Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions by Alcoholics Anonymous
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Book Reviews of Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
Book Review: "Don't judge a book by it's cover!"
Summary: 3 Stars
Although this was the correct book, the cover was not the one that appears online. What I wanted was the content, but I was little disappointed that the cover was not the same.Book Review: Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
Summary: 3 Stars
The book was older than I expected and had an odor. Otherwise it was okay.Book Review: Skip it
Summary: 2 Stars
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Count me among the legion of AA members who think this book is a buggering mess. Bill Wilson wrote it while in the midst of a 5 year depression and it shows. Save for the essays on Steps 1 and 8, this book leaves most people more confused than enlightened.
I gave it two stars cause some of the Tradition essays have some good stuff if you're willing to wade into them.
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Book Review: Please Join Our cult!!!
Summary: 1 Stars
The truth is that a newly-sober alcoholic named William Griffith Wilson -- a down-on-his-luck former Wall Street hustler who put on airs of having once been a prosperous stock broker -- just sat down, in December of 1938, and wrote up twelve commandments for the new religious group that he and fellow alcoholic Doctor Robert Smith had started. Those commandments were simply a repackaged version of the practices of a cult religion that was popular at that time, something called "The Oxford Group", or "The Oxford Group Movement", and later, "Moral Re-Armament" -- a religious cult that was created by a deceitful fascist renegade Lutheran minister named Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman -- a nut-case who actually praised Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler.
Bill Wilson described the writing of the Twelve Steps this way:
Well, we finally got to the point where we really had to say what this book was all about and how this deal works. As I told you this had been a six-step program then.
The idea came to me, well, we need a definite statement of concrete principles that these drunks can't wiggle out of. There can't be any wiggling out of this deal at all and this six-step program had two big gaps which people wiggled out of.
Notice how Bill Wilson considered his fellow alcoholics to be a bunch of cheaters who will "wiggle out of this deal" if they can get away with it -- which Bill won't allow.
And note how Bill Wilson made himself the leader who was entitled to dictate the concrete terms of other people's recovery programs.
Also notice how Bill Wilson considered 'spiritual development' to be a business deal, with a contract that you can't wiggle out of, something like selling your soul in trade for sobriety.
Nowhere in the Twelve Steps does it say that you should quit drinking, or help anyone else to quit drinking, either. Nowhere do the words "sobriety", "recovery", "abstinence", "health", "happiness", "joy", "love", or "love", appear in the Twelve Steps. The word "alcohol" was only mentioned once, where it was patched into the first step as a substitute for the word "sin" -- Bill Wilson wrote,
"we are powerless over alcohol and our lives have become unmanageable",
instead of the Oxford Group slogan,
"we are powerless over sin and have been defeated by it".
And then the phrase "especially alcoholics" was patched into the 12th step as a suggested target for further recruiting efforts:
"...we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics"...
(But regular non-alcoholic people were still fair game for recruiting into Bill's "spiritual fellowship"...)
The Twelve Steps are not a formula for curing or treating alcoholism, and they never were.
The Twelve Steps are not "spiritual principles" and they never were.
The Twelve Steps are cult practices that work to convert people into confirmed true believers in a proselytizing cult religion, just like Frank Buchman's so-called "spiritual principles" did.
1. The Twelve Steps do not work as a program of recovery from drug or alcohol problems.
The A.A. failure rate ranges from 95% to 100%. Sometimes, the A.A. success rate is actually less than zero, which means that A.A. indoctrination is positively harmful to people, and prevents recovery. Some tests have shown that even receiving no treatment at all for alcoholism is much better than receiving A.A. treatment:
One of the most enthusiastic boosters of Alcoholics Anonymous, Professor George Vaillant of Harvard University, who is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (AAWS), showed by his own 8 years of testing of A.A. that A.A. was worse than useless -- that it didn't help the alcoholics any more than no treatment at all, and it had the highest death rate of any treatment program tested -- a death rate that Professor Vaillant himself described as "appalling". While trying to prove that A.A. treatment works, Professor Vaillant actually proved that A.A. kills. After 8 years of A.A. treatment, the score with Dr. Vaillant's first 100 alcoholic patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking.
(Nevertheless, Vaillant is still a Trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he still wants to send all alcoholics to A.A. anyway, to "get an attitude change by confessing their sins to a high-status healer." That is cult religion, not a treatment program for alcoholism.)
The A.A. dropout rate is terrible. Most people who come to A.A. looking for help in quitting drinking are appalled by the narrow-minded atmosphere of fundamentalist religion and faith-healing. The A.A. meeting room has a revolving door. The therapists, judges, and parole officers (many of whom are themselves hidden members of A.A. or N.A.) continually send new people to A.A., but those newcomers vote with their feet once they see what A.A. really is. Even A.A.'s own triennial surveys, conducted by the A.A. headquarters (the GSO), say that:
81% of the newcomers are gone within 30 days,
90% are gone in 3 months, and
95% are gone at the end of a year.
That automatically gives A.A. a failure rate of at least 95%. But the GSO does not count all of those people who only attend a few meetings before quitting -- they don't qualify as "members". (That amounts to "cherry-picking".) If we included them, then the numbers would be much worse.
First there is the propaganda technique of "everybody's doing it": "AA or a similar Twelve-Step program is an integral part of almost all successful recoveries".
That is a complete falsehood. The vast majority of the successful people recover without A.A. or any "support group". It's what "everybody" is doing.
Then they use the propaganda techniques of use of the passive voice and vague suggestions: "It is widely believed that not including a Twelve-Step program in a treatment plan can put a recovering addict on the road to relapse."
It is widely believed by whom? And what do those unnamed people know? What are their qualifications? Are they doctors? Medical school professors? Or salesmen for a 12-Step treatment center? Why should we care what some unnamed invisible fools allegedly believe, anyway?
The authors also use the propaganda technique of fear-mongering: you will be "on the road to relapse" -- you will probably die -- unless you practice Bill Wilson's Twelve Step cult religion.
And then the fluff-headed Pollyanna attitude is outrageous: Just going to the wonderful A.A. meetings is supposedly all that is needed to fix some alcoholics.
But since A.A. has a zero-percent success rate above and beyond the normal rate of spontaneous remission, that cannot possibly be true.
Book Review: If you wonder why people hate AA, read this book.
Summary: 1 Stars
Imagine for a moment that you have just started AA. Your sponsor hands you this book, telling you that it, together with the Big Book, is central to an understanding of AA's "Simple Program".
You start reading, and on page 26 you find the following statement: "AA does not demand that you believe anything. All of its 12 steps are but suggestions." What a relief! Guess those people who claim that AA is a cult don't know what they are talking about.
But wait.
Reading on, you reach pages 29-30, which address themselves to the "intellectually self-sufficient man or woman." Here, you learn that there are dire consequences for not following AA's "suggestions": "We saw that we had to reconsider (our intellectual self-sufficiency) or die." On pages 37-38 you are told that: "The philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off. Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin...we have been driven to AA, admitted defeat...and now want to make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to a Higher Power."
Amazing. In less than 20 pages, you have gone from "only suggestions" to "do it our way or die." And the message is pounded home repeatedly the further you read in the book. On page 56, you learn the fate of those who don't fully confess their sins: "Some people are unable to stay sober at all; others will relapse periodically until they really clean house...without a fearless admission of our defects to another human being we could not stay sober." On page 69 you are assured that "Rebellion may be fatal."
Would you stick around for more?
If you would, then nothing is preventing you from doing so.
But if you would not, how would you like it if all the treatment centers available had no other option? How would you like it if virtually ALL treatment for alcoholism in the US was based on THIS?
Well, lots of us don't like that. And those of you who wonder why really should read this book.