My AA
A reflection after thirty years.
I’ve been in AA for thirty years. I graduated from an alcohol treatment program that promoted the Twelve Steps in 1992 and have been sober ever since. My class at the treatment center comprised fourteen people. A year after we were discharged, I was the only one who was still sober. I knew about the terrible success rate at this treatment center before I went in, but did it anyway because I was desperate. The sample size I cared about was one.
In the years that followed, many of my colleagues in treatment who drank in the first year eventually achieved sobriety. Some in AA. Others in therapy. Some in church, and some just quit. It taught me that there were many ways to get sober, that I needed to support them all, and that all of them put together would not solve the alcoholism problem in my community. My classmates who didn’t get sober are all dead.
I liked AA from the start. Some people don’t, and I’m of the opinion if you don’t like it, don’t go.
When I got to AA, I was a science guy, and although the Big Book had some 1939-style science, I knew right off that AA was not doing science. Science proposes theories that can be disproven. Science is funded. It is hierarchical. It is done by professionals. If one judged AA by standards of scientific investigation, the science it was doing was really…
