The admission of powerlessness is one of AA’s most telling features.
If you are a theist, you turn your life and problems over to god.
If you are an atheist, that’s not an option. The person in the mirror gets all the glory and all the blame. There’s no powerlessness about it.
If one embraces the ideology of humanism, nothing holds more power than the free willful acts that define us (I’m glad I found this site…).
I am reading Rational Recovery and I like it a lot.
One feature of mainstream recovery promotes the idea that alcoholism is a disease. Rational Recovery suggests that alcohol addiction is the outcome of a normal, healthy mind that is seduced or misled by the deep pleasure of alcohol.
I honestly have no interest in flaming a recovery program or method.
I do however, have a real problem with the medical establishment’s treatment of psychiatric disorders, particularly personality disorders and diagnoses such as attention deficit hyperactive disorder. I also believe that the use of drugs such as Ritalin will end up causing many people to develop addictive tendencies in the name of keeping children interested in the egocentric agendas of adult parents and teachers.
I believe that AA is working to promote the disease model (correct me if I’m wrong) and I do not agree with this approach. This seems like an extention of the designer diagnosis fad that we seem to accept in this day and age.
Alcoholism seems to me to involve a lack of judgment and discipline, not a symptom of a disease which we are powerless to control.
If we are powerless, why do we bother trying to quit?