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For that matter, the whole blame game is a bait-and-switch stunt. They will start off by telling you that it isn’t your fault, alcoholism is not a moral stigma because it’s a disease and you are powerless over it.

” I was a sick person. I was suffering from an actual disease that had a name and symptoms like diabetes or cancer or TB — and a disease was respectable, not a moral stigma!”

The Big Book, Marty Mann, Women Suffer Too, 3rd Edition page 227 and 4th Edition page 205.

But after you have joined Alcoholics Anonymous and become a committed member, then they will tell you that you are guilty and personally responsible for everything.

The First Step showed me that I was powerless over alcohol and anything else that threatened my sobriety or muddled my thinking. Alcohol was only a symptom of much deeper problems of dishonesty and denial.

Listening to the Wind, A.A. Grapevine, December 2001, page 34.

It’s all just a mind game designed to get you to surrender to the cult.

Wilson was serially unfaithful to his wife Lois. Wilson ’s affairs with women caused controversy and concern within AA and it was common knowledge in New York AA circles. His interest in younger women increased with his age, and caused Barry Leach and other friends of Wilson to form a “Founders Watch”. People were assigned to keep an eye on Wilson during the socializing that followed AA functions and to separate and steer away those young women who caught Wilson’s interest. Wilson, like many in his generation, could be sexist, but he was also “capable of treating the women who worked with him with dignity and respect”. In the mid 1950s he began an affair with Helen Wyn, a woman 22 years his junior, “in duration, intensity and scope” this was different from his other affairs. Wilson at one point discussed divorcing Lois to marry Helen. Wilson with determined perseverance was able to overcome the AA trustees objections, and renegotiated his royalty agreements with them in 1963, which allowed him to include Helen Wynn in his estate. He left 10% of his book royalties to Helen and the other 90% to his wife Lois. In 1968 with Wilson’s illness making it harder for them to spend time together, Helen bought a house in Ireland.

In the 1950s Wilson experimented with LSD in medically supervised experiments with Gerard Heard and Aldous Huxley. With Wilson’s invitation his wife Lois, Father Dowling, and Nell Wing also participated in experimentation of this drug. Later Wilson wrote to Carl Jung, praising the results and recommending it as validation of Jung’s spiritual experience. (The letter was not in fact sent as Jung had died.)

At a parapsychology meeting in the 1960s, Wilson met Abram Hoffer and learned about the potential mood-stabilizing effects of niacin. Wilson was impressed with experiments indicating that alcoholics who were given niacin had a better sobriety rate, and he began to see niacin “as completing the third leg in the stool, the physical to complement the spiritual and emotional.” Wilson also believed that niacin had given him relief from depression, and he promoted the vitamin within the AA community and with the National Institute of Mental Health as a treatment for schizophrenia. However, Wilson created a major furor in AA because he used the AA office and letterhead in his promotion.

For Wilson, spiritualism (communicating with the spirits of the dead) was a life-long interest. One of his letters to his spiritual adviser Father Ed Dowling suggests that while Wilson was working on his book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions he felt that spirits were helping him, in particular a 15th century monk named Boniface.[18] Wilson believed that the living could communicate with the dead and kept a “Spook Room” in his basement, where he along and others would conduct seances with a Ouijiboard, as well as experiment with automatic writing. Despite his conviction that he had evidence for the reality of the spiritual world, Wilson chose not to share this with AA.

The Harvard Mental Health Letter, from The Harvard Medical School, stated quite plainly:

There is a high rate of recovery among alcoholics and addicts, treated and untreated. According to one estimate, heroin addicts break the habit in an average of 11 years. Another estimate is that at least 50% of alcoholics eventually free themselves although only 10% are ever treated. One recent study found that 80% of all alcoholics who recover for a year or more do so on their own, some after being unsuccessfully treated. When a group of these self-treated alcoholics was interviewed, 57% said they simply decided that alcohol was bad for them. Twenty-nine percent said health problems, frightening experiences, accidents, or blackouts persuaded them to quit. Others used such phrases as “Things were building up” or “I was sick and tired of it.” Support from a husband or wife was important in sustaining the resolution.

Treatment of Drug Abuse and Addiction — Part III, The Harvard Mental Health Letter, Volume 12, Number 4, October 1995, page 3.

(See Aug. (Part I), Sept. (Part II), Oct. 1995 (Part III).)

So much for the sayings that

“Everybody needs a support group.”

and

“Nobody can do it alone.”

Most people do.

And note that the Harvard Medical School says that the support of a good spouse is more important than that of a 12-Step group. But A.A. says just the opposite:

“Dump your spouse and marry the A.A. group, because A.A. is The Only Way.”

It is Alcoholics Anonymous that ignores all “larger societal structures” like class, race, sex, environment, poverty, child abuse, and family life. A.A. says that those things are irrelevant. A.A. says that you drank too much because you have nasty personal defects (“defects of character”): you are sinful, willful, and selfish, you have numerous moral shortcomings, and you have a huge ego that thinks it is the center of the Universe and too big and too good to need God. And A.A.’s answer is to give you the one-size-fits-all Twelve Step cure. It doesn’t matter what your personal history is, or what your race, creed, sex, religion, socio-economic status, or anything else is; it doesn’t matter whether you were an abused child, or whether you have physical or mental illnesses, you will get prescribed the same “simple” 12-Step fix as everybody else. That is really ignoring all of the “larger societal structures.”

And Step Two most assuredly does not “say that we need to believe that a ‘higher power’ can restore us to health”, like Ms. Sandell says. Step Two says that we “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Sanity, not health. We must confess that we are insane and incapable of thinking for ourselves (and thus incapable of managing our own lives).

Likewise, Step Three says that we must turn our will and our lives over to the care of God or Alcoholics Anonymous, not “that we need to commit to turning our lives over to god as we understand him/her.” We must surrender our will to “god”, or our “Group Of Drunks”, and let A.A. do our thinking for us, and let our sponsors boss us around and tell us what to do with our lives.

Ms. Sandell blithely glosses over all of those gory little details. (Perhaps she wishes to avoid arousing any prejudices that we may have against cult religions…)

Abraham Lincoln’s life story is hardly a myth. Ms. Sandell would do well to actually read a good biography of Abraham Lincoln. He really did accomplish many things through his own efforts, perseverence, and hard work, like teaching himself to read and write, and becoming a lawyer just by studying three law books and then passing the bar examination (which, admittedly, must have been less complex in those days…) Lincoln ran for Congress and the Senate, and sometimes won and sometimes lost, but he persevered, and ended up becoming the President. That is real United States history, not a popular myth.

And Ms. Sandell actually tells us that Marty McFly’s ‘if you put your mind to it you can achieve anything’ attitude is all wrong? Just out of wild curiosity, how did the Australian woman Jillian Sandell graduate from college and become a Berkeley university professor?2 By eschewing self-reliance and hard work? By having her support group take her exams for her? I don’t think so… Does Ms. Sandell recommend the Church of Loserism for us recovering alcoholics, while reserving the Right to Excel for herself?

All of the world’s great religions teach just the opposite of the A.A. doctrine of powerlessness. And I do mean ALL of them: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Original American religious teachings, Confucianism, Taoism, Bahai-ism, the I Ching, you name it. They teach that personal morality consists of controlling one’s own actions, and actively doing good, and refraining from doing wrong. They teach self-discipline, self-control, individual responsibility, and personal accomplishment through perseverance and hard work.

cut n paste from Orange Papers

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I got the book much later than I expected. But the book is in great condition.
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I have not received the purchase yet, but it is not the fault of the sender – my PO Box had expired —- ooops: Please submit to PO Box 286, Belpre Ohio 45714…confirm please
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