OneNightAWeek

I don’t want to derail your thread onto another topic, but since the tiny comment I made has been under attack I feel like I should clarify so as to not mislead people who reading this.

I have been doing a lot of reading over many weeks now trying to understand about addiction and about what it takes for people to recover. Im sorry if you found my comment to be offensive about AA being somewhat archaic, but I do see this in many aspects and I was only being truthful. Im not in any specific recovery program at the moment but I am trying to learn. I cant commit myself to things when I don’t know what they are about, or if I believe in what they are promoting. I know one thing though, if addiction is a disease then I wouldn’t tell someone sick with it that their problem is a hole in their soul. Its not about the soul, they may have mental issues or emotional issues, but I don’t see it being a problem with their soul.

Yes there are references to rock bottom in AA and they have been said by the founders themselves. Maybe it wasn’t in the big AA book, but it is in other writings and teachings of AA. I have a feeling some of you already know this though and only latched onto the fact I maybe referenced the wrong document. This is from one of the founders Bill W:

http://www.aa.org/pdf/products/p-6_threetalkstomed.pdf

“ But deflation is just what we A.A.’s are looking for…more utterly we can smash the delusion that the alcoholic can get over alcoholism “on his own,” or that someday he may be able to drink like a gentleman, the more successful we are bound to be.

In fact we aim to produce a “crisis,” to cause him to “hit bottom” as A.A.’s say. Of course you will understand that this is all done by indirection. We never pronounce sentences nor do we tell any alcoholic what he must do. We don’t even tell him he is an alcoholic. Relating the seriousness of our own cases, we leave him to draw his conclusions. But once he has accepted the fact that he is an alcoholic and the further fact that he is powerless to recover unaided, the battle is half won. As the A.A.’s have it, “he is hooked.” He is caught as if in a psychological vise. If the jaws of it do not grip him tightly enough at first, more drinking will almost invariably turn up the screw to the point where he will cry — “enough.” Then, as we say, he is “softened up.” This reduces him to a state of complete dependence on whatever or whoever can stop his drinking. He is in exactly the same mental fix as the cancer patient who becomes dependent, abjectly dependent if you will, on what you men of science do for cancer. Better still he becomes “sweetly reasonable,” truly open-minded, as only the dying can be. Under these conditions, accepting the spiritual implications of the A.A. program presents no difficulty even to the sophisticate. “