Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
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Product Description
Originally published in 1952, this classic book is used by A.A. members and groups around the world. It lays out the principles by which A.A. members recover and by which the fellowship functions. The basic text clarifies the Steps which constitute the A.A. way of life and the Traditions, by which A.A. maintains its unity.
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More religious nonsense. I guess when people are struggling with addiction, they are at a weak point, so they go to AA and get this weird insta-family tree who makes them feel better about all the terrible things they’ve done, but also tells them they’re diseased and insane!
What about SCIENCE? As a replacement for of memorizing simple answers and being dependent on a cult for the rest of your life, why not do some research on your own? AA, for example, proves to be no less and NO MORE effective than any additional type of treatment, including psychological counseling.
To invest in this fundamentalist “sin and salvation” thinking is simple, I guess, because there are lots of additional converts out there, but at least take the time to read about the Brandsma study, the Ditman study, the work of Peele, Vaillant, Rand…
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I suppose thinking of oneself as insane and defective, and getting humble may be excellent advice for a name with an overblown ego — a name who is a pompous megalomaniac. But what about persons alcoholics who feel lower than pondscum and need to be uplifted? The 12 steps do a excellent job of deflating a persons sense of self worth, and instilling feelings of guilt, bring shame on and inadequacy. (certainly excellent treatment for self-absorbed guiltless sociopaths, but that’s not everyone!) The steps instruct the alcoholic to right all past actions and harms that were done TO others, but what about persons things which were done TO the alcoholic? Well, persons are never addressed. The alcoholic should just “let it go”, not feel rage and forgive. Fantastic! Let’s let remorseless child abusers receive our prayers while their victims are further punished in 12 step groups! The 12 steps clearly contribute to low-self esteem and a lifetime of eternal nitpicking over one’s personality. As if problem drinkers are so different from the average person that they somehow need a lifetime of guilt and bring shame on inducing listmaking and daily moral invetory just to live a normal life. Thank goodness there is a growing public awareness about the harm caused by the 12 step ideology… There are a lot of excellent, deserving people in the rooms of AA… I hope they place soon.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
The truth is that a newly-sober alcoholic named William Griffith Wilson — a down-on-his-luck ex- Wall Street hustler who place on airs of having once been a prosperous stock broker — just sat down, in December of 1938, and wrote up twelve commandments for the new religious group that he and fellow alcoholic Doctor Robert Smith had ongoing. Persons commandments were simply a repackaged version of the practices of a cult religion that was well loved at that time, something called “The Oxford Group”, or “The Oxford Group Movement”, and later, “Moral Re-Armament” — a religious cult that was made by a deceitful fascist renegade Lutheran minister named Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman — a nut-case who really praised Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler.
Bill Wilson described the writing of the Twelve Steps this way:
Well, we finally got to the point where we really had to say what this book was all about and how this deal works. As I told you this had been a six-step program then.
The thought came to me, well, we need a certain statement of concrete principles that these drunks can’t wiggle out of. There can’t be any wiggling out of this deal at all and this six-step program had two huge gaps which people wiggled out of.
Notice how Bill Wilson considered his fellow alcoholics to be a bunch of cheaters who will “wiggle out of this deal” if they can get away with it — which Bill won’t allow.
And note how Bill Wilson made himself the leader who was entitled to dictate the concrete terms of additional people’s recovery programs.
Also notice how Bill Wilson considered ’spiritual development’ to be a business deal, with a contract that you can’t wiggle out of, something like selling your soul in trade for sobriety.
Nowhere in the Twelve Steps does it say that you should quit drinking, or help anyone else to quit drinking, either. Nowhere do the words “sobriety”, “recovery”, “abstinence”, “health”, “happiness”, “joy”, “like”, or “like”, appear in the Twelve Steps. The word “alcohol” was only mentioned once, where it was patched into the first step as a substitute for the word “sin” — Bill Wilson wrote,
“we are powerless over alcohol and our lives have become unmanageable”,
as a replacement for of the Oxford Group slogan,
“we are powerless over sin and have been defeated by it”.
And then the axiom “especially alcoholics” was patched into the 12th step as a suggested target for further recruiting efforts:
“…we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics”…
(But regular non-alcoholic people were still honest game for recruiting into Bill’s “spiritual fellowship”…)
The Twelve Steps are not a formula for curing or treating alcoholism, and they never were.
The Twelve Steps are not “spiritual principles” and they never were.
The Twelve Steps are cult practices that work to convert people into confirmed right believers in a proselytizing cult religion, just like Frank Buchman’s so-called “spiritual principles” did.
1. The Twelve Steps do not work as a program of recovery from drug or alcohol problems.
The A.A. failure rate ranges from 95% to 100%. Sometimes, the A.A. success rate is really less than zero, which means that A.A. indoctrination is positively harmful to people, and prevents recovery. Some tests have shown that even getting no treatment at all for alcoholism is much better than getting A.A. treatment:
One of the most enthusiastic boosters of Alcoholics Anonymous, Professor George Vaillant of Harvard University, who is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (AAWS), showed by his own 8 years of hard of A.A. that A.A. was worse than useless — that it didn’t help the alcoholics any more than no treatment at all, and it had the highest death rate of any treatment program tested — a death rate that Professor Vaillant himself described as “appalling”. While trying to prove that A.A. treatment works, Professor Vaillant really proved that A.A. kills. After 8 years of A.A. treatment, the score with Dr. Vaillant’s first 100 alcoholic patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking.
(Nevertheless, Vaillant is still a Trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he still wants to send all alcoholics to A.A. anyway, to “get an attitude change by confessing their sins to a high-status healer.” That is cult religion, not a treatment program for alcoholism.)
The A.A. dropout rate is terrible. Most people who come to A.A. looking for help in quitting drinking are appalled by the narrow-minded atmosphere of fundamentalist religion and faith-healing. The A.A. meeting room has a revolving door. The therapists, judges, and parole officers (many of whom are themselves hidden members of A.A. or N.A.) continually send new people to A.A., but persons newcomers vote with their feet once they see what A.A. really is. Even A.A.’s own triennial surveys, conducted by the A.A. headquarters (the GSO), say that:
81% of the newcomers are gone within 30 days,
90% are gone in 3 months, and
95% are gone at the end of a year.
That automatically gives A.A. a failure rate of at least 95%. But the GSO does not count all of persons people who only attend a few meetings before quitting — they don’t qualify as “members”. (That amounts to “cherry-alternative”.) If we included them, then the numbers would be much worse.
First there is the propaganda technique of “everybody’s doing it”: “AA or a similar Twelve-Step program is an vital part of nearly all successful recoveries”.
That is a perfect falsehood. The vast majority of the successful people recover lacking A.A. or any “support group”. It’s what “everybody” is doing.
Then they use the propaganda techniques of use of the passive voice and vague suggestions: “It is widely believed that not including a Twelve-Step program in a treatment plot can place a recovering addict on the road to relapse.”
It is widely believed by whom? And what do persons unnamed people know? What are their qualifications? Are they doctors? Medical school professors? Or salesmen for a 12-Step treatment center? Why should we care what some unnamed invisible fools allegedly judge, anyway?
The authors also use the propaganda technique of dread-mongering: you will be “on the road to relapse” — you will probably die — unless you practice Bill Wilson’s Twelve Step cult religion.
And then the fluff-headed Pollyanna attitude is outrageous: Just going to the wonderful A.A. meetings is supposedly all that is needed to fix some alcoholics.
But since A.A. has a zero-percent success rate above and beyond the normal rate of spontaneous remission, that cannot possibly be right.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
The book was older than I expected and had an odor. Otherwise it was okay.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Imagine for a moment that you have just ongoing AA. Your sponsor hands you this book, telling you that it, together with the Huge Book, is central to an understanding of AA’s “Simple Program”.
You start reading, and on page 26 you find the following statement: “AA does not demand that you judge anything. All of its 12 steps are but suggestions.” What a relief! Guess persons people who aver that AA is a cult don’t know what they are talking about.
But wait.
Reading on, you reach pages 29-30, which take up themselves to the “intellectually self-sufficient man or woman.” Here, you learn that there are dire consequences for not following AA’s “suggestions”: “We saw that we had to reconsider (our intellectual self-capability) or die.” On pages 37-38 you are told that: “The philosophy of self-capability is not paying off. Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin…we have been driven to AA, admitted defeat…and now want to make a choice to turn our will and our lives over to a Privileged Power.”
Incredible. In less than 20 pages, you have gone from “only suggestions” to “do it our way or die.” And the message is pounded home repeatedly the further you read in the book. On page 56, you learn the fate of persons who don’t fully confess their sins: “Some people are unable to stay sober at all; others will relapse periodically until they really clean house…lacking a fearless admission of our defects to another human being we could not stay sober.” On page 69 you are assured that “Uprising may be fatal.”
Would you stick around for more?
If you would, then nothing is preventing you from doing so.
But if you would not, how would you like it if all the treatment centers available had no additional option? How would you like it if virtually ALL treatment for alcoholism in the US was based on THIS?
Well, lots of us don’t like that. And persons of you who marvel why really should read this book.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5