A really beautiful and serious thing

[JulianP]

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[JulianP]

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[Nightwatch]

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[Ray Smith]

Outside of that, AA and other programs have been helfpful to many people. I know, professionally and personally, many who have been helped by AA. This is separate and apart from so called "studies."

So called "studies"? Please look at this and get back to me.

http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-letters26.html#RLCS

[Ray Smith]

But, you need to realize is that, other than being arrested for public drunkeness or disturbing the peace, there is nothing else but AA at that point for this particular type of person who is also known as a "skid row bum."

If that were the case, why am I not dead?

I was homeless, abandoned by my family. (Folks in AA told my mother she needed to practice "tough love", that I wasn't serious about sobriety because I refused AA, after getting progressively worse each time I attended.)

As I mentioned before, I was diagnosed with depression before I started drinking. AA managed to add to that depression.

I'm an atheist. I accepted that I was powerless, that I had a disease, and then I had no Higher Power to rescue me. I came to believe my two options were suicide or drinking myself to death. I drank more destructively after having been exposed to AA.

When I told people that I objected to the religious nature of AA, they all told me that I was mistaken, many atheists and agnostics have found sobriety through the program of AA. So I started believing it must be me, so I'd give it another shot. And each time I asked how an atheist could work the program, I was attacked by those who thought they could convert me. I was told repeatedly, by different members, in different meeting that unless I started believing in God, I would end up "dead, drunk in a gutter".

I felt that if I could get help for the depression, I could quit and stay stopped. But that went against the sensibilities of everyone, including the mental health professionals who said they would be happy to treat my depression after I had been sober for 3 or 6 months. I'd go back, worse than ever and they would insist I stick it out a bit longer. They were certain that drinking caused my depression, that I was lying or misremembering because I was an alcoholic. One even went so far as to suggest that alcoholism came first because I was an alcoholic before I ever took that first drink by virtue of genetics.

Only by manipulating the system was I finally able to get the mental health help I needed. Lo and behold, once I talked with a therapist who listened and did not pass me off to some 12step group, I stayed sober. I have maintained my abstinence for almost eight years now.

At two years sober, I was asked to help facilitate a dual diagnosis group for a new ACT program in town. People with mental health and substance abuse issues rarely get better in traditional 12step groups (according to Kathleen Scaicca, a pioneer in the treatment of dual diagnosis), this ACT program was for people who had repeatedly failed at 12step treatment. That led to a position as a Peer Advocate. Part of my job was keeping our clients OUT of ineffective and potentially damaging treatment.

Each and everyone of our clients had been told to throw away their psych medications, if they took them they weren't "really sober". Some did and attempted suicide, that's how we ended up with them in our program.

I now work for an ACT team in another state, I am a Peer Specialist (awaiting certification). I run Motivational Interviewing-based dual diagnosis groups and work with dually diagnosed clients every day. I rarely run into 12step promoting mental health professionals anymore, most have gone to Evidence Based Practices, AA doesn't qualify.

[finding my way]

Hello. Thanks to all who have put so much thought into these posts for us to read; clearly this is a very important issue to visit for the sake of sufferers, families, and professionals involved. I hope I am welcome to participate. It’s not easy putting this into words, but I am going to try.

Back in school, my prof said that religion is the number one alienator and the number one dealienator both at the same time. That certainly seems to be true. At the risk of stepping into the fire here unwelcomed, I’d like to view this paradox from a psychological perspective. Saying that, even, is controversial. Let’s just say I’d like to air my thoughts.

The phenomenon of having thoughts and having feelings is somewhere at the core of having a mind. We have to form an identity somehow, a working ego to function in the world, to make decisions, to act. Most of us experience ourselves as our thoughts and feelings… that is who we are. It is absolutely foreign and nonsensical, if not terrifying, to pry “who we are” apart from our thoughts and feelings. However, that is exactly what we are required to do in both the counseling session with a psychologist, and in a religious encounter, whatever the setting.

In a religious encounter, you pry yourself from what you’ve known of your ego functioning and give yourself over to the better judgment of God, resulting in an improvement in your ego functioning.

In a counseling session, you pry yourself from the thoughts and feelings you’ve been having long enough to examine them. Sometimes this very act results in realizations and a change, which results in an improvement in ego functioning.

There are other ways to achieve this dynamic (Buddhism, military training, music lessons –personal joke, sorry). The dynamic is prying a space between “you” and the thoughts and feelings you are having long enough to achieve a positive change in your perspective that leads to a positive change in your functioning.

The bare-bones fact is that most of us have to have help in order to do it. We cling with complete and utter stubborn loyalty to what we have known of ourselves. Trust is a major issue. When you have been abused, why would you ever want to accept outside help for anything? People abuse each other as much as they help each other it seems. Yet when we have gone astray with our behavior, there are thoughts and feelings behind, and fierce loyalty to those so prolongs the suffering. My therapist’s term was “unblending,” and he taught me some very creative ways to respectfully unblend just enough to take a look at what was happening and the thoughts and feelings behind it. The resulting shift would be quite profound, and I have been able to crawl out from under quite a bit of mental suffering and change around many behaviors. In my case, I required a spiritual context to summon the trust to even have the experience, and that is what we did in session. Others require a spiritual context to be no where near in order to summon the trust to have the experience. But the experience of unblending can occur either way.

A “spiritual” type myself, I am comfortable with calling this process religious. I am very aware, however, that calling it that is deeply alienating for others. Do we lose or gain anything if we call this process “psychological”? From what I read when I participated in al-anon, Carl Jung was a strong influence when AA was created. His career was deeply controversial for the way he “psychologised” religion, perhaps similar to what I’ve just done. I guess all I want to attempt is to highlight that “unblending” phenomenon. It is at the root of both religious and psychological experiences that result in changed behavior, and most of us have to have help from someone to learn how to do it.

[Guest ASchwartz]

To Claire and others,

Simply put, referring to AA is the easiest way to get people started toward recovery. A couple of years ago, there was no viable drug treatment available for alcohol problems. I am not sure why you are looking for contradictions in what I write. From my point of view there are many ways out of alcohol addiction. What I object to is the outright rejection of AA that I hear from so many of you and so much contradicts the very real experiences I have had with people over decades in the field and in my family.

JP, it appears to me, but I am not certain, that you were in some type of program that used twelve steps. That is something else. I am referring only to the AA twelve step process.

As for depression, I am aware of the fact that there are those therapists, be they social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists, who will not start therapy with a person until they are free of abuse for a few months. However, there are many who do NOT work this way and start treatment with a person while they are still using. In my experience, I worked with people in therapy while they were attending AA meetings. In fact, they came to me after they had started, primarily because I had built a really good reputation. In that experience, it was the combination of therapy and AA that worked best.

Understand, please, that I am NOT suggesting that AA or twelve steps are for everyone. I have my own family experiences with programs and know how awful they can be. I am just saying: Don't throw out the baby with the bath water."

Laslty, what some of you see as failures on your way to recovery I see as valuable experiences that, one after the other, set you on the course to recovery and I congratulate all of you for that recovery.

Please do not assume that my personal experiences with programs through family member problems, were good ones because they were not.

I encourage more and more dialogue.

Allan

[Nightwatch]

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[JulianP]

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[finding my way]

JP, thank you for your words and thoughtfulness with us:)

[Guest ASchwartz]

Hi JP,

That was a beautiful statement you posted to Fingingmyway. In fact, this time you did NOT come across as a "hard ass" but as a real human being. I also agree totally with what you say about having to meet and remove the underlying obstacles to a fulfilling life. Obstacles that led to addiction in the first place because, after sobriety there needs to be a lot more work done. Actually, you stated it much better than I.

Congratulations and thanks,

Allan:)

[JulianP]

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[Mark]

Ray, This is ultimately a matter of social skills, I think. You seem unable to recognize when it is time to stop, and that makes it hard for me to like you. I'd like to like you, but listening to you repeat yourself is wearing. Interpret it how you will - I'm fairly sure it will not be flattering, because it does seem that you need me more as something to resist against than as a person who could be a friend - but - it's time to stop at least as far as I'm concerned.

Claire, I'll say more or less the same to you. It's great that you are a lawyer and all but save the cross-examination stuff for the courtroom please. Allan and I are not the enemy unless you need, for your own reasons, to make us take on that shape.

Mark

---Quote (Originally by Mark)---

I find it troubling that you have to be right so much so that a moderate voice like myself has to be challenged relentlessly...

---End Quote---

You may be more of a "moderate" now, but hasn't that come from people like myself voicing valid objections to the program? And if there is to be a change coming, isn't because people like me have been demanding that our complaints are no longer swept under the rug?

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[Nightwatch]

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[Mark]

Claire,

Inasmuch as the topic comes up, I typically do recommend the range of self-help programs these days, including SMART, Rational Recovery, etc. It's important to me that people appreciate the range of options they have available. If one thing doesn't work out, or cannot be accessed for one reason or another (and here we are not talking about what should be available but rather what is and what is affordable), I want people to know about the other options, so that they don't fall through cracks unnecessarily.

I certainly would (given the time) talk about the best available treatment techniques I'm aware of, which include relapse prevention, motivational interviewing, the harm prevention approach, etc.

If the person I was talking with seemed like a good candidate for AA classic (religious flavoring and all) I would not hesitate to point them there. There are quite a few people who do not find the concept of submission to a higher power to be disempowering. I would however, given the chance, caution people that some trends within AA - which I do not believe are universal by any means but which clearly are present in many places - such as telling someone who is taking medications as prescribed by a responsible physician that they are not sober or otherwise sabotaging psychiatric health on the alter of ideology - are not useful and that if they encounter that, this would be a clue to find a better meeting or leave the program altogether if that is not possible and a better alternative can be located.

My first impression of AA was that while it did seemed to help people get sober, that it also held them too tightly after they had managed to become sober. My early complaint was that it did not offer people a path to graduate and rejoin the world. When I actually did addictions work for a year back some time ago, I absorbed many of the opinions of my mentors, and my opinion of AA shifted towards a more positive direction. At that time I was working with people who were really really ill - dual diagnosis and actively using very heavily. Honestly, whatever worked with those people and AA worked for some of them. The horizon there at the partial hospital was very short term - a few weeks of treatment, so these longer term philosophical incompatibilities that are discussed here were not immediately relevant there and indeed live at a different level of the heirarchy of needs. That work was "any or all ports in a storm", while the discussion here is more often not taking place in the midst of absolute crisis.

Hard as it might be to believe, I'm actually happy that people are speaking up about how AA doesn't work for them and why when that is the case. It is important that people who have not thought this through and find themselves in a similar predicament can find such discussion and recognize that they are not alone. It is equally important that they find recommendations for what to do if AA doesn't fit them and I'm glad to help promote that awareness.

To summarize, it's not one size fits all, and neither is it one epistemology (theory of knowledge/method for determining truth) fits all. Some people are baseline secular and AA is perhaps going to lodge in their throats. Some others are faith-based and it's going to work for them. Who are we to say that we have better knowledge than a person who finds something that fits them and knows it?

I don't know if this is entirely coherent, but hopefully it is. Gotta go make dinner now.

Edited June 16, 2009 by Mark

[John Rutledge]

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[JulianP]

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[Nightwatch]

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[JulianP]

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[Nightwatch]

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[JulianP]

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[Mark]

can I ask a stupid question? what is a "two-hatter"? :confused:

[JulianP]

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[Nightwatch]

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