This is probably going to come across as being a little polemical, but it’s fashionable to push back against AA and the Steps, in some quarters, so I think that you can be a big girl or boy, and that you’ll be ok.

I was in my 12 Step meeting (codependency-related) last night, and (I’ll admit I’m a very abstract person, sometimes people talk—very nicely, it’s true—about their personal lives and I’ll daydream about principles, you know) I realized that I like the Steps better than the Course in Miracles. They’re similar in some ways, both spiritual psychology—new age, if that can be a descriptive term— and both borrow from Christianity and the West, although they do so in different ways. The Course borrows, I think, somewhat ostentatiously, but then it feels this pushback coming up from its gut, so that you can’t really get into it unless you can stomach both adapted Christianity and a lot of poking at the traditional version, you know. The Steps don’t have as many Big Terms and High-Sounding Ideas, and the ideas and terms that they do have tend to be somewhat psychological, although they inherit certain subtle spiritual ideas from religion and don’t feel the need to argue about hell and the nature of Jesus and the Bible and why we don’t need this or that anymore and blah blah blah.

Also, while there are different Course teachers, most of them tend to take the actual text and their collective identity as ACIM people quite loosely, which I find a little irritating and weird, that there’s this thousand page book and then little taking up of it closely; I don’t know, a little weird for me. The Steps can fit on one page or so, but many many meetings read them all the time like a prayer or a creed, and there is a definite, if tolerant, sense of identity, community, and fellowship, in good 12 Step groups. And I don’t know, this is where it gets a little subjective for me, but some Course teachers, like take Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love); I read her famous book, but I eventually deleted it [I also got rid of my other Course materials, and I do not think I will need ACIM in the future] because I feel now I didn’t get anything out of it— in a way, despite everything, it’s subtly codependent. All that subtle feminine mystique relationship coach stuff, with the, your mother likes all that King Arthur enchanted realm magic, and wants you to know that if you just, believe in love like President Kennedy (*music voice* oh yeah) and Gandhi (wait, an anti-colonial leader, and who?), and it’s like…. You know a lot of codependent stuff does wear this dress of “spirituality”, and then you make it romantic and say that the future is here now, and the future is the feminine mystique…. I don’t know. I suppose everyone is either more of an addict or more of a codependent, and there’s nothing inherently more wrong about either, but when you start to pretend, you know…. And lots of weird theory and hell’s not real sentiment, sometimes you start to pretend.

The Steps also have proven themselves to be endlessly adaptable as the years have gone by (eg the new Racists Anonymous, which I don’t know about because they don’t even have a book yet), whereas the Course seems kinda uniquely almost vulnerable to sorta blocking out the world and different sorts of problems so that we can practice being “spiritual”—which can mean either something really great, or, I don’t know, not so much.

So that’s why I still think that AA’s Big Book is still a big deal, all these years later and yeah, I guess that this has been a polemical review. 🐝

…. Maybe I’ll read the ACIM book at some point; I just think that meetings/people are important, and you can get more than your fair share of the philosophical and the pure, you know. But don’t listen to me, uncritically, you know.

But one thing about the AA book is that stories can be quite good, and we don’t have them so much in the ACA Red Book, I guess because ACA is so taboo, I don’t know. Well, all meetings are taboo, but. Anyway, but you just have to imagine the AA book people being parents, being Your Parents, and many of them were parents, you know; and then it’s an ACA book. But not only that: in ACA, as “para-alcoholics”, we “took on the characteristics of that disease, even though we did not pick up the drink”. Parents are models and diseased behavior can be modeled, even if it mutates and becomes non-obvious somewhat. (And it is kinda amusing that an age that says that physicality and even, yes, heredity matter can get so offended to hear the One say in His Book that parents can pass their dysfunction on to their children, you know. He doesn’t presume to Explain It All to us tiny ducks, you know—just to lay out a bare outline. And you just have to imagine Someone who’s not a jackass being the One, you know.) Anyway, the other thing I wanted to point out was that one of the people in the AA book, the person’s therapist, actually, remarks at one point, “The difference between an alcoholic and a heavy drinker isn’t always clear”, and I think that this is very applicable to mental illness: the difference between a ‘crazy’ or ill person and a strange or merely weird person, you know. I mean, you’ll ALWAYS be a weird person, if that’s what you are. You’ll never be the person who can gossip about stupid shit and think that you’re examining life deeply, as gossips seem to think that they are, you know…. But of course, there is that other line, where you become so part of things that aren’t real that it stops being simply a matter of the useful or good, or at least merely unusual…. I can’t really explain it, really.

…. “AA taught him to handle sobriety”

That’s the thing; it’s not just the self-medicating or the symptoms, you have to handle sobriety. You have to live. An alcoholic or addict is someone who uses alcohol or another substance because they can’t handle sobriety; self-pity or resentment come first. An AA or addict is someone who can’t stay sober without a program, and then a codependent is someone who can’t deal with other people or relationships, who has to fake kindness or isolate or get addicted to a person; someone who needs to say, s/he can’t handle sobriety! So now I….

…. N.B. I mentioned ACIM. I’m starting to read Course books again, and getting past my Enneagram Six thing where I can’t see that love is better than fear. It’s good. The reason I had the reaction I had above is that the ‘very spiritual’ or whatever take on life can sometimes be isolating, at least for some people; I don’t know how to describe it but you start to think it’s about the ‘spirituality’ and not the community, you know. 12 Step groups, although I don’t go to them anymore, were maybe the first place I saw real community, aside from church which can be very good and important but which can also encourage formalism; you go there to be religious, not for community…. The 12 Steps, I can kinda see now where people come from that feel on some level that they encourage too much the old Six type thinking—lots of addiction out there, oh no! But I am still looking for a personal/community connection now that I first found maybe in the Steps, and maybe I’ll even finish reading some of the Step books I have lying around…. I sure bought lots of them!

Great cast of characters. Plot is good if formulaic. Definitely if not definitively therapeutic. ( )

A must read for anyone who has had alcoholism touch their life. ( )

Texto básico de A.A. Ha ayudado a más de dos millones de hombres y mujeres a alcanzar la sobriedad. El relato de cómo miles de hombres y mujeres se han recuperado del alcoholismo.

A co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous describes his experience in the first of 31 "Personal Stories" which follow a professional introduction. AA begins from Doctor Bob's first day of "permanent sobriety, June 10, 1935". Fact-based information about solutions to a deadly and completely artificial problem.

I use this handbook frequently with addicts of any kind.