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L I F E S T Y L E
Unite
and Conquer
America’s
crazy for support groups. Or maybe
support groups keep America from going crazy.
All
of a sudden, people are pouring back into churches and synagogues
with a fervor that hasn’t been seen since the ‘50s.
It appears that a great religious revival is sweeping the
land – until you examine the situation a little more
closely. Then you’ll notice the biggest crowds today
often arrive in midweek. And instead of filing into the
pews, these people head for the basement, where they immediately
sit down and begin talking about their deepest secrets,
darkest fears and strangest cravings.
Alcoholics? Third door to the right.
Sex addicts? They meet on Tuesday.
Overweight men who have a problem with compulsive shopping?
Pull up a folding chair buddy. You’re in the right
place.
Where are you, specifically, is at a support-group meeting-one
of about 500,000 that will be attended by some 15 million
Americans this week. In the last 10 years, the number of
these self-help organizations has quadrupled, and the topics
they cover have been expanded to include everything from
abused wives of doctors to zoologists who love too much.
Alcoholics Anonymous, once heavily male and middle class,
has experienced a huge influx of female and low-income members.
Men, meanwhile, are streaming into the self-help movement
at what is-considering the usual male reluctance to discuss
intimate feelings-an absolutely astonishing rate.
Why is this happening? Because people have discovered that
talking and listening to their fellow sufferers has a soothing
effect on the psyche, sometimes more so than doing the same
thing in the presence of a therapist. Support groups-a rather
high-falutin name foe what’s usually nothing more
than loosely structured gab sessions-salve psychological
wounds, help destroy addictions and even extend the lives
of other people suffering from cancer and other physical
afflictions.
And how do they do all this? Well, let us first acknowledge
that there are some doctors, psychiatrists and others who
say that support groups do nothing of the sort-that they
in fact represent a dangerous do-it-yourself approach to
problems of the mind, body and spirit. Yet most professionals
and, of course, support-group members themselves, see the
meetings as an amazingly effective antidote to aloneness-
something that, apart from being a problem in its own right,
compounds every known condition brought on by late 20th
century living, from compulsive hand-washing to AIDS. Though
no academicians or researchers have yet studied the self-help
movement, there seems to be something at once common-sensical
and utterly mysterious about how the meetings work. “Just
the sight of your fellow sufferers,” says one self-help
group organizer, “tends to make your pain a little
more bearable.”
And so there is a group for every season. Got the midwinter
blues? (Call Depressives Anonymous.) Are you obese? (Overeaters
Anonymous or the National Association to Aid Fat Americans.)
A gay Episcopalian? (Integrity.) Consider yourself assexual?
)Finding Our Own Way.) Feel certain that aliens are trying
to transform you into George Jessel? (National Organization
of Rare Disorders.) Wish that aliens would transform you
into George Jessel? (True Potential Toastmasters.)
Cultural
Upheaval: You could call this a trend of course,
of course. But when there is a group for women whose daughters
won’t talk to them meeting weekly in Westchester County,
N.Y.-and when the New York City Self-Help Clearinghouse
has had several callers ask if there were meetings for people
who, to quote a spokesperson, “drink a little too
much but not way too much Coca-Cola”-then what you
have, really, is a sea change, the kind of cultural upheaval
that makes the fax machine look like mood rings, break-dancing
or some other fleeting fad. Through it all, though-as the
national registry of support groups has grown to include
Compulsive Shoppers, Pedestrians First, the Trichotillomania
Support Network (for people who pull their hair out, strand
by strand), Hot Flashes (“support for women with menopausal
problems”) and numerous bereavement groups-two basic
conditions have endured. The first is that participation
in a true self-help meeting is limited to peers. That means
there is no professional moderator to make Wise Pronouncements
based on a purely academic understanding of the subject
matter, to sell books or to collect fees. While some groups
designate a leader who might be charged with making announcements
or recognizing members who want to “share” an
experience or observation, no true self-help organization
can have a hierarchy, especially one headed by someone who
doesn’t share the members problems. To include such
a person transforms the support-group meeting into group
therapy, a standard psychiatric technique which tends, the
self-help people say, to take the burden of recovery off
the group member. “As soon as you have a therapist
or someone like that running the meeting,” says Marilyn
Ng-A-Qui, director of the New York City Self-Help Clearinghouse,
“the group members tend to dump their problems on
the so-called expert. Their attitude becomes ‘Here
I am-fix me.’ In a support group, though, the members
know they can’t be lazy. The responsibility for getting
better is in each member’s hands.
The second common trait among support groups is that they
engender a near-religious fervor. Listen to a member of
Schizophrenics Anonymous in Southfield, Mich.: “If
I don’t come to a meeting and I’m by myself
for three or four days, I’ll start getting weirder
than I am now. I have to realize that I can’t do it
alone.” Many members of Alcoholics Anonymous-the oldest
and by far the largest support group, with an estimated
membership of 1.73 million worldwide-strongly suggest that
newcomers attend 90 meetings in as many days in order to
break their bonds with the past.
Swirling
blizzard: But many support-group members don’t
need encouragement to attend. “If people are feeling
needy or going through a crisis,” says a New York
woman from Al-Anon, a group for relatives and friends of
alcoholics, “they’ll build their whole lives
around the meeting schedule. They’ll go 15 times a
week.” Fran Dory, now executive director of the California
Self-Help Center, recalls that when she was organizing groups
in New York, a bunch of senior citizens trudged through
a swirling blizzard and then, when an elevator failed to
function, climbed 14 flights rather than miss their weekly
meeting.
There’s nothing irrational, or spookily New Age, about
this kind of devotion, which is usually born of sweet relief
from years of suffering and isolation. Support groupies
say their meetings tend to serve as much stronger mind medicine
than an equal number of hours with the most expensive shrink.
Regular attendance, they claim, allows them to sleep more
soundly, eat heartier and, in the case of recovering sexaholics,
finally have the time to read the collected works of Will
and Ariel Durant and mow the lawn.
Lately there has even been some scientific data to support
the continual stream of anecdotal evidence-put forth by
members of such diverse groups as Cocaine Anonymous, stroke
victims and Incest Survivors-that the meetings don’t
just improve life but prolong it as well. A 10 year study
by researchers at Stanford University showed that terminally
ill cancer patients who participated in weekly support group
meetings in addition to receiving treatment lived nearly
twice as long as those receiving only medical care.
Even if support groups didn’t work, they would provide
a very wit-it way to stay miserable. It’s hard to
open a local newspaper without seeing, on the once bland
community-activities calendar, notices for child molesters,
former convicts or gambling junkies. Likewise, every suburban
supermarket bulletin board seems to have-push-pinned among
the pleas for babysitters and promises of cheap firewood-announcements
pertaining to cocaine addicts, teenage insomniacs and women
who love too much. The settings vary-the folding chairs
might be chintz-covered at a meeting of a short-lived group
called Rich Kids Anonymous. But a quick flip through the
Self-Help Sourcebook-Older Women In Relationships with Younger
Men…The International Intractable Hiccups Organization…Prostitutes
Anonymous….only proves that human problems know no
geographic boundaries. And that Donahue, Oprah and Geraldo
will probably never run out of topics.
Fashionable
recovery: Indeed, steely-eyed guest hunters from
some of those shows haunt the hallways outside support-group
meetings, aware that transsexuals must be out by 9 because
the bulimics have the room booked. “There’s
so much happening so quickly in this movement,” says
Frank Riessman, executive director of the National Self-Help
Clearinghouse in New York, “that sometimes you just
have to sit back and smile at it all.” Of course,
intense suffering is what brought every support group into
existence-and every member, quaking, to his or her first
meeting. In one sense, nothing about this movement is funny.
Yet, if you look at it the other way, why not laugh a little?
We the People have embraced this notion with a bit of a
vengeance, no? Today, in fact, “the social climate
is such,” says Riessman, “that it has actually
become fashionable to be ‘in recover’ from everything
from drug addiction to spouse abuse.”
In big cities especially, many people now treat AA and organization
like the Manic and Depressives Support Group as an extension
of the singles scene. “There are women at my meeting
who don’t really have a problem with alcohol,”
says Belinda L., a New Yorker in A.A. “They’re
looking to latch onto some guy who got divorced, or never
got married in the first place, because of his drinking.”
What’s equally remarkable, perhaps, is that the self-help
movement has managed, despite its phenomenal growth, to
avoid becoming a big business, or really any kind of business
at all. “There’s this explosion of interest,”
says Riessman, with a sly cackle, “and no one has
figured out a way to make a dime off the whole deal.”
The best news, though, is that group members usually make
measurable progress-a seemingly unknown concept in many
forms of psychotherapy-if they stick with the meetings.
Cambodian refugees who attend a group in San Francisco often
say during meetings that they have nightmares about the
atrocities they themselves endured at the hands of Pol Pot.
But when they arrive, neatly dressed and with children in
tow, at the Tenderloin Self-Help Center each week, the group
members are often engaged in animated conversation, playing
with their children and otherwise showing signs of recovery.
As with other support-group members, relief, for the Cambodians,
has come with a willingness to express intimate thoughts
and experiences to one’s fellow sufferers. “When
I eat,” said an older woman at a recent meeting,”
I think of starving relatives and I cry.” Hearing
that, another woman tried to commiserate. “I know
what you’re thinking. Most of my family was executed
and it is still too overwhelming for me. Yesterday I lost
my way home. I forgot I was in San Francisco.” A 39-year-old
male refugee then spoke up, saying, “I feel happy
in this group because I know the faces. It’s been
very helpful to realize I am not the only one who has trouble
in my new life.”
Marcia Colone, the director of social services at the University
of Chicago’s Hospitals, sees something uniquely American
in the self-help movement’s emphasis on tangible results
(though other countries are now getting involved as well,
most notably in Europe and the Mideast, where groups for
victims of terrorist attacks have recently sprung up). “This
supports America’s values of marshaling resources,
taking charge and solving the problem,” she says.
“There’s no doubt that these groups help people
make real changes in their lives.”
Yes, power to the people, so the people may help themselves.
The support-group movement may be the only advance in the
area of social services that was possible in the era of
Reaganomics. “At a time when we are faced with drastic
government cutbacks,” says Ng-A-Qui, of the New York
City Self-Help Clearinghouse,”a lot of poor people
and people of color have had to fall back on their tradition
of banding together to help each other.” Most people
in poor areas, she says, prefer the relatively unstructured
groups, which usually don’t bother with such formalities
as guest speakers and would never think of limiting the
conversation to any one topic. Instead, says Ng-A-Qui, "people
just get together and share experiences or exchange practical
information.”
Formal
presentation: At the other end of the spectrum
there are the 12-step “anonymous” groups. These
stop short of employing parliamentary procedures, but they
do usually begin with a formal opening statement defining
the group and its goals and then proceed to announcements
about schedule changes, new chapters and upcoming events
such as lectures, films or picnics. After that, the leader
often turns over the meeting to a group member who has prepared
a 10-to 20-minute talk, either on one of the steps or a
personally chosen topic. These groups usually round out
their hour long meeting by allowing any of the other members
to share a thought, feeling or experience that in some way
relates to the speaker’s presentation.
In both the more and less structured groups, cross talk
and the giving of well-meaning but potentially dangerous
advice such as “get a divorce,” “tell
that boss of yours to go to hell” and “send
firetrucks and pizzas to her house” is usually discourages.
Members who do get too controlling are usually reminded
by the group leader that it is the principles of the organ-ization,
and not one person’s opinion of what another should
do in a specific situation, that really matter.
Support groups are obviously based on the ancient concept
of community, as strangers gather to help one another by
telling stories. But in another sense they also represent
a holdover from the Me Decade, since no one comes to a meeting
for purely altruistic reasons. “The person who’s
sharing gets as much out of the experience as the listener,
frequently more,” says Riessman. Or as one Al-Anon
member says, “This is a very selfish program. But
what we’ve found is that the best way to feel better
about ourselves is to help each other.”
These days nothing is too personal, it seems, to share with
a group of strangers. The sexually dysfunctional gather
at Impotents Anonymous. Those who subsist unhappily among
stacks of old Vogues and Ladies’ Home Journals can
call Messies anonymous-or maybe Crossroads, a group for
male transvestites. As for women who continually fall in
love with priests: Good Tidings. It doesn’t matter
if you’re a member of Bereaved (a group of parents
of children who died during autoerotic asphyxiation) or
if you suffer from AIDS or from such strange-sounding afflictions
as prune-belly syndrome, male breast cancer and maple-syrup
urine disease. “The only thing you won’t find
in this whole movement,” says Riessman, “Is
someone waiting to judge you.” “Why, there’s
even a Kleptomaniacs Anonymous. They meet….well, the
list was here a minute ago.
Anyone
who explores the self-help movement eventually winds up
on a road heading towards Akron, Ohio. It was there, in
1935, that Dr. Robert Smith and a New York stockbroker named
Bill Wilson-both heavy drinkers-held a historic discussion
that led to the founding of A.A. Wilson and Smith made no
breakthrough on the causes and cure of alcoholism; the world
awaits that news. What they did discover that evening was
that there was something about the presence of a fellow
sufferer that was more powerful, as an aid to recovery,
than any of the spouse-inflicted punishment, public humiliation
or solitary pain they had previously endured.
Never mind that “something” was-the way to stop
drinking was to get together and then, tomorrow, get together
again. Wilson eventually took the notion of camaraderie
and refined it into a program based on his now famous 12
steps. These emphasize such concepts as acceptance of one’s
addiction and the acknowledgment of a “power”
in the universe greater than oneself. A.A. grew rapidly
in the 1930s,’40s and ‘50s, though near as fast
as it would grow in the ‘80s, when it doubled in size
as women and minorities started joining in large numbers.
The one thing it didn’t do for a long time was inspire
many offshoots or imitators. With the exception of Al-Anon,
a program begun by Wilson’s wife, Lois, in 1951, AA
for all practical purposes was the support-group movement
for many years. Which meant that if you didn’t happen
to be male, white, middle class and a drinker, there were
no meetings at which you could feel comfortable.
That wasn’t a big problem. In those days, many people
had something that took the place of meetings: intact, functioning,
extended families. You wanted some brotherly advice? You
called-egad, how positively “Nick at Nite”-ish!-an
actual brother. For a maternal perspective on things…right
there in the kitchen, she’s all yours. And so on,
down to street-wise Aunt Sophie and just-plain-wise Uncle
John. Women who had problems too delicate to discuss with
any of the faces around the dinner table could always turn
to their coffee klatches or, as Leslie Borck Jameson, the
executive director of the Westchester Self-Help Clearinghouse
says, with a sweeping gesture toward her window, to "all
those other mothers you always saw pushing baby strollers
through the park."
Kiddie
books: But of course that world now seems as distant
as Freud’s Vienna-or Donna Reed’s Hillsdale.
The traditional family started to come apart at the seams
in the mid-‘60s, as boomers began graduating from
college and moving far away from home to find jobs. Divorce,
drugs and the doomed Yuppie quest for perfection have sped
along a process of deterioration that had been going on
since the late 19th century. By the early ‘80s, there
was a flourishing cottage industry of kiddie books and records
that dealt in the “OK-ness” of having no dad,
two moms, a step-this, a half that, a mysterious “uncle”
and a grandma who’s not talking to any of you lowlifes
at the moment. But in fact there were problems, even more
than before, and, for many people, only two places to bring
them-the therapist’s office and/or a self-help meeting.
Traditional “couch” therapy has certainly helped
a lot of people, offering as it does the advantage of a
professional caregiver and a greater focus on the individual
patient. But even those who can afford the high cost of
psychotherapy have sometimes grown dissatisfied with the
open-ended nature of the process, and suspicious of advice
that comes from someone who has never sparred with their
particular demons. For those people, the only viable option
is frequent support-group sessions.
It was the women’s consciousness-raising movement
that first extended the self-help concept, beyond alcoholism.
For the most part, these oh-so-‘60s “organizations”
engaged in unstructured discussions that were as likely
to concern drinking or drugs as they were sexual harassment,
the military-industrial complex, lower back pain, Vietnam
or anything else that wasn’t groovy. What the get-togethers
were mostly about, though, was getting together. The consciousness-raising
groups set the tone for the self-help revolution of today,
by giving people a chance to come out and see others who-despite
having some very recognizable flaws and problems-were surviving,
thriving and even smiling.
Support groups in the past few years seem to have sorted
themselves into four basic categories: those that address
problems of addictive behavior (Compulsive Shoppers, Workaholics
and others that often follow a slight variation on A.A.’s
12 steps); those for physical and mental illness (Parkinson’s
Support Group, Recovery, Inc.); those for dealing with a
transition or some other crisis (Widowed Persons Service,
Recently Divorced Catholics), and those for friends and
relatives of people with a problem (Adult Children of Alcoholics,
Parents of Agoraphobic Teenagers). Though it sounds sacrilegious,
Borck Jameson and others think that a support group can
be a better place to seek help than the traditional family.
A dysfunctional family, after all, is often what brings
people to support groups in the first place. Among strangers,
people can be brutally honest. At one recent meeting of
Batterers Anonymous (sometimes called Forte) in Los Angeles,
a member posed the rhetorical question, “Man, what
am I supposed to do when my old lady tried to block my way
out of the door? There’s nothing left to do but remove
her with my fist.” Moments later, another member explained
that being arrested for beating his wife only fueled his
anger. “The last time we had a fight, I pulled a shotgun
on her and it jammed,” he said. “That’s
the only reason I’m here today. If it hadn’t
jammed, I’d be doing time.”
The only reason a lot of guys are at Crossroads, the male
cross-dressing group, is because they need to know where
to get size 14EEEE high-heeled shoes or an extra-long string
of pearls. For one married member, lounging around in a
wig and a dress and listening to a guest lecturer discuss
the best way to apply blusher, is, he says, one way to “get
away from the tension of being a husband, the breadwinner
and dealing with the factory, everyday life. Here I can
just be Susie.” Almost every problem left untreated
can become debilitating or even life threatening. Ed Madara,
the director of the New Jersey Self-Help Clearinghouse,
points out, noting that at Speakeasy members tell stories
of stutters whose affliction led them to suicide. At some
meeting, such as those for women with endometriosis and
other gynecological problems that are often mishandled by
the male medical establishment, there is almost always a
palpable sense of urgency-if not anger-in the air. Often,
what support-group members are maddest about is the way
they’ve been treated by their doctors and therapists.
“The professionals are discouraging and negative toward
recovery,” says Joanne Verbanic, 45, an executive
at Ford Motor Credit Co, in Detroit and the founder of Schizophrenics
Anonymous. They put limits on us, saying we’ll never
get better. But sometimes that’s not true.”
The relationship between support groups and health care
professionals is improving. There are, for example, few,
if any, alcohol treatment centers in the United States that
do not funnel their outpatients into A.A. At the same time,
says Marion K, Jacobs, adjunct professor of psychology at
UCLA and codirector of the California Self-Help Center,
“there is still a huge amount of resistance in medicine
to incorporating self-help as part of health care.”
Though there are probably more people involved in self-help
than in any other single form of therapy, psychiatrists
have “scant” training in support groups, according
to Dr. Frederick E. Miller, director of the Adult Inpatient
Psychiatry Unit at the University of Chicago. “It’s
a neglected area,” he says. Professionals don’t
like the idea of self-help groups for two seemingly unassailable
reasons: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and he
who treats himself has a fool for a patient.
It’s probably time, though, to stop relying on the
kind of wisdom that comes from fortune cookies. It used
to be accepted without question, before A.A., that the blind
couldn’t lead the blind. Of course, some people will
overdo anything. Frank Riessman says he’s heard talk
recently that there’s a group forming for people who
go to support groups too much. Oh, well, let them come in
and sit down. To find oneself in an imperfect situation
is human. To learn that you are not alone, divine.
Charles
Leershen with Shawn D. Lewis in Detroit and Los Angeles.
Stephen Pomper in New York, Lynn Davenport in Boston and
Margaret Nelson in Minneapolis
(Source:
Newsweek, February 5, 1990)
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