Bad Advice in AA Meetings

One of the more dangerous elements of Twelve Step Programs involves the bad advice that "Old Timers" love to dole out to unwitting newcomers, many of whom are looking for any direction following the mess that their lives had descended into.

One young man started going to meetings as a forced march, only to have one of the crusty older members confront him to his face:

"Your parents are crippling you!"

The reason that he provoked this young man (which was me, you have probably guessed), was that I had moved back home from college and still had no idea what kind of career I wanted. I was stuck at that point, in many reared so strongly on AA, Twelve Steps, taking one's inventory, running my life by other people, that it's no surprise that I was very lost and dependent, so afraid to make a mistake, in many ways afraid of the "big, wide world."

In retrospect, that crusty old fool was just as timid and terrified of the world as most people. Perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4: 18), and this love is made manifest in that God sent His Son to die for our sins, to be the Mercy Seat for all our sins, and that by this love we are mad sons of God, that as Jesus is, so are we in this world.

Any source of sin and shame, any sense of fear and abandonment, all are wiped out once and for all in the Cross. Parents, no matter how indulgent, cannot undo the good that Jesus Christ has done at the Cross.

Unless man imparts to man that Christ is made to every one of us wisdom, as well as sanctification, redemption, and righteousness (1 Corinthians 1: 30), then any other advice is just "counsel of the ungodly (Psalm 1: 1). Nothing but ungodly advice based on worldly experience gets rolled out over and over in those meetings.

Then I think of another example where bad advice, based on hurt feelings and the hollow pride-needs of "Old Timers" creates more problems than it solves.

My mother, Pat, she went to Al-Anon meetings for about two years. She still had a fractious relationship with her mother, a saga which my sister and I had to hear about for years, a terrible blotch which talking and vetting never cleared up.

It was 1984, so begins the story. Pat would tell the rest of the ladies in the meeting how her mother was hurting her feelings, giving her a hard time. After the meeting, one of the women who had been attending those forums with greater regularity than my mother, approached her after a meeting and sternly encouraged her:

"Don't let anyone get in the way of your relationship with God! You have every right to let that woman out of your life for good."

This piece of advice was especially flawed. God's love in our lives has nothing to do with us, and everything to do with what Christ Jesus did for us:

"But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5: 8)

God's life and love within us has nothing to do with how we feel or what we think. God wants us to know and believe in His love (1 John 4: 16).

No one, no thing, nothing at all can get in between us and God's love (for God is love -- 1 John 4: 8):

"38For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, 39Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:38-39)

Notice how Paul writes "persuaded". Our human minds have to be renewed to this awesome and expansive truth (Romans 12:2), and Paul prays that every believer will be strengthened from within to see God's love and comprehend it thoroughly (Ephesians 3:16-19).

In an AA meeting, one will never know about this love, since the program from beginning to end focuses on the member, who has to work twelve steps, who has to keep confessing his sins, who has to play catch-up with himself every night, feeding a guilty conscience which only the blood of Jesus can every make perfect (Hebrews 10: 14).

The extended aftermath of that Al-Anon meaning, many years after, show how poor such advice really was. Yes, my mother wrote final "Dear John" type of letter, once which outlined to her abusive mother that she was no longer interested in the abusive relations which she had conducted against her daughter for so many years. This was the big "kiss-off" later, and two years later, her mother died.

Mom was singing up a storm the day of the funeral. For all of her protesting and singing about how she stood up to her mother and let her go, it was clear that her mother seemed not to let go of her.

I really commend my sister in those days. It seemed that for years after, Pat was still fuming and steaming about what her mother had done to her as a kid. She had never really forgiven her mother, and the "advice" from the "Old Timer" in that AA meeting looked dimmer and dumber as the years wound on.

This important point is crucial. It's not enough to get away from abusive people in one's life. Forgiveness does not depend on whether we write the people out of  our lives or not. Peace with other people is not about writing letters or pushing people out of our lives.

Peace with God will grant us peace with our fellow man, and this peace starts and ends with the justification by faith which receive by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 5: 1-5). We have received forgiveness of sins (Colossians 2: 13), this is a total forgiveness, and through the Holy Spirit we receive Christ Jesus as our life (Colossians 3: 4). We no longer look at ourselves, our feelings, but we rest in Himself, and His Spirit blesses us with all spiritual blessings.

My mother, like many people in AA, was convinced that she had a part to play in maintaining a relationship with God, which included removing anyone who "got in the way" of her relationship with God. I was a casualty of this nasty mindset, as she left me at the airport as a child when I remained a depressed child. My sister was pushed away many times, and a number of times she threw her husband out of the house.

I have since that time learned that Christ has given every believer his life, and that His love makes up for all the hurts and fears in our lives. Paul prayed that every believer would receive a great and growing revelation of God's love, for we are a spiritual engine, every one of us, and through the love of God are we able to do all things. It is not enough to get rid of abusive people in our lives, as AA would contend, for then members are forever looking outside of themselves at the people and circumstances which seem to upset them so much. Yet the peace that every person needs comes from the Holy Spirit, who brings the Kingdom of Heaven, and the righteousness, peace, and joy that we all crave (Romans 14: 17).

Our love, our acceptance, and all the other things that we keep trying to get from other people, we can find only in Christ Jesus. I am certain that my mother, like many people in AA, get bitter and burned out because they leave the bottle, but afterwards they still feel bottled up on the inside. Then again, some still feel like an empty bottle, and thus they return to the very people who harmed them, because they have nothing else to rely on.

AA, or any other Twelve Step program, throws a bunch of rules and regulations at people, all of which distracts a person from receiving the grace and righteousness from God the Father (Romans 5:17). He is the Light of Life, Jesus, and the meetings can only diagnose problems and indict the wrong people and offer the wrong solutions to the deepest need of the human heart: life, and that more abundantly.

AA has nothing but bad advice for the believer.