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