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).
