Just how does A.A. work?
Answer
I
cannot fully answer that question. Many A.A.
techniques have been adopted after a
ten-year period of trial and error, which
has led to some interesting results. But, as
laymen, we doubt our own ability to explain
them. We can only tell you what we do, and
what seems, from our point of view, to
happen to us.
At the very outset we should like it made
ever so clear that A.A. is a synthetic
gadget, as it were, drawing upon the
resources of medicine, psychiatry, religion,
and our own experience of drinking and
recovery. You will search in vain for a
single new fundamental. We have merely
streamlined old and proven principles of
psychiatry and religion into such forms that
the alcoholic will accept them. And then we
have created a society of his own kind where
he can enthusiastically put these very
principles to work on himself and other
sufferers.
Then too, we have tried hard to capitalize
on our one great natural advantage. That
advantage is, of course, our personal
experience as drinkers who have recovered.
How often the doctors and clergymen throw up
their hands when, after exhaustive treatment
or exhortation, the alcoholic still insists,
"But you don't understand me. You never did
any serious drinking yourself, so how can
you? Neither can you show me many who have
recovered."
Now, when one alcoholic who has got well
talks to another who hasn't, such objections
seldom arise, for the new man sees in a few
minutes that he is talking to a kindred
spirit, one who understands. Neither can the
recovered A.A. member be deceived, for he
knows every trick, every rationalization of
the drinking game. So the usual barriers go
down with a crash. Mutual confidence, that
indispensable of all therapy, follows as
surely as day does night. And if this
absolutely necessary rapport is not
forthcoming at once it is almost certain to
develop when the new man has met other A.
A.s. Someone will, as we say, "click with
him."
As soon as that happens we have a good
chance of selling our prospect those very
essentials which you doctors have so long
advocated, and the problem drinker finds our
society a congenial place to work them out
for himself and his fellow alcoholic. For
the first time in years he thinks himself
understood and he feels useful; uniquely
useful, indeed, as he takes his own turn
promoting the recovery of others. No matter
what the outer world thinks of him, he knows
he can get well, for he stands in the midst
of scores of cases worse than his own who
have attained the goal. And there are other
cases precisely like his own - a pressure of
testimony which usually overwhelms him. If
he doesn't succumb at once, he will almost
surely do so later when Barleycorn builds a
still hotter fire under him, thus blocking
off all his other carefully planned exits
from dilemma. The speaker recalls
seventy-five failures during the first three
years of A.A. - people we utterly gave up
on. During the past seven years sixty-two of
these people have returned to us, most of
them making good. They tell us they returned
because they knew they would die or go mad
if they didn't. Having tried everything else
within their means and having exhausted
their pet rationalizations, they came back
and took their medicine. That is why we
never need to evangelize alcoholics. If
still in their right minds they come back,
once they have been well exposed to A.A.
Now to recapitulate, Alcoholics Anonymous
has made two major contributions to the
programs of psychiatry and religion. These
are, it seems to us, the long missing links
in the chain of recovery:
1. Our ability, as ex-drinkers, to secure
the confidence of the new man - to "build a
transmission line into him."
2. The provision of an understanding society
of ex-drinkers in which the newcomer can
successfully apply the principles of
medicine and religion to himself and others.
So far as we A.A.s are concerned, these
principles, now used by us every day, seem
to be in surprising agreement. (N.Y. State
J. Med.,Vol.44, Aug. 15, 1944).
Another Answer
On
the surface A.A. is a thing of great
simplicity, yet at its core a profound
mystery. Great forces surely must have been
marshaled to expel obsessions from all these
thousands, an obsession which lies at the
root of our fourth largest medical problem
and which, time out of mind, has claimed its
hapless millions. (N.Y. State J. Med., Vol.
50, July 1950).
