Sixty Years Sober (Just Not Me)
A woman I admire shared an interview NPR had with a doctor yesterday. NPR interviewed Dr. Lance Dodes a psychiatrist who has presumably been in practice at least twenty years. He states he has been treating addiction for that long, and he specifically talks about drinking as the addiction he treats.
I understand how interviews get slanted so I will just say the contents of the interview are disputable. He slams AA as harmful to 90 percent of the people who attempt to quit their, many times, live-ending affliction by joining AA for treatment.
He states that there is a “large body of evidence” to support the theory that AA is only successful in 5 to 10 percent of cases. No cite was offered for the studies. There is a big problem with those numbers. There is no membership in AA. You go if you want. AA is, by design, anonymous, so what goes on in meetings stays in meetings and not all meetings are open to the public. You have to be a drunk to get in some meetings, you have to be known by the group, and, yes, the sad wife praying her husband will sober up, is not allowed. They have their own meeting to deal with it. So, there is no way to ever even estimate how many people walk through one of those doors.
And even if only 5 to 10 percent actually get sober, and live sober the rest of their life, that doesn’t mean, by any means, that 90 percent were harmed. I hope the way this interview was reported is skewed, otherwise this man is the dumbest scientist on Earth. There can’t even be proof of those numbers. No one knows how many people come and go, no one knows how many come, leave, come back, leave, come back again, leave, and then blow their brains out in the bathroom to stop the voices. And they don’t know of the guy that stayed sober for 60 years and lived a happy productive life in the service of others in AA.
No one signs up at a meeting, last names are never used in AA context, ever, and some people never talk to a soul at their first fifty meetings before they finally break the ice and talk to another person. Some of those people stay clean and sober, and “in service” to AA for 60 plus years. In Dr. Dodes treatment, I wonder how he measures success? Obviously not when someone has been sober 60 years, he hasn’t been around that long working his magic.
I responded to the post, and that’s why this essay is happening. The biggest topic on the thread was about the “god” part of a few of the 12 steps. I get that. I am probably as atheist as any of them, and probably more so because I’ve been that way for more than 50 years. That is not what AA is about, though many in the program that still don’t get it clutch at it like a beacon to heaven. It’s not.
I’m not going to attempt, here, to explain the “god” thing, here. I will leave that for another day but know I can explain it where it makes sense even for the devil himself and all the atheists in the world. But it is a scary word, and many are put off immediately.
But the principals of the program are the rules AA has to live by, and one of them is, the requirement to “join” AA is a desire to stop drinking/shooting up/gambling/fucking…the list goes on. That is the only requirement the program wants from its members, there are no dues, there’s usually free coffee, maybe a snack, and a warm dry room. They do pass the hat, as AA pays for the place to meet, the books they give out, their outreach into prisons, and various mental and hospital stops to help, but many meetings will offer, “Please give if you can, and if you need please take what you need.” Wonder how the good doctor adds that part of the problem to his treatment.
It took me a long ass time to open up for real. They told me at the treatment facility I spent thirty days in that AA would be my aftercare. They said go to 90 meetings in 90 days. I had been to 30 meetings by then, so I only had 60 to go. They said find a sponsor, they were adamant about that. I still hadn’t said 2-point shit at any meetings beyond the standard “Hi, I’m Ken, I’m an alcoholic.” And I asked one guy to be my sponsor because he just got his 60-day chip.
A guy older than me, a biker, (a really big biker badass with a Hell’s Angel patch) overheard me. He told me to follow him, right in the meeting, and he walked out the door. I followed because I was scared. He told me to go back in, sit in the corner, keep my mouth shut and listen. And he told me when he decided, he would call on me to share. He said, if I made it, he would be my sponsor, and he said he would take care of me. He gave me a hug and sent me to my corner. I went to at least two months of meetings before he finally came up and told me I was ready. He said this will be the hardest best thing you’ve done in your sorry drunken life. And I followed him.
I wish everyone who enters those doors would have someone like that to hold the reins. My friend kept me clean, showed me how to live, and rescued me at 2 in the morning when the voices were extra loud. He also showed me how to work the program. It’s not in the 12 steps, it’s not god, and it’s not even the meeting rooms or the ever-changing group of newcomers and old-timers. It is the service, the life, and the new real life-time friends who will drag you off the cliff you make. Many do not find that someone.
But, my friend, who may have helped 50 or 100 people learn to live in his forty years clean and sober and in service, was one of Dr. Dodes “failures” he speaks of. My friend didn’t stay sober after his 42nd sober birthday. He slipped, and we found him dead with a needle in his arm. That’s what happens to many of us, those ten percent. Wonder how many of Dr. Dodes “patients” went through forty years of sobriety, or does he just consider it a success after the folks stop paying for treatment?
I don’t care how someone gets sober if they need to. I applaud them.
The problem with this doctor’s so-called assessment and the commenters who never fail to comment on anything AA with the dismissive about how it doesn’t work for whatever reason, is they post it, teach it, preach it, and the guy who just got his third 30 day chip after trying to save his own life in AA because it’s the only place he had to go, reads it or hears it, and he has the perfect reason to give up. Because that person over there said it doesn’t work. And then they die.
