and how I lead my life going forward is going to be different in some measure than yours.
I think the reason we share our “experience, strength and hope” is not to establish precedent; it’s to show the incredible malleability and applicability of the Big Book and the Steps. The Steps and the Big Book propose an ideology and some simple, re-orienting, thinking prompts that can and have been customized for a very, very wide variety of circumstances.
The path out can be pretty hard to find, but once you glimpse it, well, you can see it’s not narrow. I can’t tell anyone else where their path begins or what will happen once they find it. No one could tell me that, either. I can tell you what happened to me and what worked for me. I can tell you how I found meaning in the pages of Big Book, but how everyone else finds meaning is how everyone else recovers. My recovery is not the high score on a cosmic pinball machine, some kind of challenge to other alcoholics to recover the way I do or else.
Only 7% of the people who need help will ever seek it. I think that makes all of these arguments about methods pretty empty. The Fifth Tradition simplifies the focus: There is but one primary purpose and that is to carry the message to the still sick and suffering. That message is not, “it’s my way or the highway,” it’s “let me show you my path and maybe that will help you recognize yours.”
Also, I’m going to start making an effort to exercise some pronoun equity in the quotes from the Big Book. I definitely am not trying to alter any of the meaning, but the constant litany of “he’s” and “hims” is off-putting and I’m pretty sure that Bill W. would agree. I’ll let you know after the next Ouija session.
Someone actually got a study published that consisted of interviews with SIX alcoholics in Australia and their views on AA. Ummm, I have six friends, too.
We’re not doing this today, but one of the most-cited studies defining the “attitudes of AA,” begins by presenting this syllogism as uncontested fact. Despite the inherent logical/rhetorical flaws in this reasoning, it kind of ignores the consensus view of the medical community, as they like to set it out in the DSM.
Also, “substance of choice” is pretty common treatment parlance, but I think it accidentally feeds into this mistaken idea that addictions are choices.
One explanation of powerlessness that always stuck with me was:
“Once you start drinking/using you can’t predict how many you’re going to have until you stop”
I appreciate the fact that you offer a defense of AA that acknowledges that this is not a cookie cutter program. I find that people can forget that the 12 steps are suggestions and not rules. I think we all do need to find our own way along this journey.