QVOF

5 Comments

• #1 by Zulu Warrior on November 9, 2009 - 2:49 pm

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  You narcs complain the world is against you, you won’t shower, cut your hair or lose the clothes.

  The truth is that a newly-sober alcoholic named William Griffith Wilson — a down-on-his-luck former Wall Street hustler who put on airs of having once been a prosperous stock broker — just sat down, in December of 1938, and wrote up twelve commandments for the new religious group that he and fellow alcoholic Doctor Robert Smith had started. Those commandments were simply a repackaged version of the practices of a cult religion that was popular at that time, something called “The Oxford Group”, or “The Oxford Group Movement”, and later, “Moral Re-Armament” — a religious cult that was created by a deceitful fascist renegade Lutheran minister named Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman — a nut-case who actually praised Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler.

  Bill Wilson described the writing of the Twelve Steps this way:

  Well, we finally got to the point where we really had to say what this book was all about and how this deal works. As I told you this had been a six-step program then.

  The idea came to me, well, we need a definite statement of concrete principles that these drunks can’t wiggle out of. There can’t be any wiggling out of this deal at all and this six-step program had two big gaps which people wiggled out of.

  Notice how Bill Wilson considered his fellow alcoholics to be a bunch of cheaters who will “wiggle out of this deal” if they can get away with it — which Bill won’t allow.

  And note how Bill Wilson made himself the leader who was entitled to dictate the concrete terms of other people’s recovery programs.
  
  Also notice how Bill Wilson considered ’spiritual development’ to be a business deal, with a contract that you can’t wiggle out of, something like selling your soul in trade for sobriety.

  Nowhere in the Twelve Steps does it say that you should quit drinking, or help anyone else to quit drinking, either. Nowhere do the words “sobriety”, “recovery”, “abstinence”, “health”, “happiness”, “joy”, “love”, or “love”, appear in the Twelve Steps. The word “alcohol” was only mentioned once, where it was patched into the first step as a substitute for the word “sin” — Bill Wilson wrote,
  
  “we are powerless over alcohol and our lives have become unmanageable”,
  
  instead of the Oxford Group slogan,
  
  “we are powerless over sin and have been defeated by it”.
  
  And then the phrase “especially alcoholics” was patched into the 12th step as a suggested target for further recruiting efforts:
  
  “…we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics”…
  
  (But regular non-alcoholic people were still fair game for recruiting into Bill’s “spiritual fellowship”…)

  The Twelve Steps are not a formula for curing or treating alcoholism, and they never were.
  
  The Twelve Steps are not “spiritual principles” and they never were.
  
  The Twelve Steps are cult practices that work to convert people into confirmed true believers in a proselytizing cult religion, just like Frank Buchman’s so-called “spiritual principles” did.

  1. 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 George Vaillant of Harvard University, who is 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 is still 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 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), say that:
  
  81% of the newcomers are gone within 30 days,
  
  90% are gone in 3 months, and
  
  95% are gone at the end of a year.
  
  That automatically gives A.A. a failure rate of at least 95%. But the GSO does not count all of those people who only attend a few meetings before quitting — they don’t qualify as “members”. (That amounts to “cherry-picking”.) If we included them, then the numbers would be much worse.

  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
  Rating: 1 / 5

• #2 by Anonymous on November 9, 2009 - 3:54 pm

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  Just more of AA’s nonsense only replacing alcohol with drug. Still asking the reader to become a we people and give up their identity to that of an addict–for life. No where in the book is it shown how to end an addiction other than a suggestion to turn our will over to any god “we” so choose and do a bunch of silly busy work. Same boring stories that try to sell the program using an emotional slant.

  Just another attempt to proselytize folks into a religious and spiritual program. “The Real AA” by Ken Ragge and “The Diseasing of America” by Stanton Peele are must reads before selecting a recovery book, especially this one.
  Rating: 1 / 5

• #3 by T.G. on November 9, 2009 - 6:53 pm

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  NA is a reasonable way for an addict to recover, but so is “self recovery” where you simply make a commitment to never use again — and then *really* never use again. If this sounds impossible, it may be because AA and NA have declared it’s impossible and so many people have come to believe it that it’s folk wisdom. However, most people who quit a substance and then stay quit over the long haul do so on their own, without ever attending a recovery group. This is verifiable fact!

  I myself was involved with NA for years, and never really managed to buy into the program completely. Oh sure, I could see many potential positive benefits from it. However, it really wasn’t for me… I’ve always done things better on my own rather than as a “team player” — it’s just the way my mind works. So I never have found NA or AA very useful, and “leaving the rest” ended up being the majority of the program back in the days when I attended meetings regularly. Taking what I needed was mostly the social interaction portion, which was nice but there are other ways for people (”recovering” or not) to get involved with others. In the long run, meetings were boring and a serious drag. I guess I’ve never been guilt-and-shame-based in the way the 12 steps assume you are, because that’s what most of them focus on. Nor did I ever believe that addiction is a ‘disease’ in the same way diabetes and cancer are. Get real.

  If you’re like me, you might find Rational Recovery (rational.org) or another similar philosophy to be very helpful. Or you might just manage to quit on your own with no help at all, once things get bad enough and quitting becomes a whole lot simpler/easier than continuing to use. If not, and you do better in a group format and consider self-improvement to be very important to you and critical to quitting your substance of choice, you might find NA more helpful. Unfortunately, everyone out there likes to pretend that their own favorite option is the only one that works — including many NA members (but not NA itself, this is an outside issue in terms of the traditions).

  As far as the NA basic text, overall I find it to be quite positive and uplifting. Having read the AA big book as well, I personally think the NA basic text is better, more “open minded” and more modern and accessible. You might do well to check it out, before getting directly involved in NA — it’s used so extensively in the program that reading it will give you a good idea of the NA program itself. However, it is not a panacea and will not be helpful for everyone. Just be aware that many do manage to quit substances on their own once the problems start to outweight the pleasure, and then go on to live relatively happy and fulfilled lives without recovery group attendance.

  P.S. note that the previous reviewer states “I just want to stay clean one day at a time and never have to shoot cocaine it into my arm EVER AGAIN.” He doesn’t seem to realize that he never *had to* shoot anything in his arm in the first place, he just believes that he did! The fact is, people use drugs because they WANT TO, and addiction is a state of ambivalence where people both want to quit and want to continue using at the same time. Resolving the ambivalence is critical to quitting, i.e. the desire to quit has to be significantly stronger than the desire to continue using. Staying away from the substance for awhile is often all it takes to stay away for good, as long as using is no longer an option and the person is aware that using once will start the cycle all over again. You just don’t need to be permanently “in recovery” and believe yourself to have a disease that makes it impossible not to indulge. How depressing. There’s so obviously (to me) no such “disease” that renders people powerless over their own bodily actions. But give NA a try, and if you like what you hear and it works for you… more power to you.
  Rating: 4 / 5

• #4 by Anonymous on November 9, 2009 - 7:15 pm

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  This book will try and convince its readers that they have some sort of mythical disease of addiction. For years and millions of dollars the organization of NIDA has tried to prove that such a disease exists but has failed to do so. This book also goes on to claim a non-religious stance but yet suggests a contact with God be established. It is supposed to be a book that tells all how to end their addictions but yet never mentions how in one of its ‘twelve steps.’ I feel this book would do well in the fiction, faith healing, and how to be a cultist sections, but other than that, it is worthless. I only give it a two as opposed to a -2 because some of the stories in the back are quite humorous.
  Rating: 1 / 5

• #5 by Lawrence C. Becker on November 9, 2009 - 8:49 pm

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  Recieved Wrong Book. Got (AA) Alcoholica Annonymous, not (NA)Narcotics Anonymous. Poorer condition that was stated

  Contacted sender 3 times with no response.

  Very disapointed. Purchased book elsewhere.
  Rating: 1 / 5