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“Jack tried to reason himself into leaving but he couldn’t escape the lure of the big win, he couldn’t leave until it was his or there was no choice left, no choice left meant no change left. Still, the nudges kept coming, the cherries, never enough money to leave, always just enough left to keep going. Jack was in his own private nightmare; maybe this was where he belonged. Finally, he lost it all, losing always felt good but never as good as this.”

Quote by Jim Lowe

Book:New Reform
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New Reform

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Jim Lowe

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“One bedrock tenet of the Oxford Group, however, would influence AA for years to come: an absolute opposition to medical or psychological explanations for human failings and thus a complete prohibition on professional treatment of any kind.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“When Bill Wilson sat down to write Alcoholics Anonymous, he first prayed for guidance. The Twelve Steps themselves reportedly came to him in a single inspiration. (He identified the number twelve with the Twelve Apostles, and felt that this was a fitting number.)”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“So devoted were AA’s early members to burnishing the reputation of their fledgling organization, in fact, that when when one member, Morgan R., secured an interview on a widely popular radio show, members kept him locked in a hotel room “for several days under 24 hour watch” out of fear that he would drink before the show. When the interview went off successfully, another early backer, Hank P., mailed twenty thousand postcards to doctors, urging them to purchase Alcoholics Anonymous.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“Silkworth, a supporter of AA from its inception, was quoted [as saying], "We all know that the alcoholic has an urge to share his troubles. . . . But the psychoanalyst, being of human clay, is not often a big enough man for that job. The patient simply cannot generate enough confidence in him. But the patient can have enough confidence in God—once he has gone through the mystical experience of recognizing God. And upon that principle the Alcoholic Foundation rests. The medical profession, in general, accepts the principle as sound.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“[Jack Alexander] underscor[ed] what remains a widely held belief among many AA members: that only an alcoholic can help another alcoholic: “A bridge of confidence is thereby erected, spanning a gap, which has baffled the physician, the minister, the priest, or the hapless relatives. . . . Only an alcoholic can squat on another alcoholic’s chest for hours with the proper combination of discipline and sympathy.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“When the Big Book was first published in 1939, the American Medical Association, bewildered by its tone and inflated claims, called the work “a curious combination of organizing propaganda and religious exhortation. . . . [T]he one valid thing in the book is the recognition of the seriousness of addiction to alcohol. Other than this, the book has no scientific merit or interest.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases went even further in 1940, calling AA a “regressive mass psychological method” and a “religious fervor,” writing: “The big, big book, i.e. big in words, is a rambling sort of camp-meeting confession of experiences, told in the form of biographies of various alcoholics who had been to a certain institution and have provisionally recovered, chiefly under the influence of the ‘big brothers of the spirit.’ Of the inner meaning of alcoholism there is hardly a word. It is all surface material.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“Throughout AA’s history, its members have often embraced any literature that references disease, whether degenerative, genetic, or biochemical. AA favors the term disease because it fits with the description of alcoholism as a disease in its own literature. It also supports the foundational notion that an addict’s behavior is uncontrollable (“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol”). Ultimately the mechanism of the disease (and whether it is strictly logical to embrace it, given AA’s own views) has been less important than the word itself.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
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“Harry Tiebout, [Bill] Wilson’s personal therapist [assured] the collected members that AA was “not just a miracle but a way of life which is filled with eternal value.”

AddictionRecoverySobrietyRehabGamblers AnonymousGam AnonAlcoholics Anonymous12 Step ProgramAaAl Anon
Book:The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
Create image