In light of Javan's report yesterday...
Alternative Programs to AA
Several alternatives to AA exist that are more secular in nature. These alternatives to traditional 12-Step programs generally ask individuals to find motivation within themselves and to learn internal control instead of seeking an external source of power. Alternatives to 12-Step programs also tend to evolve with new research, and they may be more flexible in their approaches than AA and other 12-Step groups.
Alternative groups still rely on peer support and provide tools for minimizing relapse. Most of these programs are free to join, with the only requirement being that individuals struggling with addiction wish to achieve and maintain abstinence. Some common alternatives to 12-Step programs include:
- Self-Management and Recovery Training (SMART) Recovery
- Women for Sobriety
- Secular Organizations for Sobriety (S.O.S.)
- LifeRing Secular Recovery
- Moderation Management
- Evidence Based & Science Based Treatments
- Holistic Therapies
- Experiential Therapies
AA and the sunny side of life
October 19, 2013TPA is one week away, so I really must finalize my thoughts on AA and Higher Powers etc., so I can really enjoy the World Series! Michael Wacha seems to be drawing superhuman strength from someplace, maybe I need to rethink my position…
But, nah. My position is firm: AA, despite its flaws, has been a lifesaver for so many, for so long. In Jamesian terms its language of willful submission has been pragmatically vindicated. Consider, for instance, the brilliant journalist David Carr’s harrowing memoir of recovery. He says the “Higher Power” slogans worked for him, plain and simple. They paid their way. “The answer to life is learning to live.”
This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That’s some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them–the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.
I lustily chanted some of those slogans and lived by others. There is nothing ironic about being a crackhead and a drunk, or recovery from same. Low-bottom addiction is its own burlesque, a theater of the absurd that needs no snarky annotation. Unless a person is willing to be terminally, frantically earnest, all hope is lost. The Night of the Gun
But, let us be clear: the slogans worked for David not because they demonstrably hooked him up with supernatural powers. They worked because they helped him recover a sense of his own powers of will, when reliably supported and sponsored by a steadfast community of friends. They put him back in touch with his and their humanity.
David describes himself as a believing, practicing Catholic. I don’t question the sincerity of his faith. I simply observe that it demarcates his path, not everyone’s. Not mine. There are many routes to sobriety, health, and happiness.
I think the genius of Bill Wilson’s program lies in allowing its practitioners just enough latitude to let those slogans and affirmations mean what they need to mean, to those individuals. It is a natural fact about most of us that, with a little help from our friends (or a lot) we sometimes can correct our worst errors, redirect our self-destructive impulses, repair our relationships, and overcome our addictions. For some, a secular approach affirming personal will and responsibility works better than turning it all over to unseen nonhuman powers.
So, Pluralism plus Pragmatism is still my soppy slogan.
But, by the way: Bill Wilson did not understand atheism.
I was not an atheist. Few people really are, for that means blind faith in the strange proposition that this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere. AA Big Book
“Blind faith” going “nowhere”? No, not me, not us, not over here on the naturally sunny side of life. Our eyes are open wide, and we’re going to the Series.
I thank Sam for his paper, an exemplary piece of applied philosophy in the authentic spirit of William James, brought to bear on just the sort of life-centering issue he and other pragmatists became pragmatists to address. We must applaud its relevance and its deeply practical implications for one of the more vexing, momentous, and frequently ruinous problems faced by actual men and women who would look to philosophy for guidance and support, were it on offer. My comments aspire to share in that same spirit.
I have no sharp criticism to offer, of Sam’s general analysis of James’s pragmatic defense of faith and advocacy of the right of individuals to invoke their willing natures when confronting major life choices whose resolution is not conclusively settled by normal evidentiary criteria. I do offer questions and a point of view that I hope will provoke illuminating discussion. My questions center on the place of personal will in bringing people to recovery programs like AA or its secular alternatives, and on how best to understand and apply James’s philosophy when thinking about addiction and self-possession.
It’s well known that AA founder Bill Wilson was heavily influenced by James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, and that aspects of James’s thought– especially those concerned with the ethics of belief (as articulated by Sam in his essay)– directly support the use he made of it in founding AA. I do not dispute this.
But, I question whether Wilson and AA have adequately comprehended the full bearing of James’s philosophy. James was not hostile to the personal invocation of Higher Powers, but he was a naturalist about the human assimilation of supernatural belief.
In other words: effective supplication was unthinkable, for James, when and if coupled with a total confession of abject impotence (“powerlessness”) on the part of an individual seeking recovery and redemption. One must not renounce one’s will, if one wills the recovery and maintenance of health and self-possession.
The decision to submit to God (or to AA) is, in the final analysis, a willful decision and an exercise of personal will, albeit one typically undertaken only on condition of support from other supportive and willful humans...
Any form of a 12-step program is better than taking no steps at all.
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