We
quote:
“For
Alcoholics Anonymous to continue helping addicts find freedom in
sobriety, the 75-year-old organization has to reclaim its spiritual
roots.
That’s
the message coming from reformers who say the group has drifted from
core principles and is failing addicts who can’t save themselves.
But what constitutes the heart of AA spirituality is a matter of
spirited debate.
Has AA
become too God-focused and rigid? Or have groups watered down beliefs
and methods so much that they’re now ineffective?
“Some
think AA is not strict enough,” said Lee Ann Kaskutas, senior
scientist at the Public Health Institute’s Alcohol Research Group
in Emeryville, Calif. “Others think it’s too strict, so they want
to change AA and make it get with the times.”
With more than 100,000 local meetings and an estimated two million members worldwide, AA is grappling with how much diversity it can handle. Over the past two years, umbrella organizations in Indianapolis and Toronto have delisted groups that replaced AA’s 12 steps to recovery with secular alternatives. More than 90 unofficial, self-described “agnostic AA” groups now meet regularly in the United States.
Faith
language in AA goes back to the group’s founders, Bill Wilson and
Robert Holbrook Smith. Six of the 12 steps, as prescribed in the
original 1939 “Big Book,” refer to God either explicitly or
implicitly. Step three, for example, cites “a decision to turn our
will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”
Now some worry the founders’ efforts to be as inclusive as possible are being undermined by attempts to ensure, as one Indianapolis AA newsletter put it, that “AA remains undiluted.”
“In
the past, there was a great deal of elasticity and tolerance in terms
of different views,” said Roger C., a Toronto agnostic whose book
“The Little Book: A Collection of Alternative 12 Steps” came out
in January, and who doesn’t use his last name to protect his
privacy. “But there’s been an increasingly rigidity from those
who say,’It’s got to be this way and only this way.’ That has
alienated a great number of people.”
But
others argue that AA seldom offers the tough love that alcoholics
need. Too many meetings ignore the 12 steps posted on their walls,
said Charles Peabody, a 35-year-old former alcoholic and drug addict
whose 2012 memoir, “The Privileged Addict,” has an entire chapter
on “Watered Down AA.”
For
Peabody and many addicts he’s sponsored, the key to becoming “a
free man” has been rigorous and urgent application of the 12 steps,
from taking fearless moral inventory to making painful amends. Yet
mainstream AA meetings routinely do a “disservice,” he argues, by
leading attendees to believe that meetings and sponsors — rather
than God and concrete action steps — are what they need most in
recovery.
“In
mainstream AA, you hear either the war stories or the sob stories,”
said Peabody, who lives in Beverly, Mass. “This is the solution? I
just keep coming, drinking crappy coffee and listening to people
bitch and moan? I knew that wasn’t going to work.””
Source:
Washington Post
Comment:
Ah Mr Peabody! Who's bitching and moaning now! But he's got a point
with the sponsorship fetish! Still whenever expressing opinions it's
always handy to ignore the evidence. See here for a competent study
on ACTUAL AA recovery rates rather than the misinformation put about
by Mr Peabody and the like....
Cheerio
The
Fellas (Friends of Alcoholics Anonymous)
PS
Of course the term “watered down AA” is itself unoriginal and
derives from another piece of 'fundamentalist' AA propaganda …
the much publicised and equally poorly researched “Greshams Law
etc.....” A critique of this is filed here
PPS Incidentally for "tough love" read BULLYING!
PPS Incidentally for "tough love" read BULLYING!
