Clean and Sober - And Agnostic
Turned off by AA’s religious aspects, new groups are leaving God out of
their battle with the bottle
On a recent Friday evening, a small group of recovering alcoholics filed
into the Couth Buzzard Used Books store, in Seattle Wash., to talk about
their struggles with "the beast." "Haul your beast out of the cellar,"
group monitor Jim Petermann urged one woman. "Beat up on her, confront
her. Then lock her back up. Beating up on your beast is a serious tool."
The beast battlers were members of Rational Recovery, (RR), one of a
growing number of self-help groups that have sprung up in the past few
years as alternatives to Alcoholics Anonymous. Drawing heavily on A.A.
defectors, these groups are mounting a direct challenge to the older
organization's cornerstone l2-step program which calls on members to kick
their addiction by trusting a "higher power."
The 56-year-old, million member A.A. has come under increasing criticism
for what some see as the directly religious tilt of its 12 steps, four of
which specifically invoke "God. " Some reluctant members of A.A. or
similar groups ordered to attend meetings after being convicted of drunk
driving have sued on the grounds of civil-rights violation. "They were
praying and talking about God half the time at the meetings I went to,"
says John Norfolk, a Maryland man who won a 1988 suit backed by the
American Civil Liberties Union.
A disease. The newer groups, including RR, Secular Organization for
Sobriety (SOS) and Women for Sobriety (WFS), lean more on willpower than
on any higher power. Where A.A. calls drinking a disease and urges
members to acknowledge their own helplessness against it, the alternative
groups emphasize taking personal responsibility for kicking the habit.
"We credit ourselves for achieving sobriety," says James Christopher,
founder of SOS, the largest of the groups, with an international
membership of 20,000. "Some people in SOS are quite religious, but they
don't believe in an intervening God who would come down and stir their
coffee for them."
RR also shuns the religious element. Founded in Lotus, Calif., five years
ago by clinical social worker Jack Trimpey, the organization has grown to
holding meetings in more than 150 cities from a high of just 30 last
year. It traces its roots directly to the ideas of Albert Ellis and his
New York-based Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy. Ellis's theories,
formulated in the 1950s, blame emotional problems on the distorted
perceptions rather than inner conflict - a view also held by
practitioners of cognitive therapy. Trimpey, himself an A.A. dropout,
says RR tries to help members recognize the sort of "crooked" thinking
that sets up impulse behavior. "The beast" is what RR members are taught
to call the irrational inner voice that tells them it would be great to
have a beer or a tumbler of vodka with breakfast. To the RR way of
thinking, A.A.'s notion of "powerlessness" is another irrational idea.
"It perpetuates the addictive cycle," says Trimpey. "It says, 'I have no
choice."' But RR insists that choice is the essence of the drinking
problem. "You can pick up a container of beer and drink it without
somehow choosing to," Trimpy says.
For some alcoholics, the appeal to forces within one's own control simply
works better. "The whole higher-power concept just never did it for me,"
says Paul, a 45-year-old Brockton, Mass., mechanic who bounced in and out
of A.A. for a dozen years before hooking up with a Boston-based RR
chapter. "It was like hocus-pocus, like magic. When I put my hand on the
door knob at the package store, I'd say, 'O.K., higher power, where are
you?"' With RR he has learned to think differently. "Now I don't even get
in my car to go to the package store. I think it out (and) say, "I've
been there before. What's going to come of it?"'
A.A. of course doesn't discourage that kind of reasoning. But it holds
that alcoholics are never really cured of the "disease" of drinking, and
should attend meetings all their lives. Thus, critics complain, A.A.
simply substitutes one kind of dependency for another. Jean Kirkpatrick,
a sociologist and founder of the 5,000 member Women for Sobriety, says
that that presents a particular problem for a woman, who is "already
dependent on alcohol, on her husband, on everything but herself." In
A.A., Kirkpatrick says, "she develops new dependencies, on a sponsor, on
a higher power, on going to meetings for the rest of her life."
Like RR, Women for Sobriety has other ideas. Its own 13 steps stress
positive perceptions ("I am what I think") and individual responsibility.
Kirkpatrick, who founded the group after A.A. failed to halt her own
decades-long bouts of alcoholism, says a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay on
"Self-Reliance" finally helped her realize that by changing her thoughts
she could change herself. WFS literature tackles A.A. head-on, saying
that the older group's "philosophy is to turn over our will and our
lives" while WFS advocates "Taking Charge." A.A. puts "emphasis on
alcoholism," the literature continues; WFS emphasizes recovery.
The organization justifies its single-sex approach on the ground that
women alcoholics have different psychological and emotional needs from
males. "We try to give women self-value, self-esteem and self-confidence,
which most of them don't have," says Kirkpatrick. "Hopefully, this
empowers women." (In A.A., she notes, members introduce themselves by
saying, "my name is X and I'm an alcoholic." WFS members say, "My name is
X and I'm a competent woman."')
Shrugging off the criticisms, A.A. defenders insist that it doesn't
compel members to believe, literally, in a deity. In practice, they say,
religion plays a relatively minor role. "Realistically, 12-step people
have never behaved as if they think the power is outside themselves,"
says John Hopkins professor George Bigelow, a psychologist who runs the
schools substance-abuse program." In fact, most of the steps deal with
what people themselves are going to do."
Enviable-record; Undoubtedly, part of A.A.'s attraction is the release
from accountability implied to the appeal to higher forces. Calling
drinking a disease instead of a personal failure also seems to help some
people. "acknowledging an addictive disorder as a disease has some of the
same element of psychological forgiveness as the confessional," says
Bigelow. " it says, 'It's a disease, it's not my fault."' A.A. supporters
also see nothing wrong with fostering dependency on the group. "For some
people, it's exactly what they need," says Dr. Edward Khantzian, a
psychiatrist at the Danvers State and Cambridge Hospitals in
Massachusetts. "They need an antidote for the terrible, progressive
self-centeredness that develops with this addictive illness."
Even critics of A.A. acknowledge that it has worked for thousands over
its more than half a century of existence. Because its operations are
anonymous by definition, there is no official count; but according to
statistics, the organization succeeds in keeping around 29 per cent of
its members sober for more than five years, a record considered enviable
in the field. The alternative groups will have to prove their own staying
power, but meanwhile there is surely room for more than one approach.
Indeed, one member of the Seattle RR chapter also belongs to A.A.,
attending RR's Friday-evening meetings and A.A.'s sunrise meetings on
Saturday and Sunday. "In A.A. I'm an alcoholic," he says. "In RR I'm not.
I have to remember what day it is." The double allegiance is fine with
RR's Peterman. "This is an alternative," he says. "We're not trying to
replace A.A. If we help one more person that A.A. couldn't help, then
we've saved one more life."
David Gelman withElizabeth Ann Leonard in New YorkBinnie Fisher in Seattle
Source: NEWSWEEK, July 8, 1991.
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