Kids Should Never Go to AA

The "thirteen to eighteen" set of human beings have enough problems.

The world sends nothing but mixed messages. Many of them have been told that they can live their lives any way that they want to, that whatever feels good, is good.

This recipe for living is a form of death. This philosophy or radical individualism has created a culture of conformity and dependence. Everyone of us must identify with something. We cannot identity with ourselves for we did not create ourselves, and we do not define our circumstances. Sadly, more often than not our circumstances begin to define us.

AA creates this atmosphere of self-centeredness looking for a center greater than oneself, then pushes it to the extreme of fear and self-recrimination with inventories.

People who are addicted to alcohol, or engage in other self-destructive behaviors, do not need one more reason to focus on themselves. They need every reason to know that the world is not there for them, that they do not need to depend on or seek the approval of the world.

Why are we unhappy much of the time? We are consumed with guilt, or we are consumed with ourselves in some way, shape, or form. Does anyone really believe that we can be freed from self if we sit in a meeting and share "My name is. . . and I am . . " then share for two or three minutes about ourselves, telling people our problems, our pains, our fears, focusing on ourselves, and thus never breaking away from the anchor of self?

Crazy stuff, and poisonous especially for the adolescent set, young men and women who do not need to be looking at themselves.

This then is the conclusion of the matter. We have created a culture in which we tell adolescents that they can decide their own way in the world. As a result, they engaged in illicit behaviors of every kind. They have no stability within themselves, since they are changing in so many ways. I am now convinced that modern psych and social work has made these problems worse by stopping everything to focus everything on the youth.

The world does not revolve around us, the world will not sink away if we do not hold the world in our hands our in our minds. Everyone has to learn this lesson, regardless of one's age. Otherwise, there is no peace, no rest, no sense of acceptance.

Kids, adults, anyone seeking peace and rest cannot find it as long as we keep looking at ourselves, depending on what we say or do or think as the final arbiter of all things in our lives.

A sense of stability can only be found in something eternal, not in working a program, not in taking our inventories, not in anything that we do -- all of that Twelfth Step work just turns into more self-centered actions to make ourselves feel better, and thus drags more people into a program which does not work.

Kids should never go to AA, and I am appalled at the growing number of parents who insist on taking their kids to the meetings and making them sit and listen to the self-centered nonsense that breaks no one free of self and gives us the Life everlasting found in Christ Jesus.