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Recovery Fever
by
Melinda Blau
Baby-Boomers
and Club Kids are Turning
Twelve Step Programs into a 90s Scene
(Note:
The names of all those identified by their first names only
have been changed.)
“Tonight,”
Mary announces, “my topic is what we mean by sharing
our ‘experience, strength, and hope.“’
There
are groans. Mary isn’t surprised. This Alcoholics
Anonymous meeting--in a church basement in East Hampton--is
filled with vacationing Manhattanites, tanned, youthful-looking,
dressed in weekend chic. Mary, who’s leading the discussion,
hadn’t expected them to like to topic she’d
chosen.
“What
they really wanted to talk about was relationships,”
Mary laments after the meeting. “And that’s
all they want to talk about. This isn’t what AA used
to be!”
She
should know: She’s a 34-year veteran who joined AA
in desperation in 1957, after awakening one pitch-black
night in her car, which
was wrapped around a fire hydrant. Mary had no idea how
she’d got there.
And so--though she was convinced she was joining the “dregs
of society”--she ventured into an AA meeting. She
was, at 35, by far the youngest person in the room and one
of the few women. “Some of the old-timers were skeptical
about whether I could really be an alcoholic,” she
says. ‘They told me to take the cotton out of my ears
and stuff it in my mouth!” Mary thinks some of the
newer members she sees these days could do with a little
of that old-time advice. She finds it hard to tolerate the
way many of them stroll nonchalantly into meetings, acting
as if they’ve just joined the latest social club--as
if they’re just there to meet people. “Today,
we’re getting that Me Generation in,” she says
disdainfully. “A lot of them come in saying they’re
alcoholics--because the rehabs tell them they are. They
just want to belong to something! I wish they would just
listen and shut up. It’s a chance for them to experience
some kind of recovery that isn’t so self-centered.”
There’s
no doubt that being “in the rooms” (attending
meetings) bears far less stigma than it did in the fifties.
Mary is glad that people have lost their sense of shame
about getting help and are coming into “the program”
younger than they used to. (These days, almost half of the
members are 21-to-40-year-olds, and a third of the members
are women.)
But there’s a downside. The baby-boomers and club
kids flooding into the meetings can seem awfully self-involved.
Whenever somebody who’s been called on to “share”
(respond to the speaker’s story of his recovery or
the chosen topic) launches into the dread phrase “I’ve
been going through some changes” or “I’m
in a lot of pain today,” AA veterans get that sinking
feeling. They know they’re probably in for a fuzzy
monologue about the pills the speaker has popped, the cocaine
he’s snorted, the food she’s binged on, arguments
he’s had with his lover, talk about her rotten childhood,
his job anxieties, the Prozac she’s been taking for
depression, her co-dependency--everything but alcohol.
These
maunderings can be plenty off-putting--and, to tentative
first-timers, bewildering. “I must have been sober
twenty years before I even heard about pain at an AA meeting,”
Mary snaps. “We had to talk about sober experience,
which showed the strength of the program and gave the newcomer
hope. Nowadays, ‘experience’ is whatever happened
that day--from which I get neither strength nor hope!”
Erin--a fifteen-year AA member--agrees. “These people
have this incredible need to draw attention to themselves.
They come up to a speaker during the break and say, ‘I
need to share--please call on me.’ That was unheard
of years ago! Why can’t they just talk to that person
then and there? They need the floor!”
One
wonders if even the visionary Bill Wilson, who co-founded
AA in the thirties, could have foreseen the recovery fever
that has led so many into the program (membership has more
than doubled in New York City since 1978)--and made them
so open about it. It’s likely he’d find even
more amazing the alphabet soup of groups (see sidebar) that
have spun off from AA--everything from Anorexic Bulimics
Anonymous, Batterers Anonymous, Dual Disorders Anonymous,
Families of Sex Offenders Anonymous, and Homosexuals Anonymous
to Unwed Parents Anonymous, Workaholics Anonymous, Victims
Anonymous, and Youth Emotions Anonymous. Last, and far from
least, are the many “co-dependent” and “adult
children of’ groups set up for people whose lives
are entwined with one or another of these sufferers.
Most
of the spinoffs base their programs on the Twelve Steps
that Wilson and his early colleagues devised to guide AA
members into recovery. Step One involves admitting that
you are powerless over alcohol. Members are told that their
“disease” renders them out of control. Recovery
is a matter not of weakness or lack of will but of willingness
to “turn it over,” which is where Step Two--accepting
the notion that a Higher Power exists--comes in. Step Three
asks you to rely on that entity--be it a deity, a spiritual
force, or the collective power of the group--to guide you.
(“Turning it over to a Higher Power” doesn’t
mean abdicating responsibility: Your may have a disease,
but you are now responsible for your actions.) Steps Four
through Nine encourage you to look at yourself, take an
honest “inventory” of your faults, and “make
amends” to anyone you’ve hurt. Finally, Steps
Ten through Twelve are about continuing to be honest and
open and extending yourself, which includes carrying the
message to other alcoholics.
Has
AA’s popularity--and the develop- ment of all those
spinoff groups--so watered down the program that it’s
no longer effective? Many acknowledge that some meetings
have lost their focus. But, they say, AA still cleaves to
Wilson’s original tenets. Alcoholics who have tired
years of psychotherapy, antidepressants, or simply trying
to “will” themselves away from a drink still
find in AA something that finally works. When they walk
into a roomful of people like themselves, they find a supportive
community that traditional one-on-one psychotherapy can’t
replicate. “These people are almost intractable by
conventional methods,” explains Dr. Donald Nathanson,
senior attending psychiatrist at Institute of Pennsylvania
Hospital in Philadelphia, “but if you group alcoholics
together, they know each other’s tricks, they begin
talking about them, and they begin to heal each other.”
Meetings
also help people break through their isolation and learn
how to trust again. “They talk about feelings,”
notes Dr. Jonathan Lampert, a psychiatrist at the Ackerman
Institute for Family Therapy, who has had extensive clinical
experience with alcoholics and addicts and has observed
“hundreds” of other kinds of Twelve Step meetings.
“It’s very compelling to have someone begin
speaking what is unspeakable, know what is unknowable. And
they have a protocol to follow-the steps--and others with
whom they can mitigate the shame. That’s very powerful.”
Through
AA, millions have recovered, and will continue to recover,
from the ravages of alcoholism. It boils down to support
and identification--the idea of one drunk helping another.
To
find meetings they like, however, today’s newcomers
may need perseverance as well as the patience to look beyond
the confusing digression and egotistic behavior of some
members. Now that rehabs are pouring hundreds of newly sober
people into these programs each week and countless others
are coming in on their own, the balance between old-timers
(who have stories of long-term recovery that can encourage
others) and newcomers (who do not) has become skewed. It’s
harder than it used to be to find “powers of example”--people
who have attained a sense of what serenity is all about
and who are willing to extend themselves.
“You
don’t see people reaching out the way we used to,”
observes Kelly, a lover of Quaaludes and Jack Daniel’s
who joined AA ten years ago, when she was 28. “The
other night, I heard a woman tell someone that she couldn’t
pick her up to take her to a meeting [this kind of help
for a newcomer was once a common practice]. The driver thought
the newcomer lived too far out of her way. What was the
woman supposed to do--drink?”
AA’s
primary purpose, as stated in its preamble, has always been
to “stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve
sobriety.” (“You learned how to not pick up
that first drink--a day at a time,” Mary says. “Then
you reached out to others.“) Though there are greeters
at the door at some meetings, gone are the days when most
people routinely introduced themselves to whoever sat next
to them or made sure they approached a newcomer during a
break. Maxi--a nice Jewish girl from the Five Towns whose
heroin addiction landed her in jail, in an abandoned building
on Ninth Avenue, and finally “in Times Square, turning
tricks”--came into AA eleven years ago, when she was
37. “In those days," she says, “someone
would announce, ‘We’re all going for coffee!’
That’s how I learned to socialize when I came into
the rooms. That happens a lot less now.”
Today,
members are also less willing to “do service”--run
a meeting, make coffee, stack chairs, put out program literature,
or even be a sponsor (a person who welcomes phone calls
and guides newcomers through the steps). Worse, some meetings
are run by tightly knit cliques--groups of friends who came
into the fellowship around the same time, got sober with
one another, and socialize outside meetings as well. As
friends embrace in the doorway or shout at one another across
the room, a newcomer is likely to feel left out. Many members
admit that they don’t ask strangers out for coffee
as often; they don’t use the ten-minute break to talk
to someone who seems distressed or lonely; they are more
clannish; they just don’t take the time.
Georgeanne,
in AA for the past ten years, admits she is overwhelmed
by the new faces and less willing to give of herself than
she was when she first came in. Her attitude sums up a pervasive
thirtysomething mentality: “I don’t really
pay attention to them until they’ve been coming to
meetings for 90 days--to see if they’re serious.
I’ve got a husband and a baby and a full-time job,
and these newcomers can go on for hours!”
Despite
these problems, some veteran AA members are amazed and heartened
by the program’s growth and the diversity of its membership.
‘The Woodstock generation has arrived--and I’m
glad!” exclaims Steven, 65, who joined AA “when
Eisenhower was president.” He is unconcerned about
the criticism that there’s not enough talk of alcohol
in AA rooms. “If they listen closely, they’ll
hear it,” he says. “They’ll certainly
hear about addiction and all the other problems that are
common in early sobriety.” Moreover, he says, newcomers
not only keep the meetings going and growing, they add spice
to his life. “I’ve learned more about relationships
in these last ten years,” he says. “And remember,
I came from a closeted era. These young people say things
to a roomful of 100 people that I wouldn’t say to
my parish priest!”
Salvation
or Self-Indulgence
The
term recovery, once applied solely to alcoholics and drug
addicts, has expanded to include millions more who are afflicted
with the maladies of modern living: the people who eat,
work, smoke, shop, gamble, exercise, or love too much; the
sufferers of certifiable behavioral syndromes; the sex addicts,
incest perpetrators, and pedophiles and their -victims--the
“survivors” of rape, child abuse, molestation.
Messies
Anonymous? Emotions Anony- mous? Are these fellowships necessary?
Don’t groups with names like these diminish the seriousness
of a program like AA, which was founded for people whose
disease could cost them their lives?
“We
seem to be turning everything into a pathology,” complains
Daryl, who has been in AA for eleven years. She is puzzled
by the proliferation of groups for “co-dependents,”
the people who coddle the addicted and afflicted. (If you
believe the recovery gurus who are trying to sell their
books, that’s 95 percent of the population.) Daryl
points out that women have been socialized to put others’
feelings and needs above their own--and that’s one
of the hallmarks of co-dependency as it is defined today.
(The term is an outgrowth of “co-alcoholic,”
someone who is dependent on the alcoholic. He has his arms
around the bottle; she has her arms around him.) “Caring
is a wonderful thing, even in a relationship with an addict,
but when we care only about the other person, we get into
trouble,” Daryl believes. “Nor are certain aspects
of humanness--like emotions--a “sickness.“’
“The
Twelve Step principles are definitely being
commodified,” says Frank Riessman, director of the
National Self-Help Clearinghouse (25 West 43rd Street, Room
620, 642-2944), which provides information on all kinds
of self-help groups. Between 1978 and 1984 alone, the aggressive
marketing of recovery treatment resulted in a 350 percent
increase in private alcoholic-treatment facilities plus
the establishment of rehabs that take in not only alcoholics
and drug addicts but gamblers, overeaters, co-dependents,
and adult children of any type of dysfunctional family.
These inpatient facilities have become the “spas”
of recovery.
Riessman
reminds us not to forget why all these groups have sprung
up. “Recovery therapy arose primarily because other
methods were failing to reach large numbers of people,”
he says. Indeed, Jonathan Lampert maintains, many mental-health
practitioners still aren’t knowledgeable about addiction,
and “they’re often overwhelmed by the kinds
of extreme behaviors addicts talk about and bring into the
office.” He believes that for many types of problems,
the various Twelve Step offshoots can help people open up.
“Many sophisticated people can’t stop overeating,
but they do it with OA [Overeaters Anonymous].”
Since
the newer, less stable programs are works in progress, many
of the more recent me-too programs do not have as much to
offer as Twelve Step fellowships established prior to 1970--and
certainly not as much as AA. They may not be very well defined;
members often talk more about problems than about solutions.
(When Lindsey, an avid program goer, recently tried a meeting
of Co-Dependents Anonymous—CODA, one of the more popular
new additions to the city’s menu--she says, “I
didn’t hear recovery; I heard weekly reports.“)
Some meetings in these fellowships are not orderly; some
are run by the more dominant people in the room and susceptible
to personal whims. (In AA, which is guided by its Twelve
Traditions and better organized, “group conscience”
guides decision-making.) Some groups, predictably, have
already gone by the wayside, like Valium Anonymous. And
there’s at least one fellowship whose members couldn’t
be located for interviews—Isolators Anonymous.
That
so many people are members of more than one program, even
when they are newly sober, makes many veteran AA members
suspicious. Maxi maintains, “If alcoholism is your
primary disease, you have to get your foundation in AA.
When you go to a lot of different fellowships, you may not
have to focus on your problems--or on changing your behavior.”
Longtime
members of Al-Anon--AA’s companion program and the
oldest and most stable of the “-Anons” (fellowships
for families and friends of addicts)--are also distressed.
Spouses and other members of alcoholic families used to
learn at Al-Anon meetings that they “enabled”
the alcoholic by denying, rationalizing, or covering up
his drinking, and the program taught them how to change
their own behavior. Now just about everybody is a “co-dependent”
or worried about being one--and all flock to Al-Anon. “We
used to talk about the alcoholics in our lives,” says
Lilly, an Al-Anon member whose mother is an alcoholic and
who also tends to get romantically involved with alcoholics.
“Now people in our meetings talk about relationships
with their lovers whether they’re alcoholic or not.”
Twelve
Steps for Everybody?
There
are many who argue that we don’t need all the me-too
programs out there. But it’s important to resist the
tendency to trivialize. The pain one hears in those “other”
Twelve Step rooms is no different from the pain of an alcoholic
resisting a drink. The woman who goes to an Overeaters Anonymous
meeting and admits she hides cookies under her bed to feel
safe but that nothing she eats ever makes her feel satisfied,
or the man who attends a Gamblers Anonymous meeting because
he is afraid he’s going to blow a month’s pay
at Aqueduct, may be talking to someone about these problems
and fears for the first time.
Likewise,
at a meeting of Sexaholics Anonymous, you’re bound
to hear the agony of a man (males far outnumber females)
who can’t stop himself from going to the porn shops
on Broadway, from cheating on his wife, or from picking
up a prostitute--and that, these days, is as deadly as drug
or alcohol addiction.
Dr.
Robert DuPont, clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown
University and a former director of the National Institute
on Drug Abuse, applauds the fact that Twelve Step programs
have splintered into smaller, very specialized groups whose
“cultural specificity” allows people to identify
with one another more readily. Some meetings cover particular
topics, like incest and being HIV-positive, or serve certain
groups—young people, homosexuals, handicapped members.
But does the AA prescription work for behavioral problems--like
compulsive gambling or sex addiction? Can someone with a
food disorder, for example, be helped by a program originally
designed around complete abstinence?
“I’ve
watched people get well,” Dr. DuPont insists. By affiliating
themselves with these programs, he says, “people are
not only saying, ‘That’s me,’ they’re
finding better ways to live.”
Donald
Nathanson is more cautious, especially when it comes to
programs like Adult Children of Alcoholics and Sex and Love
Addicts Anonymous, where the tendency is to point a finger
at someone else. “The major focus is not on a person’s
responsibility for his own behavior but on the inevitability
that he behaves a certain way because others made him this
way.”
Still,
Nathanson thinks these programs can work--if the person
is willing to expend some effort. “If you can think
about your inner life once a day, you’re doing pretty
well”’ he says. “You reinforce the fact
that you’re an alcoholic or that you resort to sex
as an anodyne or do any of a number of types of behavior
that are a detour from facing your own feelings.”
Motivation
is all--and, according to Nathanson, “some of the
people in these other programs haven’t suffered as
much as alcoholics or addicts. So they don’t have
as much need and don’t go to as many meetings. One
has to ask about their problem behavior, ‘How long
have they been doing it? How much of their world have they
lost because of it? And how desperately do they want to
change?“’
Psychologist
Stan J. Katz’ co-author of The Codependency Conspiracy--a
thoughtful, albeit controversial, critique of the marketing
of recovery--has
less confidence in using the Twelve Steps for behavior problems.
“It’s like using penicillin for every disease.
AA was developed specifically for alcohol. It is a fairly
good program for alcoholics, and the program has a decent
crossover for people addicted to drugs. But many people
go to meetings for the social life, or because they have
other problems that
they’re trying to cure on a free basis.”
Katz
maintains that you can’t apply a program based on
abstinence to food disorders or relationship issues, because
you can’t completely abstain from eating or being
in relationships. Thus, he fears, “the people who
need genuine intervention are not getting it--they’re
going to Twelve Step meetings instead.”
Critics
of the recovery movement also challenge the widespread use
of the “disease model”’ originally applied
only to alcoholism. The theory holds that alcoholics are
not morally responsible for their behavior. They have an
“allergy” to liquor: The first drink triggers
a craving, and then they can’t stop themselves any
more than a diabetic can control the way his body reacts
to sugar.
Labeling
all these difficulties “diseases,” regardless
of their degree of severity, says Katz, is
neither scientifically warranted nor helpful to the patient--although
it does tend to drum up business for the recovery movement.
Katz thinks these labels cause people to perceive themselves
as victims, to use the label to excuse their behavior, and
to become dependent on the program they’re going to:
They are eternally “recovering”’ never
“recovered.”
Dr.
Marc Galanter, professor of psychiatry and director of the
Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse at New York University
Medical Center and director of the alcohol-and-drug-abuse
program at Bellevue Hospital Center, has studied cults and
religious groups as well as AA. He characterizes Twelve
Step programs as part of a “zealous social movement.”
He maintains that at stressful times, some people are more
susceptible to becoming dependent on the program: “The
more you are vulnerable, the more you glom on to something
that seems to offer more permanence.”
You
can usually spot the kind of people who “hide in the
rooms.” For them, getting sober becomes
an end unto itself. But Mary stresses that it’s not
AA that causes this--it’s the individual. “AA
is a bridge back to life. It was never meant to be your
life.” Jonathan Lampert notes that the program-shoppers
who go from room to room “use the therapists the same
way!” While he concedes that Twelve Step principles
can sometimes be misinterpreted or even abused, he holds
that the best starting point for talking about your problems
is still a Twelve Step program.
Does
It Work If You Work It?
A
major stumbling block for some who try AA and its spinoffs
is swallowing the idea of a Higher Power. “People
think of us as a bunch of religious nuts,” admits
Nan Robertson, an AA member for the past sixteen years and
the author of Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous.
Many people have trouble with the “God part,”
she says. The word God appears in four of the Twelve Steps
and is mentioned 132 times in Alcoholics Anonymous (better
known as The Big Book).
Meetings
in this city are particularly “New York”
in tone--intense, sharp-edged, laced with psychological
jargon. But, perhaps because of New York’s diverse
population, some meetings here don’t have the religious
overtones one finds in other parts of the country; closing
with the Lord’s Prayer makes many non-Christian members
uncomfortable. Instead, meetings often end with the nonsectarian
Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept
the things I cannot change, courage to change the things
I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” Inevitably,
that’s followed by a rousing “Keep comin’
back--it works if you work it!”
But
the “God part” keeps some people from “working
it.” For them, Rational Recovery Systems (RR), a five-year-old
organization that’s close to 300 groups strong, hopes
to provide an alternative.
RR, which is based on psychologist Albert Ellis’s
rational-emotive therapy, appeals to thinkers, not believers,
according to RR’s Small Book In RR, the alcoholic’s
or addict’s will and intelligence are called upon
to help change his behavior. RR doesn’t believe an
alcoholic is powerless, nor must he be forever recovering.
Alcoholics, RR says, can look within themselves for strength
and use “reason to light the way.”
Every
RR meeting has a professional “adviser,” a counselor,
therapist, M.D., minister, or nurse who donates time and
allegedly has a minor role. An adviser can “spot a
problem--like symptoms of suicide”’ explains
Vincent Fox, a member who also sits on the board of directors
of RR. For the most part, however, the adviser takes a backseat
to the “coordinator,” an experienced member
who “manages” the meetings. Twelve Step meetings
allow no “cross talk” (no advising or answering
one another during the meeting); RR is run more like group
therapy.
Predictably,
there is some AA-bashing at RR meetings, 90 percent of whose
members are AA dropouts. And because the organization is
so young, it seems to be suffering some of the same growing
pains that also beleaguer younger AA offshoots--instability
and a lack of long-term sobriety. “We’re not
at the final stage of our evolution,” Fox admits.
“Ten years from now, we’ll evolve into something
more polished, more mature.”
A
few inpatient institutions now offer RR, in addition to
the usual Twelve Step fare, to the newly recovering. To
help shore up its claims, RR is submitting to efficacy studies.
For now, the jury is out on new groups like RR and Secular
Organizations for Sobriety, another non-spiritual alternative.
But
then, the flow of bodies into Twelve Step programs has not
been inspired by evidence. The truth is, there’s very
little scientific proof that AA works. The “anonymous”
nature of the program, a safeguard incorporated to protect
people from the shame of declaring themselves alcoholics
(that’s a bit of an irony, these days), as well as
AA’s tradition of resisting professional involvement,
has made it difficult to monitor.
Dr.
Galanter’s 1990 study is a noteworthy exception. Galanter
and his team surveyed a group of 100 recovering alcoholic
or dually addicted doctors who had received inpatient treatment
in which AA affiliation was part of the program. They had
been clean and sober an average of 33 months at the time
of the study.
“After
all was said and done,” Galanter reports, “they
rated their AA experiences as the most influential aspect
of their recovery.” Though Galanter allows that this
was a select and highly committed population, he believes
that the findings can be generalized. ‘There are more
than 1 million members nationwide. They wouldn’t be
going if they didn’t think it helped. Certainly, in
my experience with the patients I’ve treated, that’s
the case.”
Robert
DuPont adds that many program-bashers, especially his peers
in the medical profession, are skeptical about AA and other
Twelve Step programs because “it’s a language
that’s alien to professionals. The Establishment sees
it as a fringe approach--small, quirky, nonintellectual,
cult-oriented, religious--that’s the dominant view.
They don’t understand it.”
Clearly,
Twelve Step programs don’t work for everyone--nor
does one type of treatment. Lampert and others call for
an integrated approach, combining self-help with a thoughtful
psychological assessment that factors in personality, family
history, and the person’s context today--his relationships,
work situation, socioeconomic status, among other things.
As
the AA saying goes, “Some are sicker than others.”
Some people need only the support of a fellowship and the
education and guidance that a Twelve Step program provides.
Others may want--or need--what Donald Nathanson calls “thicker
soup: something that allows them to deal with their own
personal feelings more on a one-to-one basis.”
Many
of the criticisms of Twelve Step programs are well taken.
People going to these meetings might want to ponder whether
they have isolated themselves there, doing only Twelve Step
activities with Twelve Step friends. If they feel “stuck”
or like victims, or if their conversations repeatedly center
on the past or on other people’s behavior, it may
mean they are dealing with issues that warrant professional
treatment. People who are members of more than one fellowship
should think about whether they’re really getting
something different from each one--or whether program-hopping
helps them avoid taking responsibility for their lives.
To
prospective and neophyte Twelve Steppers, Ed Madara, director
of the American Self-Help Clearinghouse (see sidebar), which
publishes The Self-Help Sourcebook, says, “Twelve
Step programs constitute the majority of all self-help programs.
And people are getting help.” But look out, he says.
Not all “anonymous” programs are necessarily
built on the Twelve Steps. In fact, some groups masquerade
as self-help, and some are commercial enterprises. (One
doctor, for instance, wrote a book on pathological jealousy
and called Madara to network a group called Jealousy Anonymous.)
In
the past, it was suggested that you try six meetings of
the fellowship you’re interested in joining. Most
veterans suggest doubling that figure, because nowadays
it may take a while to feel comfortable at a meeting and
find a group you like. Find a “home group,”
Mary advises. “If you don’t belong to a group,
you don’t become part of the structure of the program.”
A newcomer would be wise to adopt an attitude of cautious
optimism. At some meetings--certainly not all--there is
considerable whining; some sponsors are controlling; and
there are “thirteen-steppers” out there: members
who try to get vulnerable newcomers into bed. The point
is, one can’t assume that all people in Twelve Step
programs are virtuous. As one member put it, “We’re
sick people getting better, not bad people getting good.”
At
the same time, the ever-increasing acceptance of the Twelve
Step philosophy, which places a premium on “honesty,
openness, and
willingness,” offers suffering people a place to turn.
The AA program (and its copies) urges people to be tolerant
and to give to others-in essence, to get out of themselves.
This is precisely the kind of “moral jogging”--a
way to practice selflessness--that psychologist Martin Seligman,
author of Learned Optimism, prescribes to combat the depression
that comes from “overcommitment to the self and undercommitment
to the common good.” Unfortunately, as Seligman puts
it, “giving to others and spending serious time, money,
and effort enhancing the common good does not come naturally
to the present generation.”
Sidebar:
The Twelve Step Hit Parade
Although
not all “anonymous” or –anon groups are
guided by AA’s Twelve Steps, nearly 100
self-help groups are. Below is a partial listing of the
more popular clone groups for various types of addicts and
people affected by their behavior. The information comes
from the 1990 edition of The Self-Help Sourcebook ($lO),
available from the American Self-Help Clearinghouse, St.
Clares-Riverside Medical Center, Denville, New Jersey 07834
(201-625-7101).
1935
Alcoholics Anonymous-alcoholics
1951 Al-Anon-families and friends of alcoholics
1953 Narcotics Anonymous-addicts
1957 Alateen--twelve to eighteen year-olds
who have alcoholics in their lives
1957 Gamblers Anonymous-compulsive gamblers
1960 Gam-Anon--families and friends of
compulsive gamblers
1960 Overeaters Anonymous-people with compulsive-eating
disorders
1967 Nar-Anon---families and friends of
addicts
1970 Emotional Health Anonymous- people
with mental-health problems
1971 Emotions Anonymous-people who want
to gain better emotional health
1971 Families Anonymous--relatives and
friends of drug or alcohol abusers or of people with behavioral
problems
1975 O-Anon---friends and relatives of
people with compulsive-eating disorders
1976 Debtors Anonymous-credit-card abusers,
under-earners, and overspenders
1976 Augustine Fellowship, Sex and Love Addicts
Anonymous-people with obsessive/ compulsive sexual
behavior or emotional attachment
1977 Sex Addicts Anonymous-compulsive-sex
addicts
1978 Drugs Anonymous (formerly Pills Anonymous)--chemical
addicts
1979 Pill Addicts Anonymous- addicted to
mood-changing pills and drugs
1979 Sexaholics Anonymous-people with sexually
destructive thinking and behavior
1980 Incest Survivors Anonymous-incest
survivors
1982 Cocaine Anonymous-cocaine addicts
1982 Survivors of Incest Anonymous- victims
of childhood sexual abuse
1984 Adult Children of Alcoholics-now interpreted
to include adult children of people with other problems
1984 S-Anon-relatives and friends of sex
addicts
1985 Nicotine Anonymous-(formerly Smokers
Anonymous)--nicotine addicts
1986 Co-Dependents Anonymous- (CODA)-people
who grew up in dysfunctional families and have trouble with
relationships
(Source:
New York, September 9, 1991)
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