How Can You Judge All Twelve When You Don’t Understand the First?

It never ceases to amaze me at the amount of time and energy some people will expend attacking Alcoholics Anonymous and similar 12 step programs. It’s kind of like picking a fight with Gandhi since the anonymity issue guarantees you don’t have to worry about any spirited public rebuttal. Some of the attacks are from alcoholics themselves rationalizing the tall boy in their hand and others are transparent in their self serving motives (Rational Recovery’s founder calls his program the "antithesis and irreconcilable arch-rival of Alcoholics Anonymous."). What brought this topic on was a post today by someone who commented that AA’s program shut down the critical thinking portion of his brain. In this post he cited a recent article in the Canadian Reader’s Digest that bluntly states that AA is “useless”.

The article is entitled 12 Steps to Nowhere and is written by J. Timothy Hunt. Near the end of his harangue of carefully picked statistics and off-topic shots at AA’s founders the author describes himself as a “highly functional drunk”. Immediately the warning bells sounded and just got louder as I read the following passages including “I made it a point never to drink when I was on duty” and when referring to his motivation to quit drinking as a funny look from his doctor he states “then one day, I stopped… It took one step, not twelve.” Now whatever credibility this guy supposedly had was eradicated with me with these two statements.

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The first step reads as follows:

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

Not drinking at work, having an exemplary record, and one day JUST UP AND QUITTING pretty much busts the unmanageable definition and rules you out as an alcoholic in the first place. He provides a laundry list of examples of alcohol abuse that could just as well be an average frat boy’s weekend to-do list instead of definitively indicating alcoholism. There is a huge difference between alcohol abuse and the disease alcoholism, the main one being that an alcoholic by definition cannot just up and quit. Now of course since he has trouble even understanding the first step maybe a clinical definition from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism will help:

Yes, alcoholism is a disease. The craving that an alcoholic feels for alcohol can be as strong as the need for food or water. An alcoholic will continue to drink despite serious family, health, or legal problems.

The “despite serious health problems” of this definition does not have the caveat “unless your doctor gives you a very stern look”.

So the way I see it, what we have here is a guy who doesn’t understand the first step, did not work through the following steps, and has never attended an AA meeting yet he is telling the world that the 12 Steps are useless and will take you “nowhere”! That’s too rich.

Maybe one day we will get to the point where we have free 90 day in-patient rehab services, 24/7 on-call certified cognitive behavioral therapists, and trained support groups at every city corner, but until that day arrives AA is probably the only support available to most alcoholics. So trying to convince people not to go seems counterproductive at best and more like just downright asinine.