Opinion

Listen To The Addicts: The 12-Step Model Works

Ari B. Contributor
Font Size:

According to an essay in this month’s Atlantic (“The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous”), the 12-step model of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) for helping problem drinkers is unsupported by scientific research. In fact, writes Gabrielle Glaser, other approaches – such as drinking in moderation and taking pills – are more effective.

The implication? AA is a sham – a cultish organization whose GroupThink has bamboozled the masses into believing a series of false quasi-religious tenets, especially the idea that alcoholics who drink even once will inevitably relapse.

Glaser, who wrote a 2013 book about women who drink, cites experts in fields like psychiatry and psychology and shares stories of problem drinkers who have gotten better without traditional recovery. (She also quotes an anodyne one-sentence comment from AA’s central office.) Missing, though, are the voices or even a fair portrayal of the beliefs of people who have found the 12-step model helpful.

True, the ideas and methods of traditional recovery were not discovered by scientists. Instead, the wisdom offered in recovery rooms all over the world draws on the self-described experiences of person after person shared in meeting after meeting. And while AA’s approach is not perfect – no solution to difficult challenges is – it has helped millions.

I know. I’m a recovering compulsive gambler who is deeply grateful to Gamblers Anonymous (GA). I’ve been attending GA meetings on and off since 2007. While I’ve had several relapses, I’ve nonetheless received tremendous help as I’ve listened to hundreds of fellow gamblers and learned strategies that have helped other compulsive gamblers

(Note that while AA and GA both follow a 12-step model, the addictions they treat are somewhat different. I can only share my experience, strength, and hope as a recovering compulsive gambler, and thus have no specific opinion on drugs to combat alcohol abuse or other alcohol-specific aspects of Glaser’s essay.)

Cults by their very nature are top-down, but GA is bottom-up. Our ideas, practices, and literature have grown organically through trial-and-error by millions of addicts, not from fiat on high.

Most GA meetings I’ve attended don’t even allow cross-talk. That means a member who wishes to react to someone’s “therapy” or “share” must approach that person afterward. If there’s barely any mechanism for policing dissent, when does all the brainwashing take place?

If basic GA ideas like “don’t make even a single bet” didn’t really apply to everyone, there would be a minority within the fellowship of people coming to meetings saying, “Well, I’ve been trying to stick to losing no more than $100 a week, and so far it’s going pretty well.” Nobody would kick them out.

Indeed, many compulsive gamblers have tried non-abstinence strategies, some quite silly: “I’ll start with $200, and if I get up to $400, I’ll put $100 in my left pocket, which I won’t touch unless.”

I once told a GA meeting about having tried such an approach. Everyone in the room laughed, knowing it couldn’t possibly have worked. People with such a “system” invariably leave the casino broke. And the real experts are the millions of us who have tried, not researchers doing experiments. (Glaser’s article actually discusses laboratory rats on “week-long benders.”)

The Atlantic article is filled with straw men. It deeply misunderstands – or maybe deliberately misrepresents – what 12-step recovery is about. Some examples:

  • Glaser describes an attorney she calls J.G.: “Each time he got sober, he’d spend months white-knuckling his days in court and his nights at home” and end up in rehab again. By definition, white-knuckle recovery involves not drinking and just hoping to get better. People in recovery believe more than anything that “meetings make it.” Rehab is a last resort; to avoid going back, J.G. could have regularly attended meetings, worked with a sponsor, used the telephone list, and studied recovery material. Glaser cherry-picked an example of someone no AA member would expect to succeed; J.G. only followed the program when isolated from society.
  • She makes much of retired Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes’s statistic that only 5 to 8 percent of AA attendees succeed. But members of 12-step fellowships utterly reject the idea that to succeed in recovery, people must abstain for the rest of their lives. To us, success is defined as not drinking – or betting or drugging – today. We have learned by listening to other addicts that the ones who swear they will never use or bet again are precisely the ones who get into trouble. Twelve-step recovery that works is achieved “one day at a time.”
  • Glaser proudly debunks a supposed “AA truism” that recovering addicts “cannot recover before they ‘hit bottom.’” Hogwash. While many people have shared the experience of recovering only after the most extreme depths of misery, nobody at an AA meeting would tell a moderate user he must continue in a downward spiral if he ever wants to get better. The very idea can only be understood as a purposeful parody of the recovery model.
  • She criticizes AA supporters for considering anxiety and depression “outside issues” irrelevant to recovery. Huh? That’s not what the term means, as anyone who’s been to a 12-step meeting knows. A member always recites that fellowship’s version of AA’s Tenth Tradition: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” In other words, 12-step groups don’t endorse legislation, support candidates for office, or take doctrinal stands. We focus on recovery, not advocacy. We most certainly do consider the ways anxiety and depression can affect our recovery, a topic discussed in some of our literature. Glaser’s depiction of fellowships shrinking from confronting environmental factors reeks of an attempt to make us look silly.

Readers of The Atlantic deserve better than an article that slams 12-step beliefs that exist nowhere but in the author’s own hostile mind. I’m loath to assign motives for another journalist’s work, but I can’t help wondering if secularist revulsion toward the importance of a Higher Power in 12-step groups played a role.

Fellowships like Alcoholics Anonymous are not the design of some crackpot cult leader or greedy entrepreneur out to exploit the weaknesses of the vulnerable.

They represent the collective wisdom of literally millions of people who have developed and refined a system for helping people get through the day, every day, without falling back into harmful patterns.

If you or someone you care about struggles with addiction, 12-step groups based on the lived experience of real people are there for you. Or you can go with the results of experiments on rats too wasted to scamper.

Up to you.

Ari B. is a freelance writer and recovering compulsive gambler. Write him care of opinion@dailycaller.com.