Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507100002
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL MARVEL DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Last month, Alcoholics Anonymous turned 60.
Sixty is an age at which most humans begin to relax and enjoy the fruits of their labors. But AA, which over the decades has helped uncounted thousands of alcoholics stay sober, finds itself surrounded by controversy.
Its critics, many themselves former AA members, accuse the venerable organization of turning itself into a virtual religion, one that permits no heresy, no dissent from dogma.
They say that, by insisting that members rely on a ``higher power,'' AA encourages alcoholics to develop a lifelong dependency, not on booze, but on AA itself.
Such criticism leaves AA unruffled.
``The world has changed around us,'' says Helen T., a spokeswoman who works in AA's General Service Office in New York City. (Like all members of AA - and the many of its employees who are recovering alcoholics - she prefers to be known by only her first name.)
``But people have been able to find sobriety through our remaining constant.''
Certainly AA had the recovery field to itself for almost half a century. But in the last dozen years, several alternative organizations have sprung up. Most offer programs that, they say, are religion-free, that encourage the alcoholic to depend only upon himself or herself. Though none is as large as 1.8 million-member AA, all claim that they are just as successful in sobering people up and keeping them sober.
``We say, `You can think for yourself and stop drinking,''' says Jack Trimpey, a one-time ``world-class drinker'' who attended AA meetings briefly before founding Rational Recovery Systems in 1986.
According to Trimpey, a licensed social worker, California-based Rational Recovery has ``hundreds of groups around the country.''
``People in AA are not permitted to take individual responsibility. They say it was God, or the program. We say it's your responsibility. Every drink you ever took, you took.
``It's not a healthy thing for society to have a subculture of victims.''
Like Trimpey, James Christopher joined AA and attended meetings for a few months, ``then backed away,'' put off, he says, by AA's emphasis on a higher power.
Then the former newspaper advertising executive founded the Secular Organization for Sobriety, another California-based recovery organization. SOS claims 100,000 members worldwide.
``I wish them well,'' Christopher says of AA. ``But it just wasn't for me.''
``We have no opinion on other programs,'' says AA's spokeswoman, Helen T.
``God bless 'em if they get people sober.
``But I have the feeling that our co-founders felt AA was not the only way for people to get sober.''
Those co-founders, a New York stockbroker named Bill Wilson, and Robert Smith, an Ohio proctologist, knew very little about sobriety when they met in 1935. Wilson had bounced down the usual drinker's path to land in a hospital detox ward one day in 1934. Seized by the blackest depression, as he described the experience later in the Big Book, he cried out, ``If there is a God, let him show himself!'' and suddenly felt an enveloping sense of peace.
Discharged from the hospital, he stopped drinking and began seeking out other drinkers to tell of his experience. One of them was Smith, who also stopped drinking. The two then sought out other drinkers to spread the word, and AA was born.
In 1992, world membership of Alcoholics Anonymous was 1,790,528. Membership in the United States was 1,127,471 and in Canada 95,546.
The Big Book is at once Bill Wilson's testament and AA's bible, a blue-jacketed manual and guide that lays out AA's famous 12-step recovery program, tells how to achieve it and calls for AA members to ``carry the message'' to other alcoholics.
Those 12 steps have been the focus of AA's critics. Particularly the five steps that specifically mention God - ``as we understood him,'' in the words of Bill Smith - and the step that refers to ``a Power greater than ourselves.''
At first, resistance
AA's Helen T. says she, too, initially resisted the idea of a greater power.
``I got into AA,'' she says, ``and they talked about a higher power, and I did not understand any of this. But as I began to clear up a little bit, I began to hear people say, `You don't have to think of it as God. Think of the group as a higher power.'''
Whether that power is a Judeo-Christian God or the mutual support of the AA group, she says, ``I got away from thinking I was the be-all and end-all.''
Membership in AA does not require any particular belief system, says Frank M., who also works in the New York office.
``We have agnostics and atheists in AA,'' he says. ``Many, many of us when we enter AA certainly are doubters. We think: If there is a God, he certainly didn't look with favor on me.''
But reliance on a higher power, he adds, ``certainly makes you get in touch with your humility.''
``We all think we're in charge of our own life. But it's patently evident to us we're not in charge of anything. Alcohol is in charge of our life.
``We call it reaching bottom. We find out after we've dried out that we need a higher power in our life. Most of us become comfortable with calling that God.''
'Religon in denial'
None of this convinces SOS founder James Christopher.
``AA is a religion in denial,'' he says. ``They always have someone who says, `This isn't religious. It's a spiritual program.' But that doesn't work for a lot of people.
``If people want to worship they can go to a church or synagogue.''
``Every AA meeting I've ever went to, they all open with a prayer and closed with a prayer,'' says former SOS member Duaine M. ``There were references to God all through the meetings, and to turning it over to a higher power.''
Sober 14 years now, Duaine says he joined AA when that was all there was. But when SOS opened a Dallas chapter, he switched.
``I had problems with AA at the beginning because the steps were pretty rigid,'' he says. ``It didn't allow too much for freedom of individuals.
``The main thing that people would say there is that they didn't do it (get sober), that God did it. That there was no way they could have done it.
``I always felt for me, that I did it. I was the one that put the work into it, I was the one that put the effort into it. Day to day, I was the one.''
Nevertheless, since the Dallas SOS chapter broke up, Duaine has been attending AA meetings again.
``I like the celebration and the applause when you get up there. It's really a great pat on the back.''
Sobriety her own
Unlike Duaine, Barbara says she will not return to AA, ``unless somebody chains me and drags me there.''
The 50-year-old Dallas businesswoman left AA for SOS, because she found it less dogmatic. ``They were open to your thoughts.
``I remember very vividly the day when my sobriety was absolutely my own, it was not contingent upon any group. SOS allowed me the freedom to find that for myself. And that's exactly what I wanted.''
She says she was miserable while attending AA. ``My whole life was centered around alcohol. I know I don't want an alcohol-centered life, drinking or sober.''
She also was consumed by religion in her AA days, she says.
``I used to pray so hard. I remember one time I was in Austin, and I walked up on top this hill, and I was praying so hard I heard this voice. It said, `Oh, shut up.'''
Church-like rituals
If Alcoholics Anonymous is not a religion, it nevertheless surrounds itself with rituals that are religiously observed.
Chapter meetings commonly begin or end with a prayer. Members who are called upon to speak introduce themselves by first names, invariably adding ``and I'm an alcoholic.''
Then there is the ``countdown,'' when the call goes out: ``How many here have been sober one day? Three months? Nine months? A year? Ten years?'' Whether it's a day or a decade, each testimony is greeted by applause and shouts of encouragement.
Personal testimony is at the heart of AA, a kind of secular confession in which members share past transgressions and the hope of salvation.
Friday evenings, about the time that folks are heading out for a night on the town or cracking open the first beer of the weekend, the members of Aquarious Chapter of AA gather in a ground-floor office suite just off Forest Lane in Northwest Dallas.
They fill their coffee cups, fire up their cigarettes and wait for the man behind the podium to begin.
``My name is Dwayne,'' he drawls, ``and I'm an alcoholic.''
A chorus of voices answers, ``Hi, Dwayne.''
For the next 45 minutes, Dwayne tells a sometimes rambling, sometimes hair-raising story of drinking, hell-raising and hospitals, of cars wrecked, jobs lost, months spent in jail.
As of June, he will have been sober for 14 years.
Dwayne F. has told his story many times, and some of those sitting in the rows of the metal folding chairs have heard it before. But if they have not, they will have heard something very like it.
And, experts say, it works.
First treatment
``People can say whatever they want,'' says Steven Bergman, a psychiatrist affiliated with the Division on Addictions at the Harvard Medical School. ``But from a pragmatic standpoint, nothing works like AA works. For 5,000 years, there wasn't anything for treating alcoholics. Then 60 years ago, these two fellows met.''
Under the pen name Samuel Shem, Bergman has written Bill W. and Doctor Bob, a play about the fateful encounter between Bill Wilson and Robert Smith. It was to make its debut at AA's 60th annual convention last month in San Diego.
``I think the crux of it all was when Bill Wilson realized the only thing that could keep him sober was telling his story to another drunk. It's a peculiar thing.''
Bergman says he is skeptical about programs that depend upon the alcoholic's self-reliance.
``I've had clients who have gone to Rational Recovery. I haven't found them sticking with it, really. I insist that if an addict is under treatment by me they have a regular connection with AA.''
Thomas Watts, a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Texas in Arlington, says he has listened to AA's critics, read the 12 steps.
``And I do not see the problem.
``The higher power can be interpreted in many different ways. I don't think AA is quite as guilty of pushing religion down people's throats. AA is genuinely interested in getting people to stop drinking.''
Not for everybody
If there is a problem with AA, Watts says, it is that the self-disclosure and personal testimonies do not work in cultures in which there is a reticence about exposing personal problems, such as the American Indian.
``Something that's worked for as many people as AA has got to be a good thing,'' echoes Ted Watkins, who teaches a University of Texas course on alcoholism and addiction.
``It's not the answer for everybody, however. Whereas 30 years ago, AA was the only approach, now there are a number of other approaches. So among professionals in substance abuse, the aim is to try to match the approach to the specific alcoholic.''
Some may not respond to the AA approach, says Brian Aronoff, a psychiatrist who also teaches at UT Southwestern Medical School and directs the chemical addiction program at Dallas' Veterans Administration Hospital.
``The higher power, the need to acknowledge loss of control, the need to get sponsors, to go to treatment meetings - all this can be difficult to substance abusers,'' he says.
``But a higher power is very important to people. Most people in this country believe in a higher power. Why not take advantage of that?''
At the close of their Friday evening meetings, members of AA's Aquarius Chapter do. They join hands and recite The Lord's Prayer together.
Those who are non-religious simply bow their heads in silence, says Dwayne F., the evening's speaker. Nobody is pressured to pray.
``All we do is seek God,'' he says. ``We haven't got the monopoly on God.
``I've got a deal that works for Dwayne. This program works for me. I just take care of my side of the street.''
by CNB