Sober Observations

My Views on Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) at Nine Years Sober

Early on in my involvement in AA I was asked if I would eventually want to write an account of my experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. That invitation to write such an essay happened during the first year that I was sober.  At that time I certainly would not have been ready to write any sort of analysis, report, or essay on AA. Now, after years in the program, I can make an assessment of AA based on my own experiences, my studies on the history of AA, and on my own anecdotal views on what AA is.

My observation, even early on, is that most people involved in the program are sincere and dedicated to the idea of helping other people to become and stay sober, and to do those new people no harm. Initially I thought that there was no real structure to AA, but over time I realized that there is an underlying governance structure that has more cohesion than I would have expected from an organization that prides itself on anonymity. It appears that on the county, state, and national level there is little to no anonymity. This provides some degree of accountability so that the various meetings around the world will remain uniform.

On the local level, or should I say the meeting level, things are fairly loose and informal. It's possible for someone to do what AA members call "service work" and yet that person is not really involved in the actual structure of the organization nor truly involved with the people who run the organization. For the purposes of this short essay I will primarily concentrate on the local meetings and my experience in those.  Some people might find the idea of an actual structure to be something sinister; it is not.  Without that basic structure things would be completely inconsistent and there would be nothing left of AA.

I should also say that if a person really wants to do AA at the local level there are things that a person needs to do and perhaps, more importantly, things they should not do or participate in. For me, as a person in my late 60s (now 70s), I found the whole idea of a sponsor something that wouldn’t work for me.  When I got to AA I just didn’t have that much trust in people if I did not know the person for a long time. Even some people that I do know personally, I would not follow blindly with regard to how I run my life. I do listen carefully to people in the meetings, especially the new folks.  Their stories keep me from ever wanting to go back to the first year of sobriety.

I use AA as a cautionary tale of what not to do with my life, that can be beneficial to not drinking again. I’ve found this to be extremely helpful. There are only around five really basic ideas that make sense as far as things a person should do. I could list those but the last thing the world needs is my advice. Most of the good ideas in AA are buried under a pile of nonsense. At this point there is no one I want to emulate in the groups; no one I want to be like within the AA organization.

AA’s idea of powerlessness is based on the fact that all of us who are Alcoholics felt this way at one time or another; we felt like we could not stop drinking, that in spite of our best efforts, it was impossible to not drink. This is the reality for every person who comes into AA, at least those of us who do so voluntarily.

The secret to success in AA is that this is probably the first time we have been in a room of people who support the idea of total abstinence from alcohol.  This is something you will not find in most of society. Even the churches that used to teach abstinence from alcohol no longer champion that cause, which means that even church is not a safe place, or a haven, for those with addiction or alcoholism.

This brings us to AA and some of its issues. AA attempts to solve the problem of alcohol addiction with a simple one-size-fits-all program. Churches also try to solve everything with only one path, only one solution. The more traditional churches (i.e. not the evangelical churches) seem to use a bit more of psychology in their approaches to helping people, but it appears that the more "spiritual" a church is, the more they fall short of dealing with real problems in an effective way .  AA makes this same spiritual claim but in actual fact is incredibly rigid in it’s program, even if that program is subject to the whims of each random sponsor.

This problem does not only exist in AA and other religious/spiritual organizations.  I have seen it in a college setting as well (I worked for 42 years at 2 colleges). In a college one would expect freedom of expression, but instead one sees suppression of independent thought and ideas that deviate from faculty and or administrative politics.  This goes way beyond “political correctness” and instead becomes an ideology that attempts to limit or even block all ideas that might deviate from the institutional agenda that many institutes of higher learning promote.

AA suffers from this same institutional malady as most other organizations.  I wish I could report that AA is the exception to this rule but it appears that is not the case.  If you ever try to suggest something not in line with the official AA ways of thinking, “you won’t know what hit you” would be the appropriate expression.  Whether the people in AA are willing to admit it or not, they have a dogma, or a doctrine, and that dogma is all that is allowed in the meetings.  Sometimes one can expand thoughts in a private conversation but that is the limit to any variation in the message of their program.

When I am called on in a meeting of AA I know better than to elaborate too much.  One of the reasons I had to end a 6 month stint of running a group in a “public hall”, while in my 3rd year, was that as I was approaching the middle of my third year and at that point I could no longer, honestly, present the program in its entirety. I found it very difficult to find a reading in the AA literature that did not annoy me or that I didn’t find humorous, and usually for all the wrong reasons.

The few concepts that are good are buried among some truly awful ideas. I shudder to think of what might have happened if I had done the whole thing without caution or reservation.  The idea of unfailing obedience to another random person is beyond my level of trust and there is no reason to make an exception in my AA experience. Because of this I have never had an AA sponsor nor will I ever sponsor anyone.

So why does AA work at all (at least for some people)?  This is due to something called “the compliance effect”.  There is validity to that idea and it is certainly a major reason some people can get something out of AA.  What “the compliance effect” means is: certain people always take their "meds" and do what their doctor tells them to do. These same people just do what they are told, even in AA.  Hopefully they have a good and honest sponsor or such compliance can have poor results.

People who realize they need to change the way they think about themselves, and the way they think about their lives, seem to do well at recovery. This is the key to what AA calls “serenity”. That might sound simple, but it is not simple at all. Establishing a whole new perspective in the way of viewing everything both internally and externally about yourself and your life is difficult.

I knew from the beginning that I wasn't just learning how to stay sober for a short period of time. Early on I realized that if I was going to put any real effort into staying sober I really had to do it for the rest of my life.

In the final analysis a person with any sense of self worth can probably stay sober. It's a choice, that is all alcoholism is; it is not a disease. Some of us need to know that staying sober is actually possible, at least this is what worked for me.

---------- Milton D. Holmes D.D.