Truths to Counter the AA Cult #1: It Doesn't Work!

Today, I am so grateful to Daddy God for all the good that He has done for me through His Son Jesus Christ.

The more that I learn about Him and the New Covenant--Christ and Him Crucified--the more angry I become when I realize that for a large part of my life, I was in bondage to a cult because I was lied to for years and years that this "cult" was a normal expression of Christian faith.

This cult is called Alcoholics Anonymous. 

To make a long story short, my mother was a "Stepper Mom," totally knee-deep (or rather head-deep) I will be sharing the Twelve Things You Need to Know about the AA Cult via this blog site.

All of this information comes from the "Orange Papers," and that website and creator deserve all the credit.

I am merely a grateful, blessed, saved, redeemed messenger calling out one of the most pernicious, yet subtle, false gods in our society today.

Orange Papers Link

First Secret:

The Twelve Steps do not work as a program of recovery from drug or alcohol problems.

• The A.A. failure rate ranges from 95% to 100%. Sometimes, the A.A. success rate is actually less than zero, which means that A.A. indoctrination is positively harmful to people, and prevents recovery. Some tests have shown that even receiving no treatment at all for alcoholism is much better than receiving A.A. treatment:

• One of the most enthusiastic boosters of Alcoholics Anonymous, Professor and medical Doctor George E. Vaillant of Harvard University, who was also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (AAWS), showed by his own 8 years of testing of A.A. that A.A. was worse than useless — that it didn't help the alcoholics any more than no treatment at all, and it had the highest death rate of any treatment program tested — a death rate that Professor Vaillant himself described as "appalling". While trying to prove that A.A. treatment works, Professor Vaillant actually proved that A.A. kills. After 8 years of A.A. treatment, the score with Dr. Vaillant's first 100 alcoholic patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking.
  (Nevertheless, Vaillant still became a Trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he still wants to send all alcoholics to A.A. anyway, to "get an attitude change by confessing their sins to a high-status healer." That is cult religion, not a treatment program for the "disease of alcoholism".)

• The A.A. dropout rate is terrible. Most people who come to A.A. looking for help in quitting drinking are appalled by the narrow-minded atmosphere of fundamentalist religion and faith-healing. The A.A. meeting room has a revolving door. The therapists, judges, and parole officers (many of whom are themselves hidden members of A.A. or N.A.) continually send new people to A.A., but those newcomers vote with their feet once they see what A.A. really is. Even A.A.'s own triennial surveys, conducted by the A.A. headquarters (the GSO), reveal a high dropout rate. But the triennial survey does not count all of those people who only attended a few A.A. meetings, or even dozens of meetings, before quitting A.A. — they don't qualify as "A.A. members", and they are not there to be counted. (That amounts to "cherry-picking".) If we included them, then the numbers would be much worse.

  Similarly, the leader of A.A. in Australia reported:

  "Our 1992 Survey showed that only 5% of newcomers to AA are still attending meetings after 12 months. This is a truly terrible statistic. Again we must ask 'Where does the fault lie?'"
  — Dr Ron Whitington, Chairman of AA Australia General Service Board
  Comments made in AA Around Australia, Spring Edition, 1994; Commenting on a survey of more than 100 of Australia's AA groups

  And also note that the apparent five percent of A.A. newcomers who are still left after one year is exactly the same number as the usual rate of spontaneous remission among alcoholics — five percent per year. That is, in any randomly-selected population of alcoholics, approximately five percent per year will finally get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and they will just quit drinking. And the Harvard Medical School says that 80% of those successful quitters do it by themselves, alone, without any "treatment program" or any "support group". If we subtract the normal spontaneous remission rate for alcoholism of five percent per year from A.A.'s claimed success rate of five percent, we get zero for A.A.'s real effective cure rate. A.A. does not actually make anybody quit drinking; it just takes the credit for the people who were going to quit anyway. A.A. is just taking the credit for peoples' efforts to save their own lives.

  And then it gets worse: The attrition continues, and it isn't just because the old-timers all die of old age. Barely one percent of the newcomers to A.A. get a 10-year coin for sobriety, and only 3/4 of one percent get the 11-year coin. Only half of one percent — 5 out of a thousand — get the 15-year coin, and only one in a thousand gets the 20-year coin.

• Alcoholics Anonymous does not have a success rate or a retention rate. What Alcoholics Anonymous really has is a churn rate. The story of A.A. is routinely: another hundred people lured or coerced in, and then another hundred people leave. Look here for much more about the A.A. churn rate.

• The Twelve Steps are actually a hopelessly bad program for recovery:
  
  • Cult religion is not a good cure for alcoholism, and A.A. most assuredly is a cult religion.
  • One of the biggest problems with the Twelve-Step program is the learned helplessness caused by the First Step, where people are taught to confess that they are "powerless over alcohol." This leads many people to believe that once they have a drink, that a full-blown relapse and total loss of self-control is inevitable and unavoidable. So some people go on suicidally-intense binges, thinking that it is pointless to try to resist temptation.²
  • Step Two is just as bad: it teaches people that they are insane, and that only a Supernatural Being can restore them to sanity — which means that they are helpless, and cannot heal themselves.
    
  • Then Step Three teaches a lifestyle of infantile narcissism and passive dependency, where A.A. members turn control of their wills and their lives over to "the care of God as we understood Him", and then they expect God to take care of them and run their lives for them, and solve all their problems, and wait on them hand and foot, and do all of the hard work for them from then on... "Let Go And Let God" is their official motto, their lifestyle, and their approach to problem-solving.
  • Then Steps Four through Ten induce guilt in the members by forcing members to make lists of all of their sins and flaws, and "defects of character" and "moral shortcomings", and confess every intimate dirty little secret to another A.A. member who isn't even ordained clergy, or even sworn to secrecy.
  • In Step Eleven you are supposed to "channel" God and receive psychic work orders and power.
  • Then Step Twelve tells you to go recruiting, to draft more alcoholics into this madness.

• There is also experimental evidence that the A.A. teachings about powerlessness lead to binge drinking. In a controlled study of A.A.'s effectiveness, court-mandated offenders who had been sent to A.A. for several months were engaging in five times as much binge drinking as the no-treatment control group which got no A.A. "help".

• A.A. boosters and propagandists constantly repeat the Big Lie that A.A. works great, and A.A. with its Twelve Steps is the way that everybody recovers:

  One way or another Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) or a similar Twelve-Step program is an integral part of almost all successful recoveries from alcohol or drug abuse. In fact, it is widely believed that not including a Twelve-Step program in a treatment plan can put a recovering addict on the road to relapse. For some people, regular participation in such a mutual self-help group is all that is needed to become and remain sober.
  The Recovery Book, Al J. Mooney M.D., Arlene Eisenberg, and Howard Eisenberg, pages 40-41.

  All three of those sentences are untrue. The truth is just the opposite of what they are telling us:

  1. Far more people recover without A.A. than with it. The good, unbiased, medical research shows that the vast majority of people who successfully recover from alcoholism — like 75 or 80% of them — actually do it without any Twelve-Step program, or even any "recovery group" or "treatment program" of any kind. Contrary to everything you have ever been told by 12-Step promoters and recruiters, doing it alone, quitting without any treatment program, or any "support group", or any cult religion, is actually the "time-tested, proven" method that really works for most people. And the research also shows that A.A. is actually very harmful: it raises the rates of binge drinking, re-arrests, and death.

     The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health, performed the 2001-2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. For it, they interviewed over 43,000 people. Using the criteria for alcohol dependence found in the DSM-IV, they found: "About 75 percent of persons who recover from alcohol dependence do so without seeking any kind of help, including specialty alcohol (rehab) programs and AA. Only 13 percent of people with alcohol dependence ever receive specialty alcohol treatment." http://www.spectrum.niaaa.nih.gov/features/alcoholism.aspx

     The Harvard Mental Health Letter, from The Harvard Medical School, stated quite plainly: On their own There is a high rate of recovery among alcoholics and addicts, treated and untreated. According to one estimate, heroin addicts break the habit in an average of 11 years. Another estimate is that at least 50% of alcoholics eventually free themselves although only 10% are ever treated. One recent study found that 80% of all alcoholics who recover for a year or more do so on their own, some after being unsuccessfully treated. When a group of these self-treated alcoholics was interviewed, 57% said they simply decided that alcohol was bad for them. Twenty-nine percent said health problems, frightening experiences, accidents, or blackouts persuaded them to quit. Others used such phrases as "Things were building up" or "I was sick and tired of it." Support from a husband or wife was important in sustaining the resolution. Treatment of Drug Abuse and Addiction — Part III, The Harvard Mental Health Letter, Volume 12, Number 4, October 1995, page 3. (See Aug. (Part I), Sept. (Part II), Oct. 1995 (Part III).) And note that the Harvard Medical School says that the support of a good spouse is more important than that of a 12-Step group. But A.A. says just the opposite: "Dump your spouse and marry the A.A. group, because A.A. is The Only Way."

  2. So it doesn't matter how many people believe that not including A.A. in a treatment program will lead to relapse — it still isn't true.
  3. And then just going to A.A. meetings does not fix alcoholics. It tends to make them relapse and binge drink, and even die.

  Also notice all of the propaganda tricks that the authors used there:

  • First there is the propaganda technique of "everybody's doing it": "AA or a similar Twelve-Step program is an integral part of almost all successful recoveries".
    That is a complete falsehood. The vast majority of the successful people recover without A.A. or any "support group". It's what "everybody" is doing.

  • Then they use the propaganda techniques of use of the passive voice and vague suggestions: "It is widely believed that not including a Twelve-Step program in a treatment plan can put a recovering addict on the road to relapse."
    It is widely believed by whom? And what do those unnamed people know? What are their qualifications? Are they doctors? Medical school professors? Or salesmen for a 12-Step treatment center? Why should we care what some unnamed invisible fools allegedly believe, anyway?

  • The authors also use the propaganda technique of fear-mongering: you will be "on the road to relapse" — you will probably die — unless you practice Bill Wilson's Twelve Step cult religion.

  • And then the fluff-headed Pollyanna attitude is outrageous: Just going to the wonderful A.A. meetings is supposedly all that is needed to fix some alcoholics.
    But since A.A. has a zero-percent success rate above and beyond the normal rate of spontaneous remission, that cannot possibly be true.