Errors of Alcoholics Anonymous: "Keep Coming Back"

One of the biggest scams in most cults, including Alcoholics Anonymous, is that if a member leaves, he is likely to get drunk again, or “go back out.” Every meeting ends with, "Keeping coming back. It works if you work it!"

I have met many people who stopped going to meetings after a couple of years, and none of them drank again. One lady got so fed up with listening to arrogant reprobates crow about their sexual conquests, admitting to murder or other terrible crimes, but they were convinced that they were OK because they did not take a drink that day.

After sixteen years of attending meetings, one lady stormed out of a meeting, where she saw the same people year after year having the same problems, never getting better. People may stop drinking, but they do not start living. For some adherents to the program, they just keeping coming back, convinced that their lives will just get better.

For many people, however, it seems that their lives just get worse. They have quit drinking, they have taken their inventory, but they find that they are still unhappy, they wish they could go back to drinking, only because in the early days of their addiction, they were at least having fun. Now, life has become about not drinking, and they have nothing else to show for what they have in their lives beyond going to meetings, where the listen to a bunch of adults whine like little children about their adult lives and childish problems. Like the Israelites who fled Egypt by the might arm of the Lord, they begin to long for the stable misery of Egypt, where they had some fun, instead of entering God’s Promised Land by faith. They stop doing the bad stuff, they stop drinking, but they have nothing life-enhancing to do instead.

In meetings, old-timers will then mentor newcomers, a way to stave off the boredom of their lives.

This reminds of one bum, a man who had collected so many newcomer chips, that he could have sold them for money if he wanted to. He had tried the program for a year or two, but he said that he was bored. It was boring for him. This indigent man, like many people in the world, are trying to treat an infinite need with finite seed, when only the Spirit of God living within us can grant us life, and that more abundantly. We are not called to live lives of self-propulsion, as the writers of the Big Book suggested, but neither are we called upon to trust ourselves to some Higher Power, yet in the mean trust to our own efforts and step-keeping to stay sober.

It is a pernicious lie to deceive people into thinking that the must attend a meeting every week, or risk getting drunk and dying. I recall that many times, individuals would share their stories after taking another cake for another year of sobriety. Invariably, someone would share that they had plenty of friends who quit drinking but never went to meetings.

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous inevitably became the staunchest witnesses against the efficacy of the program. To this day, there is not empirical evidence which supports that this program works. Alcoholism is not a disease, but a perversion of the mind.

The reason why men and women are trapped in the bondage of drinking is that they suffer intense condemnation. The more that they try to break from the substance, the more in bondage the individuals become to the substance. “The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law.” Paul also related that he saw another law working in his members. He wanted to be obedient to the law, but the more he tried, the greater the bondage that he suffered. The law brings out the worst, not the best, in people.

So, individuals are not in bondage to some physical allergy, they are suffering from the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve. We have a sin nature that gets activated when we try to be obedient, when we strive in our flesh, through our own efforts, to do the right thing or the wrong thing.

The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. The Holy Spirit living within us leads us into all righteousness. As we receive His grace to live according to His will, His Spirit working within us, we find ourselves by faith living obedient lives. We do not struggle to get sober, to get free of unclean or unhealthy habits because we draw our life from God’s Son, who lives in us by the power of the Holy Spirit.