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| quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
Congrats Eddie. That's quite the milestone and you should be proud of the self discipline. |
After a few years, it takes all the discipline necessary to keep from touching a hot stove-top burner or slamming my foot in a car door - not really much of an accomplishment but thank you, none-the-less.
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN & Evolve140
Fuck AA.
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Cor version: Fuck AA.
I got lucky and found a group who actually knew what the fuck they were doing. Most don't. Never minding the issue of *God/Higher Power, the second step is, Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. I can't say I blame either of you for this sentiment and would grant RANN an honorable mention for being an AA outsider who's astute powers of observation give him insight into what I've also observed as a "social dependency." How one is supposed to come to believe their sanity would be restored when they see a group of people, many of whom are just lonely and/or horny and not really alcoholics, carrying on in the way that is typical in 99% of AA meetings is quite impossible. And if anyone thinks that's sanity, they are clearly too fucked up to know what's good for them.
I will tell you, from personal experience, that there is nothing wrong with the AA model. Adhered to closely, it has favorable results, but it's not for everyone, let alone every legitimately diagnosed alcoholic. The problems arise from the interpretations and applications of the model. ~AA's 12 steps are adapted fairly directly from the Bible's Book of James. Religion, at the time of the Oxford Group - the coalition of recovering alcoholics responsible for AA's founding - was almost as loaded a term then as it is, now. What Bill Wilson, who authored much of the literature currently used in AA meetings, today, was trying to dispense with was the need to directly confront the individual's fear of religion and, instead, make a very clever and subversive suggestion that God was an almost formless entity completely untethered to the dogma meted out my many pastors of the time.
Wilson authored the AA Big Book; the formal instruction manual the first 164 pages of which, along with the Doctor's Opinion as its prologue, are currently used in AA, today. The writing of that book was essentially what put him on the map as AA's founder. He was exalted to nearly the level of a saint, not just in AA, but outside of it as well. Unfortunately, Wilson was as far from being a saint as a hog from the Moon. He had numerous extra-marital affairs with new-comer women (a huge taboo in AA, called 13th stepping). He was such a prolific philanderer that, in order to protect AA's reputation along with the women who were arriving, looking for help, a few of the first members of Oxford/AA secretly formed the Founder's Group specifically to run interference against Bill's seductions; to, quite literally, cock-block Bill W.
In later years after the publication of the Big Book, Bill was falling on financial hard times. He decided to write a companion piece to the Big Book that would further explain the steps and traditions, suggested in AA. More commonly referred to as the 12 & 12, it is truly some of the worst writing in the history of self-help. As dated as the Big Book has become (the book contains a prediction about landing on the moon among its other anachronisms), it is still an example of very clear, lucid writing that, while too simplified to be above misinterpretation, is still useful in the hands of people who have had more stringent experience following its suggestions.
The 12 & 12 is quite the opposite. Its genesis speaks volumes as to why. Fame had gone to his head and Wilson lost touch with the realities of sober living. To the alarmed consternation of many in AA's founding circle, rumors of a pending relapse began circulating through the grapevine. AA's hierarchy became alarmed that Wilson, whose now precariously inflated fame had garnered so much successful publicity for AA, would topple the organization altogether with a brutal notoriety. The danger that Bill would once again raise booze to lips was quite close to becoming a very public reality that would torpedo the reputation of AA in one sip.
A select group was sent for an intervention to get him to come back into the fold. After a great deal of persuasion, Wilson relented. For a while, he would reform his behavior but, on the brink of financial ruin, he still finished the 12 & 12. Bill would eventually be convinced to repudiate its content but the damage had been done. In financial terms, AA would still be successful but so much of what it is currently has been influenced by the rambling musings of a narcissist who'd let his fame decide who he was.
Just a few years later, Bill Wilson and Timothy Leary, who was touting LSD as a miracle drug that could be used to treat all manner of psychiatric conditions (including alcoholism), formed a chemical bromance. News reports threatened to tarnish AA's reputation and, if Bill would have tested Leary's cure with a drink, he would be relapsed and AA would be scuttled. He was, once again, pulled back into the fold before he could test Leary's cure. He may have helped launch AA but to members concerned with the work of actually helping other alcoholics, Bill W. was a huge pain in the ass. Bill Wilson died, begging for a last drink. In a thinly veiled kidnapping, The Founders Group had closed ranks around his deathbed and forbade his relapse. It was a public relations effort that would preserve the figurehead's mythological quality of sobriety. He did, in fact, die sober.
From its inception, on a realistic level, AA has an essential vulnerability in that its message requires someone who is experienced with its suggestions to interpret, to the newcomer, their meaning. This is neither by accident nor was it really ever avoidable. The thinking of the alcoholic, coming in from the cold, is so distorted that their ability to comprehend much of anything is negated by a brain in the perilous throws of detoxification. Inherently, there is a need for that person to form a support network - if not from within AA than from people who have been through similar straights and know how to navigate the way out of them.
After the 12 & 12 was published, Wilson's saintly reputation superseded his admonishments against it. Slowly but surely, amidst the useful lore of the Oxford Group becoming diluted with time and outside social influences - the rejection of authority evolving throughout the Sixties or the practices of judges referring simple binge drinkers, drug-addicts, and other non-alcoholics to AA - the 12 & 12's specious reasoning took hold in an organization that already derived all of its growth from its inclusion of people at their absolute worst. If the Big Book and mentoring model were the genetic back-bone of Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12 & 12, along with subsequent ramblings authored by Wilson, are its herpetic virus - forever changing the intellectual make-up of the formerly efficacious subculture.
The first 100 members of AA may have tried to thwart the new influences but as new members came in and garnered influence within the rapidly growing organization's hierarchy, the war for AA's intellectual (and some would argue spiritual) integrity was lost. An example of this is the word, sponsor; circulated in the general public's consciousness through movies, television, and news. It wasn't a word commonly uttered in AA until its appearance, in the 12 & 12.
On its surface, it's this nice, warm, fuzzy word. "I'm going to call my sponsor!" I've got a connection to someone who's seen what I've seen, has felt what I'm feeling, and is there to support me. Just one person who has taken a small pledge to be there for me and help me pull my head from its seemingly inextricable lodging, firmly up my ass. The problem with the concept, however, is that it promotes isolation from the larger group who, as a result of following the same model, are fragmented in terms of having an otherwise common solution. This isolation often prohibits new members from checking with those, outside of their sponsors, as to the efficacy of his or her suggestions. The sponsor, if he or she is so inclined, can exploit the vulnerability of the newcomer and foster, in them, an emotional dependence that can last for years. Sometimes this dependence is only as parasitic as the pursuit of personal gratification through the act of helping others. Sometimes it's far more dangerous than that, as the sponsor forms his own micro-cult consisting of psychologically vulnerable newcomers. Regardless, it's next to impossible for the newly recovering to discern whether the sponsor, taking them through the steps, has actually done them, himself.
The group I got sober in didn't use sponsors or the 12 & 12. They did it the old-school way and, while I'm not convinced their way was always the right way++, they had a common efficacy with a lot of people who had achieved relatively successful, very long-term (a combined average of 20 years or more) sobriety. It wasn't just not drinking. They had visible signs of success. Their reasoning - the sanity - was restored. They carried themselves in a different way than most AAs. Many had just quit smoking after being in the group for a while without any effort, let alone a decision to stop, on their part. There was a logic to their discourse that eludes most AA meetings.
The average AA meeting usually has at least one person with ten or more years of sobriety. Sometimes the number is a little higher but 75% of the population in AA, today, has less than one. There are a few with two or more. There are hardly any collectives with a combined average of 5 or more years. Many of the "old timers" are just as insane as when they came in. Some of them, more-so.
Most meetings consist of attention-seeking behavior and dialogue constructed around loose relation to the literature along with AA's countless, practically meaningless platitudes ("Live and Let Live, One Day at a Time", "Let go and let God" et al). Newcomers are welcome to share but, invariably, everyone indulges in rambling monologues that meander so ridiculously that their speaker nearly always loses the point of what they were trying to relate to the group, in the first place. They wind up speaking in circles, constantly having to return to the origin of the thoughts they were trying to convey. Those who do speak well are typically regurgitating long-rehearsed speeches that have been practiced for the length of time they've been sober. Trap them in a conversation where they can't fall back on the cliche's, however, and they invariably resort to the previously described pattern of accidental tautologies, non sequiturs, and syllogisms.
One, that I remember because it was said, so often, goes like this:
"I remember when I first got here (to AA). I was having a lot of trouble because I couldn't find a sponsor. Finally, there was this one guy who told this other guy in a meeting to shut up. He said, 'You're just trying to make fucked-up look cool!' I thought that was cool and I knew, right then and there, I was going to ask that guy to be my sponsor.
"Well, me and him didn't always get along. I got pissed off at him, one night, and fired him and you know what he says to me? I'm out there smoking on the front steps and he walks right up to me and says, 'I know all about abandonment, Steve!' That shit got me, right in the heart. I knew... as pissed off as I was, I knew that guy had my number."
He constantly recited this very same monologue, over and over and over, again.
Above, I've mentioned just a few things that make AA truly fucked up. To catalog everything which has changed it from being a formerly helpful subculture to being a loosely organized cult would take a few hundred pages. Most people who criticize AA, criticize it from the outside. They don't like the God aspect or disagree with the disease model and it's not my place to say that these criticisms are necessarily incorrect. Sometimes their criticism is leveled incorrectly at things they just can't understand. Other times they're criticizing something that actually is fucked up but it's a symptom of a deeper problem that eludes their comprehension. They might not like the notion of sponsorship and use that to dismiss the entirety of AA. What they don't understand are that ideas, like sponsorship, were never part of the original model and therefor shouldn't really be the focus of their criticism.
*No, seriously, I'm not ever going to argue that my sobriety is proof of the existence of God - not even a direction I'm interested in taking this discussion. Pretty sure that better debaters than myself could successfully argue that me being sober is evidence that there is no such being. 
~Most of this has been explained to me by a few old-timers with 20+ years of sobriety. It's part of their narratives, being able to speak to people who were actually there, rather than just blindly following the over-blown mythology.
++There were other groups who were persistently old-school who managed long-term sobriety without nearly as much drama. Some members, in the pretense of being helpful, indulged in what I call axiom abuse in which a rule or ideal is invoked to bully other, often less experienced members. Others were just prima donnas who, although decent enough, tended toward self-righteousness when it came to the smell of their own farts.
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Now with extra singles!
my old stuff, not quite up to snuff - but I still dig it - UPDATED 9/23/2012
Last edited by EddieZilker on Sep-09-2012 at 19:49
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