Browse 79 quotes about Aa.
“By drinking, a boy acts like a man. After drinking, many a man acts like a boy.”
“Angel is responsible for all the AA prayers and mottoes. DON’T THINK AND DON’T DRINK. Angel put a cold wet one-sock on Tony’s head and knelt beside him.
“Brother, believe me … I’ve been there … right down there in the gutter where you are. I know just how you feel.”
Tony didn’t open his eyes. Anybody says he knows just how someone else feels is a fool.”
Source: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
“AA purports to be open to anyone, as it is stated in Tradition Tree, "The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking," but it isn't open to everyone. It's open only to those who are willing to publicly declare themselves to be alcoholics or addicts and who are willing to give up their inherent right of independence by declaring themselves powerless over addictive drugs and alcohol, as stated in Step One, "We admitted we are powerless over alcohol- that our lives had become unmanageable.”
Source: The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery
“Danny strolled to the town common, sat on one of the benches in Teenytown and took one of the bottles out of the bag, looking down on it like Hamlet with Yorick's skull”
Source: Doctor Sleep
“The only way to truly help most drug addicts and most alcoholics is to—instead of them—change reality.”
“....the Crocodiles say they can't even begin to say how many new guys they've seen Come In and then get sucked back Out There, Come In to AA for a while and Hang In and put together a little sober time and have things start to get better, head-wise and life-quality-wise, and after a while the new guys get cocky, they decide they've gotten `Well,' and they get really busy at the new job sobriety's allowed them to get, or maybe they buy season Celtics tickets, or they rediscover pussy and start chasing pussy (these withered gnarled toothless totally post-sexual old fuckers actually say pussy), but one way or another these poor cocky clueless new bastards start gradually drifting away from rabid Activity In The Group, and then away from their Group itself, and then little by little gradually drift away from any AA meetings at all, and then, without the protection of meetings or a Group, in time--oh there's always plenty of time, the Disease is fiendishly patient--how in time they forget what it was like, the ones that've cockily drifted, they forget who and what they are, they forget about the Disease, until like one day they're at like maybe a Celtics-Sixers game, and the good old Fleet/First Interstate Center's hot, and they think what could just one cold foamer hurt, after all this sober time, now that they've gotten `Well.' Just one cold one. What could it hurt. And after that one it's like they'd never stopped, if they've got the Disease. And how in a month or six months or a year they have to Come Back In, back to the Boston AA halls and their old Group, tottering, D.T.ing, with their faces hanging down around their knees all over again, or maybe it's five or ten years before they can get it up to get back In, beaten to shit again, or else their system isn't ready for the recurred abuse again after some sober time and they die Out There--the Crocodiles are always talking in hushed, 'Nam-like tones about Out There--or else, worse, maybe they kill somebody in a blackout and spend the rest of their lives in MCI-Walpole drinking raisin jack fermented in the seatless toilet and trying to recall what they did to get in there, Out There; or else, worst of all, these cocky new guys drift back Out There and have nothing sufficiently horrible to Finish them happen at all, just go back to drinking 24/7/365, to not-living, behind bars, undead, back in the Disease's cage all over again. The Crocodiles talk about how they can't count the number of guys that've Come In for a while and drifted away and gone back Out There and died, or not gotten to die.”
Source: Infinite Jest
“You know what they say at [Alcoholics Anonymous] meetings. Coincidence is your Higher Power acting with anonymity.'
'I didn't know you were in the program.'
'I'm not. I go for the dialogue. It's great material.”
Source: Robicheaux
“In the one-treatment-fits-all approach, clients sit in group meetings all day and all evening and listen to each other stories. At the end of the first week, everyone in the room knows everyone's story. That goes on for three more weeks, and then most people go home with the same problems they brought with them when they arrived.”
Source: The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery
“Times change and discoveries are made that render earlier techniques and approaches less effective. Change is inevitable. To remain rigid when the whole world is changing and advancing is to invite misfortune. The AA program in particular is challenged with an opportunity of unprecedented magnitude.”
Source: The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery
“Bill Wilson’s experience normalized the idea that a spiritual awakening could happen outside of traditional religion. AA meetings became sacred spaces for raw vulnerability, confession, and spiritual transformation—without clergy, sacraments, or hierarchy. Bill’s white light moment shattered the funhouse. It didn’t make him holy; it made him honest.”
Source: The Son of Man & Its Mystical Awakening: Reclaiming Eschatology & Atonement During a Convergence of Globalization, Nihilism, Science, & Spirituality
“That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal—will steal things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away — at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low‐IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high‐IQ people.”
Source: Infinite Jest
“Not a single alcohol has a human problem.”
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“[They] also developed some theories of their own, including the notion that alcoholics were “in a state of insanity rather than a state of sin.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“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.)”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“[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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“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.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“It wasn’t long before the court systems began to mandate AA attendance for drug and alcohol offenders. AA won a landmark decision in 1966 when two decisions from a federal appeals court upheld the disease concept of alcoholism and the court’s use of it, despite the fact that there was scant precedent for a US court of law to assign itself the power of medical diagnosis. Although later decisions would rule court-mandated 12-step attendance unconstitutional, judges still refer people to AA as part of sentencing or as a condition of probation. Dr. Arthur Horvath, a past president of the Division on Addictions of the American Psychological Association, summarizes the current legal status of this practice: "If you have been convicted of an offense related to addiction, it is common to be ordered to attend support groups, treatment, or both. It has also been common that you would be ordered, not just to a support group, but to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) specifically, or to another 12-step based group. Based on recent court decisions, if you have been ordered to attend a 12-step group or 12-step based treatment by the government (the order could be coming from a court, prison officer, probation or parole officer, licensing board or licensing board diversion program, or anyone authorized to act on behalf of the government), you have the right not to attend them. However, you can still be required to attend some form of support group, and some type of treatment. These court decisions are based on the finding that AA is religious enough that being required to attend it would be similar to requiring someone to attend church. Five US Circuit Courts of Appeal (the 2nd, 3rd, 7th, 8th, and 9th) have made similar rulings. . . . The 2nd Circuit Court decision states that AA “placed a heavy emphasis on spirituality and prayer, in both conception and in practice,” that participants were told to “pray to God,” and that meetings began and adjourned with “group prayer.” The court therefore had “no doubt” that AA meetings were “intensely religious events.” Although some have suggested that AA is spiritual but not religious, the court found AA to be religious.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“A recent paper looking at state-sponsored physician health groups (for doctors who have problems with addiction) found that “[r]egardless of setting or duration, essentially all treatment provided to these physicians (95%) was 12-step oriented.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Examining this history, it is clear that AA has been extraordinarily effective at influencing public opinion and policy toward a favorable view of its ideas. What is missing from this account is notable as well: these strides were achieved without any triggering event, such as a well-designed study, that might support the organization’s claims of efficacy. Most of AA’s claims were simply grandfathered in, collecting legitimacy in a sort of echo chamber of reciprocal mentions that often featured the same handful of names.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Human research tends to cleave into two major “kingdoms”: observational studies and controlled studies. Observational studies observe and compare groups of people. This research is conducted passively; in other words, without interventions or controls. Any significant differences that emerge between the populations studied—say, finding that people who drink more diet soda tend to have a higher incidence of depression than people who don’t—can’t prove anything but may be used to generate hypotheses about what is causing this difference. Yet people still assume the obvious when confronted with a correlation of this sort. In the diet soda study, which was actually run by the National Institute of Health and widely reported, many people jumped to the conclusion that depression must be caused by something in the soda. But a moment of creative consideration turns up several other plausible possibilities. What if the people who drink diet soda are simply more judgmental about their body appearance and generally more prone to self-criticism? What if, since drinking more diet soda correlates with a history of being overweight, the depression arises physiologically from the effects of obesity, or as a result of the cluster of health problems that go along with it, such as obstructive sleep apnea and diabetes? What if people who are depressed simply crave sweet things, as evidence suggests? And what of the fact that diet soda drinkers tend to cluster more in urban areas: is there something about this environment that promotes depression? Strong correlation is tantalizing, a just-so homily that satisfies our need for simple explanations. It feels definitive and self-apparent, especially given the huge number of subjects typically involved in such studies. The NIH study that produced the diet soda finding, for instance, had 260,000 subjects. Headlines are driven and public health advice administered whenever a major observational study unearths a provocative new correlation. But it turns out that the record of observational studies like these for generating accurate medical advice is, in a word, abysmal.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Why do purely observational studies fail so often despite finding such clear associations? The diet soda example tells the tale. All of those alternative theories I mentioned can be boiled down to a single, devastating possibility: what if diet soda drinkers are just fundamentally different from regular soda drinkers, in any of the ways I mentioned, and this difference colors everything about the way they live and behave? Scientists call this the selection effect, or selection bias. When human beings are free to behave as they always have—free to willfully choose their behavior—there is no meaningful way to find a control group of comparable subjects.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“A growing body of evidence strongly suggests that people who do things faithfully and regularly for their own well-being, such as taking a multivitamin, exercising daily, or eating a certain diet, are, in fact, fundamentally different from people who don’t. People who adhere to, or comply with, medical advice are more likely to take care of themselves in numerous other ways as well: "Quite simply, people who comply with their doctors’ orders when given a prescription are different and healthier than people who don’t. This difference may be ultimately unquantifiable.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“The compliance effect can lead researchers and reporters who study interventions to falsely credit a pill or diet with improving our health—“Look, people who take fish oil pills live longer than the rest of us!”—when the truth may be far more subtle: the kind of people who take supplements in a disciplined way are already healthier to begin with, with a better prognosis for every disease.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“The compliance effect has led to some famously strange epidemiological results. One long-term study showed that people who took a placebo were half as likely to die as those who did not. Was the placebo protecting them in some way the researchers had failed to anticipate? Hardly. It turned out that simply taking the placebo regularly was a signpost for a wholly different lifestyle. The pill takers were simply more actively engaged in their health across the board.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“A poor understanding of these issues—the need for randomization, the difference between correlation and causation, and the power of the compliance effect—has colored much of the research that has been conducted to date about the effectiveness of 12-step membership and attendance.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Deborah Dawson of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Division of Biometry and Epidemiology, once lamented the lack of credible data in the study of addiction treatment: “Few, if any, studies have assessed the impact of different types of treatment on both the probability and rapidity of recovery, i.e. on person-years of dependence averted.”5 Her principal complaint: the lack of controls in most AA studies.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Analyzing the available data about AA requires that we begin with a clear definition of success. Success, after all, can mean any number of things. Should one measure it in days of sobriety? Weeks without a binge episode? What if people who are making substantive progress slip and have one drink during an otherwise successful period of time: Should they “go back to zero,” as is the practice in many AA chapters? What if they stop drinking but acquire a gambling problem instead?”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Disease is usually a binary system: either you’ve got it or you don’t. Pneumonia: got it or you don’t. HIV: got it or you don’t. Multiple sclerosis, polio, emphysema—all of these are yes-or-no propositions. But alcoholism is not, in fact, a disease: it is a behavior, or perhaps a collection of behaviors. And because nobody can say for sure whether a behavior has ever been eliminated for good without a crystal ball, we must first establish a baseline definition of what success looks like in the treatment of addiction. I’ll propose this simple definition: A treatment for alcoholism may be called successful if an individual no longer drinks in a way that is harmful in his or her life.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“A review of all such reports between 1976 and 1989 was performed by C. D. Emrick (of the School of Medicine of the University of Colorado) and colleagues. The researchers concluded: "The effectiveness of AA as compared to other treatments for “alcoholism” has yet to be demonstrated. Reliable guidelines have not been established for predicting who among AA members will be successful. . . . Caution was raised against rigidly referring every alcohol-troubled person to AA.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“In a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the oldest continuously published medical journal in the world and widely considered the world’s most prestigious, D. C. Walsh and his co-researchers “randomly assigned a series of 227 workers newly identified as abusing alcohol to one of three rehabilitation regimens: compulsory inpatient treatment, compulsory attendance at AA meetings, and a choice of options. The findings were notable: On seven measures of drinking and drug use . . . we found significant differences at several follow-up assessments. The hospital group fared best and that assigned to AA the least well; those allowed to choose a program had intermediate outcomes. Additional inpatient treatment was required significantly more often . . . by the AA group (63 percent) and the choice group (38 percent) than by subjects assigned to initial treatment in the hospital (23 percent). These results led the researchers to issue a warning in their final recommendations: “An initial referral to AA alone or a choice of programs, although less costly than inpatient care, involves more risk than compulsory inpatient treatment and should be accompanied by close monitoring for signs of incipient relapse.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“In 2006, the Cochrane Collaboration undertook a characteristically careful and detailed look at studies of AA and 12-step recovery. First, the researchers recapped what had been determined to date: "[A] meta-analysis [historic analysis of previous studies] by Kownacki (1999) identified severe selection bias in the available studies, with the randomised studies yielding worse results [for AA] than non-randomised studies. This meta-analysis is weakened by the heterogeneity of patients and interventions that are pooled together. Emrick 1989 performed a narrative review of studies about characteristics of alcohol-dependent individuals who affiliate with AA and concluded that the effectiveness of AA as compared to other treatments for alcoholism was not clear and therefore needed to be demonstrated." The Collaboration then identified eight high-quality, controlled, randomized studies, with 3,417 subjects in all. Their conclusion was unambiguous: “No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA or TSF [Twelve Step Facilitation] approaches for reducing alcohol dependence or problems.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“What troubles many good scientists about research like the Fiorentine paper is that studying the people who choose to attend AA is an almost perfect recipe for generating the compliance effect error. AA members who frequently attend meetings may be demonstrating the same sort of self-care qualities that the placebo takers do. They may be, in effect, the Boy Scouts, or “eager patients,” of the addict population. Nobody who has looked at this data would dispute that people who attend AA most often and stay the longest are more likely to improve than the dropouts. The question is whether AA is driving this outcome or benefiting from a correlation instead. Is it possible that the kind of people who stay in 12-step programs are already more likely to improve? Would they be equally likely to do so in any treatment, or even no treatment at all? At heart, the dilemma facing AA research is whether people stay in AA because they’re the type of people who will stick with a program no matter what it is and who would have stuck with it even if it were of no help to them at all.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Visit a therapist and AA together, the data suggests, and you are likely to do better than you would with therapy alone. But visit a therapist for one year and then try AA, and you won’t do any better than if you had just stayed in therapy.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Unsurprisingly, they found that the people who stuck with either treatment—AA or professional treatment—did significantly better than those who did not. These were the compliers.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“People who stayed in AA for fewer than six months had worse outcomes than people who never entered AA at all. This finding seems to mirror the Brandsma data: AA attendees seem to get worse before they get better. One theory is that the finding is nothing but noise—the standard statistical turbulence that can foul any short-term study. But if the data are real and repeatable, then they suggest something the Moos researchers perhaps did not consider: that AA might do more harm than good for the people who choose to attend but do not buy into the program.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Why do large observational studies such as that of Fiorentine and Moos seem to suggest that AA is effective, while smaller controlled studies like those of the Brandsma, Walsh, and others included in the Cochrane Review do not? The likely explanation is simple: people stay in AA if they’re getting better and leave if they aren’t. This is understandable. If you are able to stop drinking, then continuing to attend AA is a comfortable and affirming choice. If you struggle with drinking and can’t make use of the AA approach, then you are less likely to keep attending. Over the long term, the people who remain in AA are, by definition, the success stories. But they represent a very small slice of the people who start there; as we will see shortly, the dropout rate from AA is extremely high. These facts—that AA works for the diehards and fails for the dropouts—are perennially misunderstood by the press and even by some researchers. Proponents of the program proudly point to the fact that people who stay in AA tend to be sober, ignoring the tautological nature of this claim. Reviewing this logic, Harvard biostatistics professor Richard Gelber said, “The main problem is the self-fulfilling prophesy: the longer people stick with AA the better they are, hence AA must be working. It is like saying the longer you live, the older you will be when you die.” As we will soon see, this fundamental error in logic undergirds nearly every claim of AA’s efficacy.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“In 2008, J. McKellar (writing as lead author, with Ilgen, Moos, and Moos as coauthors) concluded that “clinicians should focus on keeping patients engaged in AA.” This recommendation is even more dogmatic than Moos and Moos suggested in their original paper. In fact, this paper itself notes that pressuring people to attend AA is usually unhelpful: “a significant number of substance abuse patients never attend self-help groups after discharge,” that is, when no longer mandated to attend.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“AA began as a nonprofessional attempt to grapple with the alcoholism of its founders. It arose and took its famous twelve steps directly from the Oxford Group, a fundamentalist religious organization founded in the early twentieth century.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“AA spread like wildfire through a country desperate for hope at the end of Prohibition and in the midst of the Great Depression.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“AA has managed to survive, in part, because members who become and remain sober speak and write about it regularly. This is no accident: AA’s twelfth step expressly tells members to proselytize for the organization: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” Adherence to this step has created a classic sampling error: because most of us hear only from the people who succeeded in the program, it is natural to conclude that they represent the whole. In reality, these members speak for an exceptionally small percentage of addicts.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“AA makes inflated claims about itself. Its foundational document, Alcoholics Anonymous (commonly referred to as the “Big Book” and a perennial best seller), spells out a confident ethos regularly endorsed by AA members: "Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest." In other words, the program doesn’t fail; you fail. Imagine if similar claims were made in defense of an ineffective antibiotic. Imagine dismissing millions of people who did not respond to a new form of chemotherapy as “constitutionally incapable” of properly receiving the drug. Of course, no researchers would make such claims in scientific circles—if they did, they would risk losing their standing. In professional medicine, if a treatment doesn’t work, it’s the treatment that must be scrutinized, not the patient. Not so for Alcoholics Anonymous.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“More than anything, AA offers a comforting veneer of actionable change: it is something you can do.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“For an organization that has expressly denied religious standing and publicly claims a secular—even scientific—approach, it is curious that AA retains these explicit references to a spiritual power whose care might help light the way toward recovery. Even for addicts who opt to interpret this step secularly, the problem persists: why can’t this ultimate power lie within the addict?”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“Addiction is not a moral defect, and to suggest that does a great disservice to people suffering with this disorder.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry
“The degradation woven through these steps also seems unwittingly designed to exacerbate, rather than relieve, the humiliating feelings so common in addiction. If moral self-flagellation could cure addiction, we could be sure there would be precious few addicts.”
Source: The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry