As with Part 1, this post contains criticism of Alcoholics Anonymous that you may find confronting if you’re in early recovery. My advice is to give AA a fair go regardless and draw your own conclusions.
In the first part of this article, I’d argued that AA’s ‘all or nothing’ approach to sobriety, combined with their tendency to blame the alcoholic for having a lapse or relapse was going to cause problems for a lot of people. It seems to me that this approach runs the risk of potentially setting someone up to fail and, given the nature of the affliction and the addicts’ seemingly limitless capacity for self-blame, fail in a most exquisitely painful manner.
Further to that, we have the matter of the ‘God thing’ and what that entails. Step 3 of the famous 12 Steps demands that we, ‘turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him’. For me this line, known well to all members of the fellowship, contains within it, both a problem and an apparent solution – but a solution that still leaves a question:
‘God as we understood him’.
The seeming brilliance of this lies in its spiritual openness. AA is not asking you to believe in any one or particular God, but one that has meaning for you. A ‘higher power’, as they say. Now this definition leaves it open for you to interpret that as you will. Your higher power could be the Christian or Jewish ‘God’ of the Bible, Jesus Christ, Allah, Shiva, Buddha and all the rest, or it could be, for instance, the music of Bob Dylan, nature, the love you have for your children or (God forbid) the Manchester United football team. Whatever works for you. The genius of this, is that it opens up the fellowship’s core understanding to card-carrying atheists. You don’t have to be religious to enjoy the benefits of salvation. Which is good, but still leaves in place that tricky core understanding which is, whichever way you look at it, a spiritual solution to what AA consider a spiritual problem.
At the heart of AA’s philosophy is the belief that only God, or a higher power call it what you will, can fill the void in your soul that are currently filling with alcohol. However you want to twist it, ‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘higher power’, are terms with strongly religious connotations. AA also has prayers, a guiding book or bible (The Big Book), and ‘saints’ in the form of people who have had a great or founding influence on the organisation. Even the word ‘fellowship’, routinely stylised as ‘the Fellowship’, has a strong sense of the exclusive devout about it.
So what’s the problem, I hear you ask. And indeed, if it works for you, it works for you. I can see, and have directly experienced, the very strong pull that such notions have on the mind – particularly a mind trapped by the hell (another religious concept) of alcoholic misery.
But somehow, for me, giving my life and my will over to the care of God/Bob Dylan, didn’t quite click. What does that look like in reality? ‘I just hand it over to God’, you’ll hear people say in meetings, referring to just about everything in their lives. ‘Why’, I can understand, but ‘How’ is the real question, and I think that’s where lots of people stumble and, sadly, fall. I say all this as a Catholic as well, just to add to the general confusion.
I think the problem is that AA asks us to look beyond both the self and the rational, and that’s simply something that a lot of people aren’t going to be able to do. For me, and as the tagline to this blog alludes, the truth lies within. Ask yourself the questions you need to ask. You know what they are already. Reframe. Seek the better version of you that you want to be, not what you think you have to be or, even worse, what someone else says you should be. Abandon vanity by all means, and embrace humility with all your heart.
But here’s the thing: don’t give it away. Whatever you have inside you, the things that make you who you are, never left you. They’ve been suppressed maybe, beaten up a bit, knocked around and all that, but they are still there.
For me, it comes down to evolution. The will to survive is, quite literally, a force of nature and it’s not going to go quietly. I recognise the very real emotional collapse that can produce suicide or thoughts thereof, but even those emotions are being resisted at all times. And, to be frank, if you are hellbent on killing yourself, notions of higher powers, gods and prayers aren’t going to help you anyway.
If you can marshal this very real force, this inner, not higher, power, then the true path to recovery can begin: the quest to find your authentic self.
More on this theory in later posts.
Be the first to comment