humanspirit's blog

It’s been a while since I posted on these pages, and I think it’s time to update you all on my thinking.

I was thinking about this in the light of some of the comments on JR’s blog, and it’s quite a tough question to answer. Given that the 12 step program is a religious one that is not really about overcoming alcoholism but about coming to God as defined by Bill Wilson and achieving a “spiritual awakening” (not defined, as I suppose Bill found his hallucinogenic trip difficult to describe), perhaps it’s a bit of an academic exercise. However, there are some arguments in favour of seeing Al-anon as even wackier than AA in many ways.

Although the private messaging facility here states that the sender's email address will be hidden, in fact it is not. This hasn't been a problem for me so far personally, as the people I have PM-ed here are people I trust. But surely this shouldn't be happening?

See:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/06/peru-drug-fire-14-locked

The aunt of a teenager who died in the fire said he had to be locked up in a "rehab" because he was stealing in order to buy drugs. Tragic.

Now that Clara’s husband has forbidden her to read any of my posts or comments, perhaps we can get down to some serious discussion without too much hijacking from the trolls.

Not quite as off-topic as it seems. There's an interesting debate going on over at the Guardian at the moment - apparently some evangelical christian has said that depression is caused by ego, resentments, self-pity, etc. and that finding God is the answer (now where have we all heard something like that before?):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/apr/26/god-cure-depr...

It seems to be intrinsic to the 12-step philosophy that “alcoholics” have certain spiritual and moral defects that non-addicts do not have, and that any addiction is “but a symptom” of these. This is why the person who has desire to stop drinking for whatever reason and goes to AA is required to dwell on all their bad points and all the things they have ever done wrong in their lives (even if these bad deeds were not related to drinking at all). Clearly this is not helpful or relevant to stopping drinking, but it’s worth examining this strange idea.