Posted on 07/25/2006 10:52:10 PM PDT by neverdem
still incorrigible after all these years :^
I know many people in AA. Some stay, some don't. It's not for everyone, and people are free to leave. Most do. Most of my friends are in it, and have become productive members of society. Whatever works is good. Alcoholism & drug addiction cause many of the problems in the world (yet they are just symptoms...).
THAT'S BULLS**T. You don't know what you're talking about. AA is about TOTAL and COMPLETE responsibility for your actions. Why do people want to to tear down something that helps so many people become happy, productive citizens. I've seen it personally and with so many people around me. It's like criticising religion. Even if I don't agree with your religion, and it't teachings or methods, if it helps you and makes your life better, who the hell am I to tell you it's not real...it doesn't work. That's just sad.
People who are not alcoholics don't usually have much of a problem moderating or stopping whenever they want. The real alcoholic, however, has some kind of physical reaction to alcohol such that once he puts even a small amount alcohol into his body, something happens. Thus, the idea of abstinence is that if a person doesn't take the first drink, she can't get drunk. Unfortunately for the alcoholic, that first drink sets in motion a chain of events that usually leads to bad results, thus the emphasis on staying away from the first drink one day at a time. Most AA members just try to avoid the first drink one day at a time, not for the rest of their lives (which is one of many paradoxes of AA).
Most alcoholics have tried to unsuccessfully moderate or control their drinking for years, if not their whole life. Thus the idea of an individual's powerlessness over alcohol and the idea that only a Power greater than one's self can help is the basis for the twelve steps of AA. The 12 steps help the alcoholic to find a new way of life where he can connect with his own understanding of a Higher Power (or God, if you like) such that the mental obsession to pick up that first drink is removed.
As to whether it is acceptable or realistic, that depends on how desperate a person is. AA seems to work best for those who are at the end of their ropes and have the "gift of desperation". It's worked for millions of alcoholics all over the globe; before AA there was little that could be done for the chronic alcoholic. Nowadays, in addition to AA, there are all kinds of treatment & recovery options. If someone can come up with a better or easier method to help people with a drinking problem, that would be a good thing as well.
July 23rd, 1989.
no need to yell at me. I wasn't tearing down AA, just saying it doesn't work for all, and that's true. And I specified "in my brother-in-law's case" he was taught by AA....I should have said "he CAME AWAY blaming others..." and by specifying only my brother-in-law I was not saying, or didn't intend to imply, that AA teaches EVERYONE to blame others for their alcoholism. It's sad you didn't read all my posts.
It is my understanding that most shrinks won't touch an alcoholic as a patient until they are sober AT LEAST one, preferrably two years.
In fact, AA was recommended as the BEST therapy for the newly recovering.
Grant and Churchill are interesting cases. FWIW, I don't think Grant was alcoholic, at least as the term is understood today. He never drank when anything was going on, he never drank under pressure, and he continued to drink socially through his White House years and beyond without incident. He did not deteriorate mentally or in character; indeed, the story of his memoirs, a minor literary classic written as he was dying and in chronic pain, is one of the finest chapters of his life. He also had, by all accounts, an uncommonly happy and devoted marriage. These are inconsistent with an alcoholic pattern.
My suspicion is that Grant had a few mishaps with alcohol, as many people do. He perhaps, as Shelby Foote once put it, "got drunk easily." The enduring question is what happened out on the west coast, when as a desperately lonely junior officer (he missed his wife) he may have sought refuge in the bottle. The purported Civil War episodes are problematic.The supposedly incriminating stories, mostly second and third hand, were told by people who had an ax to grindand and have been contested by historians.
But even if these happened, isolated incidents of the general getting drunk (even beastly drunk) in a social context does not make him an alcoholic. Every person who has one too many at the office Christmas party and makes a pass at the boss's wife is not an alcoholic. Every binging college student is not an alcoholic. As we use the term today, it is the pattern that counts: chronic, progressive, drinking in appropriate times and places, etc.
My husband said it took close to 2 years for the fog to clear in his head so that makes sense what you said. My brother who started drinking daily and heavily for the last 3+ years, has changed so much; how he thinks, speaks and acts. A total 180 on who he was before the heavy drinking. It's heartbreaking seeing the transformation.
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