The Twelve Myths of Alcoholics Anonymous
 
 
  1. Alcoholism is a disease.
 
  1. Recovering alcoholics can never drink again.  Taken in any form, alcohol will trigger an irresistible craving.
                       
  1. A.A. is unique and unprecedented – the single key to sobriety.  Other methods simply do not work as well, if at all.
 
  1. Those who leave A.A. always end up drunk – either dead drunk or miserably dry drunk.
 
  1. A.A. alone can heal our mental  disorders.  Medications are superfluous and dangerous to sobriety.
 
  1. All our problems arise from our character defects; all our solutions lie in the steps.
 
  1. A.A. is a spiritual program, but it eventually leads to religion, preferably Christianity. 
 
  1. The Big Book is divinely inspired, and non-program literature about alcoholism is worthless (unless it’s published by Hazelden).
 
  1. Having a sponsor, of the same sex, is essential to sobriety. 
 
  1. The soberest person in any meeting is the one who got up first in the morning. 
 
  1. There is no such thing as a bad meeting; all A.A. groups are essentially the same.
 
  1. Those who don’t believe the above haven’t been working the program. 
 
  1.  Since the thirteenth step does not exist, it rarely happens.

 The Twelve Myths of Alcoholics Anonymous: A Commentary
 
By Matthew J. Raphael
 
 
Alcoholics Anonymous saved my ass and then it saved my life.  Grateful as I am and ought to be, I have no wish to harm the fellowship by creating needless controversy.   It seems to me, however, that A.A. needs dissenting voices to be heard -- just as much now as in the early days, when a few mavericks from the New York group bucked the Oxford Group orthodoxy of the Akron group.  Then as now, the survival of A.A. may hinge on its capacity for embracing differing viewpoints without losing sight of its primary purpose: to carry a message of hope to alcoholics who still suffer. 
 
During the 1980s, the Southern Baptist Conference, another prosperous spiritual organization, was plagued by divisiveness when right-wing radicals tipped the balance of power among liberals, moderates, and conservatives and captured the church for their own narrow aims.  A.A. has long maintained a similar balance of power, with moderate leaders steering between extremes.  But I have sensed in recent years – and I’m not alone in this – a narrowing within A.A.: a fundamentalist ascendancy that threatens to repel or expel anyone who might beg to differ with some popular but dubious doctrines.  
 
The Twelve Myths of Alcoholics Anonymous are meant to redress the imbalance in A.A. by calling some of these ideas into question.  Left unchallenged, the Twelve Myths could undermine A.A.’s reputation as an honest program.  For honesty should be practiced in regard both to our drinking and to our thinking. 
 
There has always been an anti-intellectual bias in A.A.   It seems sometimes as if newcomers are required to check their brains at the door in order to get in.  “Don’t think, don’t drink, go to meetings.”  Sound advice, to be sure, especially early in sobriety.  But just as our wills are restored by working the Twelve Steps, so our minds are reactivated.  Thinking alone won’t get anyone sober.  It’s often an obstacle for those too smart to grasp a simple program.  But not thinking won’t necessarily keep anyone sober for long.  From time to time A.A. members need to take moral inventory of what we think we know and what we profess to believe. 
 
I am using the term myths with all due respect.  I don’t mean calculated lies; rather something like unexamined half-truths.  Myths are closely associated with belief systems.  They can serve as the enabling fictions by which people lead better lives.  If the Twelve Myths were not useful, after all, they would never have attained mythic status in the first place.  If some A.A. members want to live by them, that’s fine.  But other members (or prospective members) may have legitimate doubts, and they may need reassurance that a healthy measure of skepticism is also part of the authentic A.A. tradition. 
 
There must, of course, be Twelve Myths.  Symmetry requires it.  But the number and their order are finally arbitrary, and readers will undoubtedly think of omissions.  Some of the myths are more prevalent than others, and few A.A. members likely believe all of them, at least all at the same time.  So let’s take them one myth at a time.   
 
ONE.  Alcoholism is a disease.  Alcoholism is a “progressive fatal disease,” a “family disease,” a “disease of denial,” the cunning nature of which is to tell us we don’t have a disease.  Alcoholism is no different from cancer or diabetes.  And so on (and on).
 
 It would be impossible to attend many A.A. meetings without hearing about the “disease” of alcoholism as if it were a natural fact.  The disease concept, however, was invented only in the late eighteenth century, and its currency in A.A. dates only from the rise of the Modern Alcoholism Movement during the 1940s and, more recently, from the consolidation of the rehab-industrial-complex. 
 
In the original version of Alcoholics Anonymous, particularly the part carried over from one edition of the Big Book to the next with minimal revision, alcoholism is not presented as a medical disease -- except, perhaps, in Dr. William Silkworth’s prefatory “allergy” theory, which has long since been discredited scientifically.  Alcoholism is seen, on the contrary, as a soul sickness, a spiritual dys-ease, the remedy for which can never be found solely on the material plane of medicine.  Insofar as it implies that alcoholics are not accountable for actions under the influence, the disease concept, in fact, goes against the grain of the Big Book and other program literature, in which taking personal responsibility is constantly stressed. 
 
What’s happened over the decades since 1935 is that A.A. discourse has been gradually transformed as alcoholism has been gradually displaced from the realm of the soul to that of the body and mind.  That is, the A.A. idea of alcoholism has been medicalized and also psychologized, most markedly since large numbers of drunks began to reach the program by way of rehabs, whose best interests, financial and otherwise, depend on instilling the disease concept as if it were an indisputable scientific finding.  As a result, the disease concept has now come to dominate thinking in A.A. more fully than anywhere else in the current world of alcoholism theory and treatment (from which A.A. is increasingly out of touch). 
 
There is at least one good reason for A.A.’s clinging to the disease concept: its immense pragmatic value.  This notion helps to relieve the newly sober from disabling guilt about drinking and its consequences.  It offers hope that the crushing weight of responsibility can be lifted just far enough to set them free.  With the implicit and explicit advocacy of A.A., the disease concept has shaped both public policy and popular understanding about alcoholism.  It has even been endorsed by the American Medical Association.  Surely, so lofty an authority as the A.M.A. can’t be wrong! 
 
The truth is that the disease concept, born in controversy two centuries ago, has never since been undisputed.  Challenges have come from religious, philosophical, psychological, and medical thinkers, and the idea now holds far less sway than it once did among scientific investigators of alcoholism, especially outside the United States.  As for the A.M.A. endorsement, it must be understood in its historical context.  Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the medical establishment was relentlessly lobbied by leaders of the Modern Alcoholism Movement to adopt its idea of the alcoholic as a diseased rather than immoral person.  When the A.M.A. yielded to such tactics during the 1960s, the result was comparable in many ways to the later de-diseasing of homosexuality by the American Psychological Association.  In both instances the medical authorities were under pressure from influential interest groups, and politics weighed heavily in supposedly scientific matters. 
 
Honesty requires that A.A. members have the right to conceptualize their drinking problem in any way that advances their sobriety.  That may be the disease concept, but there is no A.A. orthodoxy about it.  The nature of alcoholism is finally an outside issue. 
 
TWO.  Recovering alcoholics can never drink again.  Taken in any form, alcohol will trigger an irresistible craving.  Credible scientific studies have shown that a very small portion of alcoholics (on the order of five percent) can apparently return to “social” drinking.  Good for them.  But such slim odds change nothing for the overwhelming majority of alcoholics, who place themselves in this tiny minority at their extreme peril.  Certainly, the soundest advice to drunks is that they should never drink again.  Honesty requires, however, that we don’t insist, in the face of the evidence, that no exceptions exist.
 
As for automatic loss of control from ingesting alcohol, it just isn’t so.  Yes, for some recovering alcoholics a whiff of mouthwash or a sip of “non-alcoholic” beer or a drop of cough syrup might touch off a craving for the real stuff.  But it is also true that picking up a drink is not an entirely involuntary action, and it need not follow inevitably from any of the above (or similar) brushes with alcohol.  Much depends on our attitude and our spiritual condition. 
 
It is only prudent for the newly sober (or anyone in A.A.) to avoid contact with alcohol.  But not every slip is a planned drunk, and it is misleading to pronounce the situation hopeless when a recovering alcoholic takes any alcohol, even accidentally.  A slip is really no more reason to pick up a drink than any other excuse – such as that a slip is a predictable “relapse” into the “disease” of alcoholism. 
 
THREE.  A.A. is unique and unprecedented – the single key to sobriety.  Other methods simply do not work as well.   Bruce Cole, the current director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has been talking lately about “American Amnesia” -- our peculiar national habit of forgetting our own past.  In regard to alcoholism and its treatment, this amnesia underlies the common but erroneous belief that nothing like A.A. ever existed before Bill W. met Dr. Bob in 1935. 
 
 The truth is that all the major components of A.A. – such as fellowship meetings, recovery stories as a means to sobriety, and non-sectarian spirituality – were all present in the Washingtonian Temperance Society that flourished during the 1840s.  Bill W. himself honored the Washingtonian precedent once he became aware of it.  But he did not know what historians have subsequently discovered: an unbroken chain of mutual-help, non-drinking organizations between 1840 and 1935.  On the level of how it works, nothing about A.A. is unprecedented.  What makes A.A. unique is its unparalleled endurance.  This is clearly due to the organizational genius of its cofounder.  Bill W., with a background in business and the executive skills of a Fortune-500 C.E.O, built A.A. to last.  And so it has – far longer than any other sobriety institution.   
 
Nevertheless, since A.A. keeps no statistics and resists inspection by outside investigators, it has no way of assessing its own efficacy except anecdotally.  We just don’t know how well A.A. works, either in comparison to alternative programs or even in comparison to A.A. itself in earlier decades.  
 
Honesty requires that we embrace ends and not means.  Anything that helps alcoholics to get sober merits respect.  A.A. has no stake in bragging rights about cure rates.  It’s enough to know that A.A. works -- not so much for those who work it, as for those it works for.  Some people just don’t like A.A.; some do not belong; some may not need our help to get sober.  It has yet to be shown convincingly that A.A. or any alcoholism treatment is more successful than self-imposed abstinence. 
 
FOUR.  Those who leave A.A. always end up drunk -- either dead drunk or miserably dry drunk.  Anyone with time in the program knows that A.A. has the largest alumni/alumnae association on earth.  For all its multitude of members at any given moment, most of them – in truth, the vast majority -- will move on sooner or later, usually sooner.  And we don’t really know what happens to our “graduates,” especially those – also, perhaps, the vast majority -- who don’t turn up on the police blotter or the obituary pages. 
 
The only alternative to A.A. is not dry drunkery.  Not everyone who leaves meetings behind is condemned to lifelong misery.  There are many who deeply absorb the A.A. message for a while and then take it out of the rooms and put it into their lives and stay sober on their own, serving as positive examples to others.  It may well be that as much good Twelfth-Step work is being done by former members of the fellowship as by active ones.  
 
FIVE.  A.A. alone can heal our mental disorders.  Medications are superfluous and dangerous to sobriety.  The relationship between alcohol and other drugs, as between alcoholism and other addictions, is complex and controversial.  We need not address it in A.A., whose singleness of purpose demands that we reject the rehab rhetoric of “a drug is a drug is a drug” and limit ourselves to drinking problems. 
 
That also means that we ought not to issue directives to those, still suffering from mental disorders, under treatment by medications that some A.A.s regard as mind-altering and hence inimical to true sobriety.  Here again, there is a world of common sense in discouraging alcoholics from substituting one addictive substance for another.  But dispensing medical advice lies well beyond the competence of all but a few in the program, and amateur physicians may be doing at least as much harm as the drugs they denounce.   
 
SIX.  All our problems arise from our character defects; all our solutions lie in the steps.  It is sometimes asserted in meetings that all our character defects stem from the “alcoholic personality” – the existence of which is dubious at best.  Early research on the matter was too poorly conceived to prove anything, and the catholicity of A.A.’s membership seems to rule out predicting who will or will not qualify as an alcoholic.  In any case, our own character defects do not account for all our problems.  Non-alcoholics have their own share of shortcomings, and a sober drunk might even be right now and then.  For serenity’s sake, we may choose not to insist on being right, but biting our tongues is very different from blaming ourselves unreasonably.  
 
A spiritual answer to life’s problems can always be found in the steps, but such an answer may not always be the same thing as a solution – because not all change can be accomplished from within, although that’s the only kind possible through A.A. itself.  Some problems are irreducibly external, and these may require structural reform or even political action that is beyond the proper scope of A.A.  When such outside issues don’t yield to inside solutions, this is not necessarily the result of a defective program. 
 
SEVEN.  A.A. is a spiritual program, but it eventually leads to religion, preferably Christianity.  The history of A.A. shows that it originated in an evangelical Protestant sect, the Oxford Group; and although A.A. separated from the Oxford Group in 1939, it never lost its Christian tinge.  For some members that’s a very good thing.  They believe that just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no real atheists in A.A. and that the message to the agnostic will sooner or later prevail.  True religious belief is often thought to be inseparable, as it was for many early A.A.s, from Christianity. 
 
Many recovering alcoholics do get religion in one form or another, but persistent non-believers are not automatically less sober than believers even if their Higher Power remains a light bulb.  Religious belief may be a byproduct of sobriety, but it is neither prerequisite nor inevitable.  Therefore the explicitly Christian practices of many meetings are basically contrary to A.A. principles. 
 
EIGHT.  The Big Book is divinely inspired, and non-program literature about alcoholism is worthless (unless it’s published by Hazelden).  Alcoholics Anonymous was written by Bill W. with a lot of help from his friends.  As Bill often remarked, its spiritual ideas are philosophical and religious commonplaces.  The book was originally intended as a promotional device, and its boosterish tone is all too apparent in some passages.  (Its style is badly dated overall, but revising it had become anathema even in Bill W.’s lifetime.)  The Big Book, then, is an historical document, and it is useful to remember that it was produced when no one in A.A., including Bill himself, had more than four years’ sobriety.  Alcoholics Anonymous may continue to be a godsend for many of its readers, but to regard the Big Book as sacred writ is to inflate its importance, perhaps blasphemously. 
 
There is plenty of A.A.-sanctioned literature for members to read, although unfortunately few newcomers are steered to Bill W.’s revealing history of the program, Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age.  A trip to the “recovery” section of any large bookstore will confirm that there is also plenty of good material, from many perspectives, which is not “conference approved.”  The Big Book may be crucial for the newcomers to read, if only as a key to the otherwise incomprehensible program jargon tossed around in meetings.  But exposure to other readings – on which Hazelden certainly has no monopoly – can also foster sobriety.  Newcomers should, in fact, be informed that Hazelden is not part of the program, but rather a commercial enterprise that happens to enjoy a cozy business relationship with A.A. headquarters.  The Hazelden guides to The Twelve Steps, for example, have no special authority, although they are sometimes presented as if they did. 
 
NINE.  Having a sponsor, of the same sex, is essential to sobriety.  Sponsors are not mentioned in the first part of the Big Book, for the simple reason that they did not exist as such until after its publication in 1939.  Although it may be argued that the idea of sponsorship – the guidance of new members by more experienced ones – has always been fundamental to A.A., the institution itself has not.  Many A.A.s nonetheless seem to subscribe to the cult of the sponsor, insisting that he or she possesses a superior wisdom that is properly lorded over “pigeons,” as A.A. newcomers once were called. 
 
Sponsors may be wise; they may also be foolish or worse.  They are not, in any event, indispensable to sobriety.  Some people do fine without them.  The same-sex practice, too, has its limitations.  Although there are practical explanations for this custom (see below), there is no reason in principle why sponsorship cannot cross the gender line (as it sometimes does for gay and lesbian members).   
 
TEN.  The soberest person in any meeting is the one who got up first in the morning.  In the interests of preserving its democratic spirit and practicing humility, A.A. encourages those with long-term sobriety not to make too much of it – certainly not to pull rank, as if years in the program automatically conferred seniority of sobriety.  There are, unfortunately, some A.A.s with a lot of time who remain so deeply drunken in their ways and means that they offer no recommendation for the program.  By contrast, there are the many old-timers who radiate a spiritual aura that seems to come with growth in the program.  Honesty requires that we acknowledge that some members are more sober than others and that the soberest are often those with the most A.A. experience.   
 
ELEVEN.  There is no such thing as a bad meeting; all A.A. groups are essentially the same.  Anyone who travels knows that there are at least as many varieties of meetings as there used to be of Heinz pickles.  The variations run along regional, national, and international lines, with overlays of racial, ethnic, linguistic, and class difference.  Formats, readings, and prayers may not be consistent.  Even within a small city, A.A. is seldom homogeneous.  Some members may quite reasonably prefer one sort of meeting to another, and the program is designed to accommodate individual preferences.  The proliferation of new groups is a sign of A.A.’s vitality. 
 
Although one might hope that all meetings were equally sound on A.A. principles, it must be admitted that some groups are sounder than others and that some meetings, even within the best groups, are better than others.  There are certain A.A. meetings, indeed, that are hardly worth attending.  Entire groups can and do go astray, and newcomers should know that objections they may have to a given meeting may not be accountable only to a bad attitude or newness in sobriety. 
 
TWELVE.  Those who don’t believe the above haven’t been working the program.  Despite the inclusive rhetoric of the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, fundamentalist members insist on a narrow construction of A.A. orthodoxy and perform the self-confirming trick of turning disagreement against itself.  This is the same stunt that psychoanalysis used to pull: if you don’t agree with every last Freudian doctrine, then that only proves how desperately sick you are – and how much more analysis you need to break down your “resistance.”  So if you don’t embrace the Twelve Myths, it’s because you aren’t working the steps and traditions. 
 
A.A. has everything to gain from cherishing the expansive liberality of the Third Tradition, especially in its long form, where the “only requirement for membership” is reduced from a desire (formerly “an honest desire”) to stop drinking to merely a willingness to join with one or two other alcoholics in the quest for mutual sobriety.  In practice and in principle alike, the only real requirement for membership is a desire for membership. 
 
THIRTEEN.  Since the thirteenth step does not exist, it rarely happens.  Among its many benefits, A.A. does not offer a dating service.  But that doesn’t stop the mating game.  The gossip mill is always churning about this or that relationship, licit or illicit, between A.A. members.  Like all sexual topics, thirteenth-stepping is rarely addressed in meetings.  But it has long been a part of A.A.  (Bill W. himself may have invented the term, or at least inspired it).  And it is practiced quite visibly at some meetings, where newcomers, especially attractive younger women, are swarmed by “helpful” admirers. 
 
Thirteenth-stepping arises out of the gender imbalance that has always characterized A.A.  Once a male fellowship -- so the subtitle to the first Big Book attests: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism -- A.A. has remained so in various and important ways.  Women, who did not join A.A. in any numbers until the 1940s, have long had to adapt themselves to A.A.’s masculine ethos. 
 
I’ve attended thousands of meetings, and I can recall only one at which women were in the majority.  It has been uncommon in my experience that women have constituted even a third of those present.  Yet a meeting’s mood and substance are often changed (for the better, I think) by a higher proportion of women.  The existence of women’s meetings speaks to this fact, as well as to the need for new female members to be shielded from sexual overtures.