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AA = Crap?
JohnnyCache
Starting DefensePlace at the tableRegistered User regular
Starting DefensePlace at the tableRegistered User regular
Here's something I haven't seen done to death on these forums.
Is the Alchoholics' Anonymous program (and/or other appications of 12-step) a venue for state mandated religion?
It does mandate a belief in and surrender to a higher power, and is, in many places, mandated by the court.
Then there an issue with function - AA is often described in the most glowing of terms ancedotally, but statistics don't back it up as a functional program. It's statistically little better then quitting cold turkey.
Finally, the issue of attitude - do addicts need to be told they should surrender to a higher power, or do they need to be more self-reliant and self- constrained?
There are secular alternatives to AA that seem to produce better results, yet they aren't court mandated - they often aren't even allowed as alternatives to AA.
Why might that be?
Is the Alchoholics' Anonymous program (and/or other appications of 12-step) a venue for state mandated religion?
It does mandate a belief in and surrender to a higher power, and is, in many places, mandated by the court.
Then there an issue with function - AA is often described in the most glowing of terms ancedotally, but statistics don't back it up as a functional program. It's statistically little better then quitting cold turkey.
Finally, the issue of attitude - do addicts need to be told they should surrender to a higher power, or do they need to be more self-reliant and self- constrained?
There are secular alternatives to AA that seem to produce better results, yet they aren't court mandated - they often aren't even allowed as alternatives to AA.
Why might that be?
JohnnyCache on
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Short answer is yes, AA is crap. The only real way that I see to stop people from drinking and driving is to somehow instill in them a sense of social or personal responsibility into them. As defeatist as this may seem, I just don't see that happening.
I host a podcast about movies.
I'm more concerned about it's weak success rate much more than it's religious overtones. Curbing the destructive effects of rampant alcoholism in an individual would be worth dealing with the ills of religion (and I say that as a staunch atheist) if it worked, but there's minimal evidence of that.
Have you ever been to one? They're pretty churchy. Also very depressing. And the one experience I had with part of a meeting picking someone up, never has ten minutes made me want to drink so bad.
In fact we went straight to a bar.
I host a podcast about movies.
--
Also, AA religious cooks make up at least 50% of the pain-in-the-ass-morons on the atheist USENET groups.
But then again, I'm just going by what I saw when House went through rehab a couple of weeks ago. What do I know.
That looks like basic self-help stuff with mentions of god thrown in there. I see nothing about worship, ethics, claims about the existence of any single deity, or prophetic/mystical claims.
It would seem to me that AA has adopted the idea of the existence of a supreme being for a) psychological and b) cultural reasons. It's not that big of a deal. If you go to AA, and you understand god to be the grey sock that clings to your couch, then you are free (and, indeed, encouraged) to use that conception of god to further your own emotional and moral development.
They did some TV special some years ago.
AA meetings would get you out of jail sooner for certain violations.
Sucks for the ethical atheist.
I haven't looked up the success rate of other programs, but I'd wager that the ones which build up the confidence of their subjects, and make them feel empowered, are more effective than this "spiritual awakening" stuff.
"Hope is not a strategy," indeed.
Then you go to jail, Christ denier!
Clearly they're referring to our heavenly father, Bacchus, the God of Wine.
You're saying that I'm wrong because they capitalize 'G'? I assume that you are implying they are trying to encourage belief in the God (capital G) of the largest religion in the West, Christianity. Which would bring us back to b) cultural reasons for mentioning a higher power. Chances are, if you are born in Europe or the Americas, you're going to be a christian. Even if you aren't, you are at the very least going to be exposed to the various (and sometimes very pervasive) cultural artifacts that we all have to deal with.
I think people are overreacting. It's self-help that encourages you to come conceptualize a higher power that will aid you in your journey of emotional and moral reconstruction.
And it doesn't work.
I'm pretty sure that would be true regardless if god was mentioned or not.
The thing is that the majority of the program is BASED on religion, which is likely why it gets so much support to begin with.
The shit gets promoted like it's a cure, when all it's good for is finding new drinking buddies.
my gut feeling would be that its leaps and bounds better than a program that has not changed since it was started 70+ years ago.
I automatically distrust any claim that psychotherapy for alcoholism "doesn't work". Drug addiction of any sort is best described as a psychosocial and biological chronic disease. The right mix of environmental and biological cues can bring any addict back to their substance of choice; almost every addict has occasional slips or relapses in their behavior. In short, there is no cure, so no treatment will ever "work". There were too many studies to read in the Orange Papers link cited above, but most were written before this model was even recognized, and you can read the error for yourselves in some of the quotations whenever they mention remission from drinking as an absolute.
The maddening thing about psychotherapy is that it's exactly as rewarding as the patient thinks it is, and notoriously tough to measure otherwise.
Learn something new every day, I guess.
I know a person who has gone through AA. The program went out of its way to specify that the "higher power" wasn't necessarily God. It could be family, community, God, a sense of responsibility, whatever. The point is to acknowledge the existence of some entity greater than yourself, and draw strength from it. If it's God, cool, if not, that's cool as well.
This is why I can't ever risk drinking.
(In case nobody gets the imbedded point there...)
The method is fairly likely to make some people feel insignificant and unimportant, and make them more likely to drink.
Yes, some of us would have a problem with that.
Me, I just have trouble thinking of some entity greater than myself. I like to think that I'm in charge of my own life, and the whole idea of "surrendering myself to some other power" is kind of creepy. And isn't it kind of counter-intuitive when it comes to drug/alcohol support? Shouldn't the message be that YOU and only YOU have the power and you have to be strong blah blah blah?
Like...
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
11. 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.
Those are pretty terrible messages, if you ask me. If you want to fix your failure of a life, YOU have to do it, not ask some higher entity to repair your fuck-ups for you. That's just retarded.
Actually, it's pretty good, for the same reason that other older psychotherapies can turn out to be good: they're self-selecting. People who go to AA think there's a chance that it will help them. For some people, AA helps them, and they stick with it and get helped. For others, they stop, and find another way or are not helped. The program does help some people, but can never claim to be able to help them all in the way that most medicines would.
I'm having a problem with the whole "entity" thing in general, God or god or whatever. I would hazard a guess that your friend just attended an AA group that was leaning to the secular and trying to avoid religious connotations while still technically adhereing to the origional tennents of AA.
I fail to see any evidence of why that is even a necessary step. I think it's a leftover from when the group was more overtly religious, read: Christian, and rather than scrapping it like they should they are trying to retrofit it to make it more palatable.
That, is a massive reaming to someone like me. If I didn't know anything about the process of AA, just the name (which I didn't, for the longest time), then I would get to step 3 and just go
Experiments done in the 60s with treating alcoholics with LSD had 50 percent success rates, compared to the 5 percent being discussed for AA.
I would make it very clear that my understanding of God is that God is actually Lucifer.
And I don't mean the kind that wears a smoking jacket.
But presumably there are courts looking at you so this might not be the greatest idea.
That would actually be a very funny cosmic joke.
Lucifer creates the universe and all, and then makes up this person called "God" "Yahweh" whatever for kicks to see how we take it. Sets himself up as the villian.
I mean, it's a throwback to the Greek mentality of Gods, but damn I think it's pretty hilarious and something that the mythological "Lucifer" character would do.
Ha! I love that.
But yeah, a throwback to the Greeks who generally liked to fuck with us for their amusement. They didn't harbor any particular ill-will, they were just bored.