Whether or not you will have an easy time using a 12 step process to overcome your addiction, let alone your depression, probably has a lot to do with how you react to something like this:
He told Gately to just imagine he’s holding a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix, which represents Boston AA. The box had directions on the side any eight-year-old could read… It didn’t matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of how a cake would result: if you just followed the motherfucking directions… a cake would result.
You start this process, if you are going to start it all, by acknowledging that you’ve tried to quit killing yourself with substances and that you have not succeeded. You aren’t going to do this by yourself, and that’s understood by everyone around you, and completely acceptable. Maybe the thing would be less of a stumbling block if they talked about an other power rather than a higher power, but you won’t get better on your own power, and that includes by trying to write (or even understand) the recipe yourself.
The 12 Step banalities actually can serve to help the inquisitive mind by mocking it and its efficacy.
Gately panics when the AA narrative is questioned by Joelle van Dyne, a new AA member. It is actually a very small detail that she raises, a grammatical concern about an AA cliche.
Her trouble is that ‘But For the Grace of God’ is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. ‘But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin’s bathroom floor,’ so that an indicative transposition like ‘I’m here but But For the Grace of God’ is she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it’s meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in the Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in.
Joelle van Dyne isn’t going to get better unless and until she allows One Day at a Time to mean something profound that actually works.
So then at forty-six years of age I came here to lean to live by clichés,’ is what Day says to Charlotte Treat… ‘To turn my will and life over to the care of clichés. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.’
…
‘I used to think in long compound sentences with subordinate clauses and even the odd polysyllable. Now I find I needn’t. Now I live by the dictates of macramé samples ordered from the back-page ad of an old Reader’s Digest or Saturday Evening Post.’
…
You just have to Ask For Help and like Turn It Over, the loss and pain, to Keep Coming, show up, play, Ask For Help. Gately rubs his eye. Simple advice like this does seem like a lot of clichés… Yes, and if Geoffrey Day keeps on steering by the way things seem to him then he’s a dead man for sure. Gately’s already watched dozens come through here and leave early and go back Out There and then go to jail or die. If Day ever gets lucky and breaks down, finally, and comes to the front office at night to scream that he can’t take it anymore and clutch at Gately’s pantcuff and blubber and beg for help at any cost, Gately’ll get to tell Day the thing is that the clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do. To try and live by instead of just say.
Addiction usually arises to mask or blunt some intolerable internal mental condition, but it soon becomes its own intolerable mental condition. You must solve the latter problem to have any hope of coping with the former.
In cases like these, your brain, thinking, is your enemy. Banalities are your friend, whether because they contain kernels of wisdom or just because they show that what works has no relationship to rational, logical cause and effect-type reasoning.
Learn to be stupid, would be the best advice I could give.
These clichés do the trick: your best thinking got you here.
Or, to put it another way, if your thought processes are a constant source of torment, then thinking isn’t going to be central to the solution.
And it comes around, eventually, that the actual stupid thing was to go on for so long under the misimpression that being smart wasn’t killing you. That it won’t kill you.
I mention all this because I don’t know how else to send a message that the 12 step program can save people I love, but not until they stop trying to understand how it’s supposed to work.
well said BooMan.
there is lots and lots of criticism of the 12-step approach, some of it more sensible than this person’s grammar hangup. But no one has ever found a better way of treating addiction.
That’s actually not true. Read the article posted by Cervants. There are more modern methods which have been subjected to scientific testing to which AA, due to its anonymity, is immune. There’s actually much better evidence that other techniques are effective.
My sense is 12-step programs really do work for those who can surrender to them. 12-steps are nondenominational but religious. One can brush that aside by changing “higher power” to “other power.” But the real power of it, as Booman alludes to, is that it gets one out of his/her own way.
There is actually no evidence whatsoever that it works at all.
There’s lots of evidence that it works for some people. There’s not good evidence that it works for everyone who “works it” (to us AA’s term) or that it’s the only or best method. There’s also not good evidence that every dependent person necessarily needs to quit completely. Some probably do. For others, it may be enough to cut back with the help of another program.
Just telling someone they should believe has never been successful. Sure, give it a try. For some people it’s perfect. But for the ones who can’t put their brain aside, there’s always scientifically proven medical procedures available. The trick isn’t to do something you don’t believe in. The trick is in deciding to do something, and actually doing it.
>>there’s always scientifically proven medical procedures available
what “scientifically proven medical procedures” are there for treating alcoholism? I’m aware of exactly none, although it’s been a few years since i researched it deeply.
Hallucinogens seem to work pretty well. Particularly peyote and ‘magic’ mushrooms.
Please read this article. There are real answers out there. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/03/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255
/
Seems to me we humans are simply hard-wired to remember the hits and forget the misses throughout life. Much like prayer, hot streaks, lucky socks for ballplayers and secret incantations at the craps table; any adherent of these will swear by them. And don’t go trying to persuade them otherwise by using fancy numbers or statistical evidence.
The vast majority of people simply can’t help it. We want to believe. We have to believe. And once in a while something happens that reaffirms what we wish to be true. And those are the things that we cling to.
Opioid Addiction: Hard to Predict
One clue:
Alcoholics I’ve known seem either to experience more pleasure when drunk than others and/or experience less intense hangovers.
Bingo. That is my experience. My BIL and I are opioid/alcohol opposites, something we discovered in long conversation after one of my many alcohol relapses.
I’ve tried opioids, several different kinds (all these people can’t be wrong!), and found them all extremely unpleasant, with exactly zero pleasant effects, none. BTW, you forgot the charms of opioid-induced constipation.
On the other hand, I cannot conceive (except in an abstract intellectual way) how anybody can have one drink, or five, or ten and not always want the next one. Always want the next one. That’s just how it is for me, it feels so f-ing good.
My BIL? Exactly reversed. Oh, he gets the constipation, but it’s trivial compared to the magical oxy or heroin high.
We’re both clean, sober & happy for some little time now, both working our respective 12-step programs, and both just smile and shake our heads at each other over it.
Cocaine/crack addicts describe their experience the same way you describe alcohol. One hit and their looking for the next one.
The common denominator of all addictive behaviors is that they isolate the addict. The isolation then feeds the pain which the addiction is meant to blunt. Therein lies the vicious cycle.
IMO, the most crucial aspects of 12 Step programs, when they are effective, are in shattering the wall of isolation, and providing a room of sympathetic people to hear you talk about yourself and your problems. The steps themselves are of dubious importance to me. The end of isolation is the thing that really matters.
(Disclosure: I am not an addict, but I am an adult child of alcoholic parents. I have studied this stuff for nearly 30 years.)
My personal experience is that it’s more than shattering the emotional isolation that addiction feeds on, and more than having access to rooms of sympathetic people. It’s also creating relationships which make addicts accountable to changes in their behavior and thought processes, with a particular focus on honesty. The Steps are helpful to create these irreplaceable attributes.
Yes, and it provides a support network, often for those who have shredded their own. When friends and family have been around the block a thousand times and their trust is bankrupt, the support one gets through a 12-step program can be critical.
We can either believe AA and their self-proclaimed 75% success right (shouldn’t it be 100% because the only time any one is doing AA right is when they are sober) or actually study the data and see the rate is between 5-8%. How many other things have such a lousy success rate that people think are the cure-all? If it were a cancer treatment, there’d be more experimentation to refine and improve the process, but AA — that shit has worked for, at best, 1 out of every ten people who have walked into those rooms. If it doesn’t work for you, you fucked up.
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/03/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255
/
I don’t think the 5 to 8% is definitive. It’s an estimate promulgated by skeptics. The problem is it’s impossible to accurately assess AA’s effectiveness.
Why do the 12 Steps work for some and not others?
First, you have to able to not drink or use today. If you can’t do that, you’re hosed. Why is it that some people can’t seem to do that? Answer that and I think you’ve solved the problem.
To answer that question, consider what happens when someone drinks. There is a decision followed by an action. Is that decision mandated by emotions that are overpowering? For some people, obviously not. Is that the case in others? My experience is that in almost all cases it is not. A person grows weary of the struggle and picks up a drink or a fix. Why are some people able to endure where others don’t?
The rest of the program is a way to reduce anxiety and remorse, and to live in a way that keeps emotional upset to a minimum and provides ways of dealing with those upsets when they happen.
Or God actually exists, but this atheist 12 Stepper doubts it.
I’ve worked primary care for 8 years and managed a halfway house for another 7. I had 12 years sober, started using again during law school, and now have 9 years sober.
And I realized I split an infinitive above, which apparently is enough to drive some prospective AA members to drink.
And that may be a hint to part of why it doesn’t work for some people (oversensitivity to errors of grammar).
One of the more important aspects of the 12 step program is treating the people around the addict. Learning to not enable someone else’s addiction goes a long way toward helping the addict. I’ve seen people do really well using it; I’ve seen people totally fail. Nothing is foolproof. The beauty of the program is that it works whether or not people analyze or believe in it. It is immune from external criticism. There will always be people who call it a failure. And there will always be people who use it to turn around their lives. The program just is.
Most meditative practices seek to first do one thing: silence the internal chatter. And what works to do this varies among individuals. To a sufficient number of Americans, cliches are as good as koans or physical exercise, or breathing exercises. Trying to think things through methodologically all the time is the very chatter one is trying to cease.
Here are some more cliches on the same theme.
Know thyself.
Be still and know.
If “learn to be stupid” silences the internal chatter, that cliche can be therapeutic.
And it is universally true that that chatter does not quiet down without a bit of a fight. Actually, that is a horrible metaphor that places one against onself. One never becomes perfect at stillness because one is after all human. Trying to be the best 12 stepper in the world turns out to be a fool’s errand. It’s about what you yourself decide to do for yourself to take care of yourself. A constant stream of “Do or not do.”
Everyone has to do their own journey. And until the chattering becomes unhelpful about the only way to bring attention in the interruption of shared cliches, shared poety, shared stories, and shared interruptions of wonder and courage and care and thankfulness.
As you often do, Tarheel…you just pinned it. Try everything; use what works. For you. As one of my strange information teachers used to say, “My job is to present factual information to you. That’s all I can do. You? You either do it or you don’t.”
End of story.
Moments of real inner silence are a blessing that I cannot describe.
How to get there?
Ay, there’s the rub! Shakespeare knew. It’s a a death of sorts. An old friend…or enemy…who has been with you night and day, 24/7 for your whole life is suddenly gone. Suddenly silent. UH oh!!!
That same teachers asked the following question:
Hmmmm…
That addiction is the root of all others.
Bet on it.
AG
As a thirty-five year alcoholic I quit entirely on my own with a little compassion from friends and family; the twelve steps program may ‘work’ but that doesn’t mean it isn’t unnecessarily tangled up in typical God-bothering bullsh*t.
Bunch of unimaginative, superstitious, self-righteous wusses.
For those who have been helped by 12-step and other programs which include a spiritual element, that spirituality wasn’t unnecessary. For many to most of them, the spiritual element was in fact necessary.
I’ve found the higher power concept not at all explicitly linked to “God bothering” or other concepts of monotheism. Many are unable to grok the concept that their higher power need not be a God in any culturally common form. Many join me in understanding that this is easily available. Take what you need, and leave the rest behind.
Buddhism and the 12 Steps. Buddhists, most of who don’t believe in a personal god, do pray. I work the steps along those lines. Nietzsche said that Buddhism was more a program for psychological hygiene than a religion.
I’m glad for you that you were able to deal with your alcohol problem on your own. Many people are not as strong or as fortunate. I’m pretty non-religious myself, but if clinging to an Imaginary Friend helps people transcend an addiction, I am not going to put them down for that.
When I was in my formative years -early adolescence- my mother’s alcoholism forced me to be a parent to my 9 year old sister and 5 year old brother. When mom was drinking she could be scary and mean. Her disease has had longlasting repercussions for the whole family. I don’t believe in “God” but given a choice of an “unimaginative, superstitious, self-righteous wuss” or the horror show I somehow managed at age 12, I think I’d choose the former.
So maybe a little more empathy and a little less punching down.
Addiction is about trauma. It is an emotional crutch. This begins the cycle. Now you are physically addicted too. Pot relaxes you and you are probably agitated and irritated without it!
______
cerebral success
Fortunately I have not had a problem with addiction, nor anyone close to me, so I can’t speak to that.
I have had a problem with thinking too much. The point you make, I also came to realize by about the age of 25.
Thinking is very important, most people don’t do it enough. But it’s a waste of time and energy, in fact it’s downright counterproductive, if you don’t start from correct premises. In highly emotional situations it’s often difficult or impossible to know what the correct premises are.
Sometimes, as you say, it’s more important just to DO certain stuff that you’re not doing, or not do certain stuff that you are doing, and literally experience where it gets you. This applies way beyond addiction. No doubt it applies also to people like Sean Appleby, who found a different route than the 12-step program, but the point is, it worked for him.
I came to Japan for Zen 25 years ago, and I ended up in Vipassana. I should have that printed on a t-shirt. I’m amazed at how much AA and Vipassana resemble each other. I make my comparison from studying Vipassana meditation, and chatting via Facebook with my sister who is in a recovery program for alcohol abuse in Chicago.
The thing that resonates in your posting BooMan, is that “thinking isn’t going to be central to the solution.” That’s the wise resonating bell right there for me. That concept hit me hard during a Vipassana lecture a few years back. The lecturer described reaching a state of awareness where he didn’t banish incessant thought, but he had cultivated an overall sense of awareness in his day to day life whereby his thinking intellect was now really only a very small part of his total mind awareness. I know it’s a very difficult, groovy thing to conceptualize, but I’m beginning to get long patches of that awareness he described, and it’s mighty nice. Lots of anxiousness and depression over a Republican majority Senate and House have dissipated a lot these last eight years of practice. I really enjoyed your post BooMan, you and those you care about are part of the way there already because you’re connecting the right dots.
Is the biggest danger I see with AA and its sister programs like Narcotics Anonymous. There is a physiological difference between alcohol addiction and opiate addiction. Simply put the 12 steps have a better chance of succeeding with alcoholics or coke addicts than with heroin addicts because the “craving” for alcohol, while debilitating, is not near as strong as the “craving” for opiates like heroin.
That is why I am so glad that step down and maintenance programs are becoming more widely accepted for opiate addicts. They have a much better chance at success
Interesting post, Mr. BooMan…I have a hard time bashing AA. And this is going to be a rambling comment…
In my humble observations, 12-step groups help people trying to get clean or sober not feel like they are alone with their problem. Addiction is a disease of isolation. For people trying to be clean and sober in a society that seems to think the purpose of college to is get drunk and laid, and where you can’t watch 30 minutes of television without multiple beer and pharmaceutical ads telling you that chemicals are what you need to be happy, it is very important to know you’re not alone! I know from experiences at office and social functions, people are uncomfortable with the sobriety of others, viewing it as something to mock or or criticize.
For many people, the 12 steps provide a framework for being able to turn their lives around, and forgive themselves for the things they may have done while in active addiction. And if you’ve ever read the steps (higher-power issues not withstanding), they are really just a guideline for living your life without being a resentful prick (reminds me of this site’s rules for behavior). With regard to the higher power, some think that there is a great power in not feeling alone with their problems anymore, in being able to call on others for support for what they haven’t been able to do alone. If it works for some people (and I hear there are 23 million people in the US in long-term recovery, so at least some of them got clean and sober through 12 steps), what’s the problem?
12-step groups like Al-Anon and family support groups also help loved ones change their own behavior, and start helping their addicted family members in ways that truly help, not hurt. People in the recovery community share resources that they find helpful with each other, providing critical information that is often hard or at least very time-consuming to find anywhere else. Some people embrace this more formally, while others take what they find useful and leave the rest.
Support groups like these are free, with a small donation requested from those who can afford it. This makes them accessible to way more people than addiction counselors and inpatient treatment are. People who have been struggling with drug and alcohol problems for a long period of time often don’t have the resources to get help outside of 12 steps.
So it may not be perfect, and it isn’t an answer by itself but I think the 12 steps are an important component of recovery from drugs and alcohol; inpatient treatment, medical treatment of co-occurring disorders, and counseling are also important, as well as the development of healthy activities and whole new way of life.
We live in the Philadelphia suburbs, and opiate and heroin addiction is taking far too many young people from us far too soon here. I’m not about to throw out anything that might help some of these people get back on track and find meaning in their lives.
(climbing down off soapbox)
From the AA preamble: “The only requirement is a desire to stop drinking”
If you you only want to drink less or like. “Normal people” it is not intended for you.
First step: “Admitted you are powerless over alcohol – that you life has become unmanageable”
If you can’t control your drinking and drink like “normal people” and if you or others see your life as something like an unhappy disaster then you are ready to take the next steps. An important point Boo makes is that drugs and Booz e effects the brain in lasting ways that very likely makes that judgement difficult or impossible to make alone.
Alcohol is only mention in the first step and makes up only half of it. The 12 steps are suggestions to living a better life and to stop being a self centered asshole and a self centered asshole has little chance to stay sober. Learning to get out of yourself, put aside resentments and fears leads to a happier serene life that makes sobriety possible.
Being able to drink less may be a goal for some but if drinking hurts, not helps your ability to be happy why drink at all? Many alcoholics proudly say they haven’t found a Eason to drink.
Other therapies and drugs certainly can have a place, but the fact remains that for many AA is the only therapy they can afford, have access to, or are willing to try. A meeting is easy to find almost anywhere and only cost a buck and it is optional.
A recovering drunk I know once told me, “I used to pay a shrink $75/hour and I lied to him.. Now I pay a dollar and I tell the truth to a room full of drunks”
The breakthrough that Bill W and Dr. Bob found was the magic of one drunk talking to another. The “been there, done that” relationship that fostered brutal honesty, humility and lack of judgement and shame cannot be easily replaced by a degree, certification, drug or textbook.
Also, about the God thing…
My experience is that by far the majority of AA members are self described recovering Catholics, agnostics or atheists and/or have a real problem with organized religion.
The requirement is to come to believe that there are powers greater than yourself whether it be alcohol, gravity, the need for food and shelter, or a group of people. Some of these can hurt you and some can help you regain sanity and happiness. The point is you are not completely in charge but help is there is you ask for it . That’s it.