Jim
I'm a bit confused by this mail. I thought you'd already posted it to the list before Christmas. Maybe you reposted by accident? You're right to say that the AA/NA Fellowship is a somewhat mixed bag. This is inevitable I suppose when you have a federated fellowship rather than a formal organisation. There's been some discussion about this on the Wired In to Recovery site with regard to women who have been abused. Specifically, the discussion arose as a result of an article in a recent issue of Drink and Drug News which speculated that AA might not be appropriate for former female alcoholics who had been abused (either sexually abused as children or domestically abused by a partner or both). The argument ran that AA's insistence on putting faith in a higher power actually reinforced the woman's feelings of powerlessness when a positive intervention should be doing precisely the opposite and that when women plucked up the courage to challenge this they were accused of "being in denial".
As you can imagine, the debate was wide-ranging and often impassioned. It included the issue of spirituality (in the case of AA/NA this is usually a white, male, Anglo-Saxon, Christian God); the difference between "being in recovery" and having "recovered" and the issue of powerlessness and self-affirmation.
I won't bore you (or the other list members) with a blow-by-blow recounting of the arguments but it did seem to me that the discussion touched upon a number of areas where TCs offer a more hopeful and positive option.
Firstly, for all our concerns about TCs wandering away from the template we know to be effective, I suspect this is a less troublesome issue for us than for AA/NA mainly because we understand why what we do works and how.
Secondly, TC practice has arrived at a point where we understand how to establish a therapeutic environment which can be appropriately stressful without being threatening (if nothing else, this is far easier to achieve anyway in residential settings).
Thirdly, in most TCs, the treatment population is such that issues of this kind can quite easily be dealt with in a women's issues group without undermining the authority and purpose of the wider community.
Finally, the TC philosophy goes beyond the AA/NA notion of providing the individual with the support to re-engage with their demons on a day-by-day basis and, rather, sees itself as equipping the resident/student with a self-understanding which allows them to walk away from their addiction altogether.
Having said all that, I am aware that the AA/NA fellowship is regularly and (I think) unfairly castigated for being a less effective treatment intervention by people who appear not to understand that its purpose is not to be a treatment intervention at all and rather to be a support mechanism. In addition, those who castigate the AA/NA fellowship tend to do so on the basis of negative individual experiences (not very scientific) without recognising that this is a federated fellowship; which means that meetings may differ dramatically in tone and content from one to the other. At the end of the day, it really is childishly simple to go to another meeting if the one you first attend does not feel right.
Rowdy Yates
Senior Research Fellow
Scottish Addiction Studies
Dept. of Applied Social Science
University of Stirling
Scotland
T: +44 (0) 1786-467737
F: +44 (0) 1786-466299
W: http://www.dass.stir.ac.uk/sections/showsection.php?id=4 (home)
W: http://www.drugslibrary.stir.ac.uk/ (online library)
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From: Therapeutic Communities [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jim [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 12 January 2010 15:50
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [EFTC] To: Rowdy Yates and Dave Tomlinson
Deeply involved in social and political action as I am at the moment, your email on politics and spirituality interested me very much. I do find it hard to imagine you, Dave, in the role of the Miss Jean Brodie of the Left. Having started out in the public service, followed by journalism, I learned not to trust either bureaucrats or politicians, right or left. Mao, Stalin and Hitler talked the talk but something else emerged. I met many sincere people in public services but also the devious power abusers in both groups denying rights to citizens. I feel that the only reliable perspective is Healthy Scepticism about what these groups claim, and their actual intentions and mirage programmes. Have they delivered? Loyalty to a party is a mistake, to my mind, and involves a loss of independence and objectivity. From being a free citizen you become a follower. It becomes a fixed belief, a faith that we socialists, or whoever, have the only sure framework, or prison.
I think you will be interested in the following happening. Sometime towards the end of the 70s a group here set up a well funded programme for drug addicts. Their plan also included a concealed agenda: to convince the participants that they were victims of society, and it was the enemy and cause of their addiction. Stoking participants’ anger, and their own ignorance, proved very combustible. One day the programme blew up and the staff had to take refuge in the toilets until rescued. It was closed immediately.
While there is great energy and satisfaction in the kamaraderie of a cause, I am very conscious of the danger of it getting out of hand and conviction in the rightness of the cause leading to vile actions. We on this island are still searching for bodies, North and South, victims of “the Cause.” Anyway , Dave, I tend to lean towards the Buddhist view of interrelatedness/interconnectedness of all beings as a spiritual beginning. But I also support Albert Ellis’s view that we are all screwed up, fallible human beings. It’s not pessimistic but rather compassionate.
It is also a reason why all human organisations are corruptible, but we can reclaim ourselves and reform our organisations, by keeping a close eye on them, continuous vigilance and reform and reappraisal, adherence to ethics, and maintaining permeability of the programme’s interface with society, as Bridger advocated in Rome and which I often discussed with our dear friend Don Ottenberg. I like the idea of “Listen to the talk, but only trust, or believe, what they do.”
As you know, the TC programme embraces honesty, care for others, responsibility, keeping commitments, and mindfulness of what we think and do and the outcome, and an ethical way of living, to mention but a few components of the TC that relate to how to live a more healthy, and perhaps a happier life, and contributing to society. Awakening to the actual world we live in can be transcending and reenergising, particularly transcending the conditioned self.
I think that the resident has a lot to do making his/her own of a new value system and self nourishing way of behaving, before becoming involved in social or political activism, which, as you know can be a way of avoiding personal change, mindfulness, and responsibility.
I would tend to regard all of this, particularly personal mindfulness, and altruism as spiritual and far from nebulous, but you don’t have to see it as anything more than a practical and better way of living for yourself, and others. An interesting book in this area is Bo Lazoff’s “We are all doing time,” a guide to getting free, available via The Prison Phoenix Trust, Cambridge, UK.
Of course I also believe in social and political action as essential activity (protest and votes), if fairness and democracy are to be achieved and taught to politicians, and telling them what these are about, and we are having some success.
To you, Rowdy, I would say that frequently AA and NA branches make a dog’s dinner of “It’s a spiritual programme” by not satisfactorily explaining what they mean. This often results in endless arguments, confusion with religion, rejection, and an escape route for disgruntled participants. I often wonder how many actually do a ‘fearless moral inventory’, if I have that correctly.
A bewildered member consulted me many years ago having been taken apart at an AA meeting for quoting an American list of issues that might be included in such an inventory. From the details of the abuse, I suspected that few of them had taken the Step and resented being reminded. Nevertheless, I have to acknowledge good work done by the Fellowship, particularly as an ongoing resource, by groups that I have known about here and in London.
A happy and exciting New Year to both of you and all EFTC members.
Kind regards to you both. Very, very sad news about Juan!
Jim Cumberton
DPA, Ireland
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