“Not working” for me for 38 years. Continuous sobriety, nights and weekends included.
The article seems to equate fellowship (”brotherhood”) with the 12 step process. I currently see about 30% of the fellowship actually doing the 12 steps. Most stay try to stay abstinent on fear and fellowship.
I will look for some raw data from one of the medical insurance companies about the percentages for people who do the process through step nine. Those people show much higher success. “Anecdotally”, I see >50% for those people who do that.
Being sent through two re-habs by uncle sam (Bethesda and Jax dry dock) I spent another year out there before I stopped.
That was Nov 16th, 1977.
It was not the ‘treatment’ that got me sober, but the fellowship. People who shared with each other with out getting a paycheck for it.
For me, the 12 steps were a little too much for me to grasp. A friend of Clancy told me about the program before the steps;
Find God, Clean house, Help others.
Works for me
There has been a long history of “psychologists” being very anti AA, they favor so many other treatments, such as Rational Recovery. Their two biggest problems with AA is that it encourages a Higher Power ( and psycholgists like to think of themselves as the higher power.ha) and that it is not “therapy”.
This clown obvioulsy has not studied AA as nowhere does it say it is THE ONLY way to get and remain sober, in fact, AA says if you can stay sober another way, go for it. Failures? The whole problem of addiction has high relapse rates, and some people may have to try recovering again and again.
But the most hilarious aspect of his “theories” is his incredibly flawed “research”. Any psychologist in his first year of school would know it almost impossible to do the rigorous, quantitative evidence based, double blind research that a valid protocol demands because AA does not keep records of its members. HA. HA.
So Mr.brilliant PHD, keep writing books, make some money in the rehab field, hit it out of the park in Academia where everyone already agrees with your hypothesis!