Wow, that Penn and Teller thing is horrible. About 3:30 when they're reading from the AA book -- "I admit that I am powerless over alcohol" as Teller makes fun like it's the stupidest idea ever. A lot of the people you'll find in AA really do need to admit they're powerless over alcohol. That's no joke.
But Penn and Teller readily admit they've never had a drink in their lives (it was a choice we made, a path we never decided to go down, so screw you losers that aren't total teetotalling illusionists).
The comments here in general demonstrate a general lack of understanding of addiction. It's not a choice, it's a disease, and the prognosis is generally shitty. I'm not saying AA is the end all be all (it's not), but holy shit, don't be so dismissive of an organization that saves lives by trying to give people strategies they can use to avoid drinking. I'll put it this way -- if alcohol (or any recreational substance) is fucking up your life, I don't see any harm in seeking out a support group of people who have dealt with similar issues and have gone on to lead normal lives. There's a lot of suffering people out there that refuse to take that first step because they believe bullshit like it's something they can fix themselves with magic.
And for all the people bitching about how AA is religious -- it's not! The "higher power" thing is more of a philosophy than a religion. This philosophy essentially says alcoholism is a disease, individuals are generally powerless to control it (as evidenced by the lack of an addicts ability to control it in the past), and they will need the help of some kind of "higher power" to avoid drinking. What's the nature of this higher power? That's for you to decide. It could simply be AA as an organization, a higher power that will help with support to prevent you from drinking. I dunno, there's a few books about it, but my point is -- it's not religious!
>And for all the people bitching about how AA is religious -- it's not! The "higher power" thing is more of a philosophy than a religion.
Bull-fucking-shit.
I've read the AA "big book" (enough of it that I could stand). It is a religious book. The part about non-believers is especially offensive - to me. It quotes from the Bible, it explicitly refers to the Judeo-Christian God. Many court have ruled people can't be forced to attend AA meetings because it violates the first amendment's freedom of religion clause.[1] If it wasn't religious organization, then it wouldn't.
AA can actively harmful - to some people. This whole "go to AA if you have an addition as a first step for everyone" is complete and total nonsense.
If people seek AA, struggle with the concept of a higher power, you know GOD, they might think they can't get better. If you are religious, seek AA, if you are not, don't. I disagree completely that AA is a universal treatment. It is not.
As I said before - I know an addict, he avoids getting help because he believes that the 12 step programs are offensive. (I share the same opinion - however I acknowledge they work for some people and that's good - I just disagree they should be the "go to" programs for everyone) He knows AA doesn't work for him, but he doesn't know there are non-religious programs and people who have gotten better without religion.
Preaching AA as a first step or a cure all is harmful to these people.
Do I have personal experience with addition - absolutely. I was never an addict, but I grew up all my life with an addict parent.
United States courts have ruled that inmates, parolees, and probationers cannot be ordered to attend AA. Though AA itself was not deemed a religion, it was ruled that it contained enough religious components (variously described in Griffin v. Coughlin below as, inter alia, "religion", "religious activity", "religious exercise") to make coerced attendance at AA meetings a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the constitution.[88][89] In September 2007, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stated that a parole office can be sued for ordering a parolee to attend AA.[90][91]
>Your friend avoids getting help because he's an addict, not because he's offended by the 12 step program.
Completely and totally incorrect. He has tried AA, and was completely disgusted with it. He just thinks if he tries to get professional help again, it will be like AA and he doesn't want that. Quitting on his own hasn't worked out yet, he's tried.
>You would suggest doing nothing in the absence of a perfect solution?
OF COURSE NOT! I never suggested it, I didn't even imply it. I said "Preaching AA as a first step or a cure all is harmful to these people." I didn't say it didn't help some people, of course it does. I am saying if you have an addiction people jump to "AA" like it is a cure all or the only route. They don't evaluate the patient to see what is right for them. Even doctors don't do this to a great degree. There are other non-region based programs out there, they need to be considered on equal footing as AA, introducing the wrong person to AA can turn them off of getting help at all. Right now it is "I have an addition" then the answer is "Oh well just go to AA."
>That is awfully convenient if you're a fan of getting high...
What are you talking about? I don't get high.
> Try going to an AA meeting and saying you're an atheist--you'll find plenty others present.
So some can get past some parts of AA, some also cannot. Big deal.
LOL such denial.
Your friend just likes to get wasted and doesn't want to really stop. He would just like the consequences to stop while still being able to get wasted at his own accord.
Being powerless over alcohol is similar to saying your powerless over a nuclear bomb going off next to you. You have the power not to pick up the first one. Once you start it sometimes can be really hard to stop, and admitting that is the key to not starting. And for most drunks theres no point in drinking one or two drinks anyway. the point is oblivion.
After having trouble with alcohol for over 10 years, I quit about a year ago. On my first day of not drinking I spent a long time reading rational.org, and parts of it were very useful to me.
I have to say, I've been feeling better and better over the entire year. Thinking more clearly. Better perspective on life. Hanging out with people I enjoy, and not spending too much time around people I used to drink with who drag me down.
In a way I could see that drinking was a problem at the time, but a year of not drinking (though also not complete sobriety ;) ) has put into perspective that it was a HUGE problem.
One side note that I think others here will relate to: Even when I was inebriated, I had very strong cognitive abilities in some areas, and I used that to convince myself that I could "handle it." I couldn't tell that my medium and long-term perspective was being thrown way out of whack.
As much as I love watching Penn and Teller I wouldn't take their opinion, as presented on TV, seriously on anything. They have no interest in objectivity or to seek out valid counter arguments. Their attempts to make it look like both sides get an equal chance to present their ideas are pathetic. They care nothing about educating their viewers on the nuances of what are often complex issues. All they want is to present entertaining polemics and scathing diatribes (and maybe some nudity), objectivity and consequences be damned.
And I'm saying this as someone who is not only a great fan of Penn and Teller, but also someone who almost always finds myself on their side in the arguments they present.
A Cochrane Review of eight studies, published between 1967 and 2005, measuring the effectiveness of AA, found "no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA" in treating alcoholism, based on a meta-analysis of the results of eight trials involving a total of 3,417 individuals. To determine further the effectiveness of AA, the authors suggested that more studies comparing treatment outcomes with control groups were necessary.
One indication AA isn't based in science - it is supposedly a panacea, a cure all for whatever ails you. There is literary HUNDREDS of different twelve step programs, one for everything!
AA is also harmful because it make members say the are "you have hit rock bottom, your life is out of control, you are powerless against your addiction." This is harmful to people who may otherwise seek help for harmful drinking habits that haven't become a full blown addiction yet. It is also very degrading for some people.
My apologies for my harshness, but wow, those links were horrible. The non-video links are really the most vapid kind of argument-free partisan blogspam, filled with guilt-by-association logic, and overstating their conclusions.
However, by walking the link-graph for a while from one of your links, I found this, which seems to contain some useful detail, and seems to agree with the bias of the articles you linked: http://www.morerevealed.com/library/coc/chapter7.htm It claims that the evidence is pretty terrible overall, but there is some evidence that AA is worse than no treatment. Hmn.
I wasn't able to bring myself to read the terribly-presented websites of the suggested non-religious alternatives. Ugh. Since you claim there are "more effective, non-religious, evidence-based" alternatives, could you point to some evidence? In particular, evidence of "more-effective" and "evidence-based"? That'd be super super useful to people!
And the P&T bit is almost entirely rhetorical dirty tricks. You can pick any minute of it where Penn is speaking, and find several logical fallacies and rhetorical innuendo. (The interviews vary greatly in logical clarity.) Though I agree with one thing Penn is ranting about: courts (or employers) mandating AA attendance is highly objectionable, on several levels.
I'm very interested in this subject for two reasons; I'm a devout atheist, and I've seen an enormous improvement in the life of a loved one directly chronologically following that person's involvement with AA. It's just a single anecdote, and anyway perhaps there was no causation in this correlation, but it has definitely piqued my interest in whether AA can work, and how, and why, and what it has to do with religion.
I've found that when one attends an AA meeting, one meets a lot of people who claim to have been profoundly improved by AA... but I realize that maybe that's just because the success stories stick around and populate meetings for 4 or 40 years. Maybe it works really well for some, but maybe the success rate is terrible.
Successes notwithstanding, even if they might be rare (or common! I dunno!), I would agree there are many valid criticisms about AA. As one of P&T's interviewees points out, they resist change, and have no feedback mechanism to improve themselves. There are advantages to dogmatism, but disadvantages too. But I will say that, at least in the lefty-leaning SF Bay area, it is quite possible to be an atheist at AA. But it's still America, so if you randomly sample the population, you're gonna find a lot of professed Christians, and so an atheist at AA is going to need to have considerable tolerance of other people's (crazy wrongheaded) opinions. I would say that it's not a religion, but it is a club full of religious people, talking about things that they think are related to their religion. Maybe the SFBA is atypical.
I haven't experienced chemical addition personally, and I don't know anything about the effectiveness of other programs, but if there are atheists out there avoiding AA-like programs for religious reasons and would like to talk about reconciling those things, my email is in my profile.
"but I realize that maybe that's just because the success stories stick around and populate meetings for 4 or 40 years."
What on earth makes you think they're the success stories?
That'd be like saying "this physical therapist is awesome; there's a guy who sprained his ankle 4 years ago who's still seeing her regularly for treatment."
First, because that's how most people, measuring these things, define success. For example, the Penn&Teller clip the parent post linked explicitly treats cessation of attendance as failure, and uses this as its sole justification for claiming that AA "does not work". You're welcome to see this as evidence that P&T are full of bullshit.
Second, those people declare themselves to be successful, by their own lights. They might be wrong, but I suggest that our first approximation should be to believe them.
But the third and more-important reason is more complicated. I don't claim to be an expert on AA on any level, but with my very limited data, I'm starting to believe that a better analogy than yours is this: "this gym is awesome... people keep coming back to maintain their muscle tone and cardiovascular health!" And for me - as a non-drinker - the alcoholism part is just the tip of the iceberg.
I have a friend with a drink problem and I persuaded him to give this a try.
However he is the kind of person who attracts negative people like a magnet. Within a couple of weeks he was drinking more than ever because he met people via AA with more severe addictions than his and they just pulled him down to their level.
I'm not saying AA isn't effective - just that it may not always be the best solution for everyone.
The vocabulary of AA is unfortunate. It has a historical underpinning (AA is essentially a single-purpose offshoot of an oddball "first century Christianity" feel-good movement) and it is incredibly difficult to find a way clear of the "AA cult" within AA. While I don't like it, I can (to a limited extent) understand it - people who have recovered are highly reluctant to mess with the program as they understand it.
That said, there are a lot of us atheists (and, of course, people whose religious/spiritual beliefs, if they have them, are incompatible with the ever-present whiff of Christianity ) who have managed to recover in AA. The steps (with one exception, explained later) can be divorced from the idea of the supernatural, and actually boil down to an effective cognitive/behavioural therapy. (They have been re-written many times, but because of frictions with mainstream AA, it's difficult to find the secularized versions published anywhere outside of the agnostic/atheist groups.) The only fly in the ointment, I suppose, would be the fifth step, which requires one to posit an all-knowing entity. It doesn't require believing that one exists; it's more a recognition that trying to hide things from yourself, to rationalise things that aren't rational, or to take on more blame or responsibility than you honestly ought to own is futile and counterproductive.
There are more than a handful of us working to fix this. I wish I could say the battle is an easy one. Frankly, one gets a little tired of hearing (after nearly thirty years sober) that if I don't get God, I'll get drunk - from people who are still riding the pink cloud. If one looks hard enough, one can find rational people and groups in AA; one day, they may even be listed with the other groups (as we generally were until just a few years ago). I'm going to put on my optimist hat in the meantime and read the big push-back as the death throes of something whose time has passed.
The one part of AA that can't be simply transferred to a professional therapeutic setting is the peer support. There is absolutely no substitute for a large enough number of people who've been there, done that and puked on enough T-shirts that a sizable handful can tell you your very own story (with the dates, times and names altered somewhat). Learning how to live after the drinking (or other addictive behaviour) goes away is hage as well, and it's an ongoing process that takes years. Most "treatments" only take you to the point of feeling better, and it is far too easy to mistake feeling better for being well.
As I said in my previous, there are a whole bunch of us working on getting rid of the "mumbo jumbo", but we're unwilling to throw the baby out with the bath water. Those of us who've been around for long enough have seen the difference between merely quitting and a sustainable lifestyle change often enough to understand that merely removing the self-medicating behaviour is asking for a lifetime of the symptoms one was attempting to medicate. That is not enough for anyone. We've also seen how long it takes to go from black and white through various bit levels of greyscale to a full life of colour and nuance - the whole damned universe changes suddenly on a regular basis for about the first five or six years.
The problem I've seen with alternative efforts is that they either concentrate on a "quick cure" (a short-term effort that is supposed to take you through a lifetime, but winds up being about as effective in practice as leaving AA behind the moment you think you've got a handle on things) or treat the substance abuse as a separate concern from the rest of life. The problem tends to be that for some value of "better", life is better for the drunk on the other side of the bottle cap than it is on this side. That's what needs to change, and that's what a rational approach to AA provides.
>The one part of AA that can't be simply transferred to a professional therapeutic setting is the peer support.
Have you ever been to CBT or DBT? I have (not for addiction, for psychiatric illness). It is specially and absolutely practiced in a group setting, with peer support. There is also a one-to-one part too, with a professional. I was in inpatient hospitalization, outpatient hospitalization, and less intensive treatment.
>Most "treatments" only take you to the point of feeling better.
Wrong wrong, couldn't possibly be more wrong. I have personal experience, as I've said. Stop it with the scare quotes around treatment.
>treat the substance abuse as a separate concern from the rest of life.
This absolutely positively does not happen in a clinical setting. I've been in "behavioral health" treatment (which includes addiction) for many years. There have been addicts in my CBT/DBT groups. People don't stop getting help unless they want to stop. If they need more CBT, they stay. If they need it again, they will start it again. If they need to see a therapist (one that specializes in addiction mind you) more often then they are, they do. Treatment is entirely up to what the patient wants and needs. Nobody progresses at the same pace.
I agree. It is also important to avoid the pseudoscience in the scientific establishment though; for example, the entire psychiatric manual has been thoroughly discredited in the 70s, but that is not communicated openly.
it's good that aa uses the 'god as you understand him' which most people just use that as meaning 'something outside yourself'. its a way to have a consciousness shift and perception change away from negative self talk and see reality as it is not as you interpret it. it can be religious for some, it can just be 'the great unknown' for others. really makes no difference. just that theres something other than your own mind telling you the answers in your head with great authority. its really just a mind trick/hack to get out of a thought loop that leads to harm.
>it's good that aa uses the 'god as you understand him' which most people just use that as meaning 'something outside yourself'.
Have you read the AA "big book?" If you have it is very clear it refers to the Judeo-Christian God with many quotes from the Bible. Its section on non-believers is completely offensive (to me). It basically says "accept god or die."
it does explicitly say god as you understand him - but i do know what you mean. its a shame that get's in the way for you tho, as there are alot of tools in there that if put to use - does provide alot of relief - alot more than drugs and alcohol provide.
"if that be the case, you may be
suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experi-
ence will conquer. To one who feels he is an atheist or agnostic such an experience seems impossible, but to continue as he is means disaster, especially if he is an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alter natives to face.
But it isn’t so difficult. About half our original
fellowship were of exactly that type. At first some of
us tried to avoid the issue, hoping against hope we
were not true alcoholics. But after a while we had to
face the fact that we must find a spiritual basis of life
—or else. Perhaps it is going to be that way with you.
But cheer up, something like half of us thought we
were atheists or agnostics. Our experience shows that
you need not be disconcerted."
That's a paragraph not a 'section to unbelievers'. The chapter is titled "We Agnostics". Theism, agnosticism, and spirituality are not synonymous. It's sad that you find AA to be such a threat that you created an account exclusively to 'refute' the comments in this thread with vitriol and militant secularism.
> It's sad that you find AA to be such a threat that you created an account exclusively to 'refute' the comments in this thread with vitriol and militant secularism.
What are you talking about? My account is 254 days ago with 1658 karma.
I am not using "militant secularism", I am presenting AA as it is, a religious organization. People like to pretend it isn't one. AA can and does work for a lot of people. That is good! It also doesn't work for a lot of people. The only thing I object to is saying AA is a cure-all or saying AA is the only game in town when it comes to addiction.
Religion isn't the cure for everyone. That's all I am saying. Some people will get behind it and it works very well for them. Some people will find it vial. We are all different.
Many people I know have replaced their drug addiction with a religion addiction and have become intolerable to be around. My brother in law is the worst.
I would also strongly recommend against using religious counselling of any kind. It may work, but a rational world view is an extremely high price to pay.
