The 'benign cult': Twelve Step Programs
People who know me will know that I sometimes make reference to a 'cult' meeting that my mom forces me to attend on Tuesdays. Today, I thought it was high time to explain what I actually mean by that statement. Sounds pretty scary, right? When people hear the word 'cult', it usually conjures up images of groups like Heavens Gate---compelling members to commit suicide so they could hitch a ride on a comet. Or like Scientology---compelling their members to isolate from outsiders and spend thousands upon thousands of dollars to learn to think a certain way and eventually discover the millenia-old secret of an intergalactic war.
The group I'm talking about doesn't portray all those characteristics. As far as I know, it hasn't driven its members to suicide. And as far as I know, though it asks for more and more money there is absolutely no requirement to give it to remain in the group. Members may dissociate with people outside the group on their ownm but it's not outright enforced the way it is in many other cults.
The cult I'm talking about, of course,is the twelve step program. If a self help group for people you've heard of is called _________ Anonymous, it is almost definitely one of these. They purport to cure different addictions such as alcohol, narcotics, gambling, overeating, sex, and more. In actuality, this 'cure' comes with a price that is not often advertised---a religious conversion to a very specific form of Christianity.
I'm sure some of you are gaping at me in shock. These groups, especially Alcoholics Anonymous (henceforth referred to as AA) have widespread acceptance and influence in American society. Some of you reading this may even be members of a twelve step group. If you are, please know that I am not judging you personally or asking you to leave. I could never do that. There is nothing wrong with going to a religion for comfort in hard times, and I am not advocating abolishing AA or forcing it to change. My only argument is that a religion should start advertising itself as exactly that, not as a 'cure'.
If you've never been to a 12 step meeting, this is what you'll find when you go in. All meetings have some autonomy to run their own ways, so others may not be as overtly Christian as mine, but I'm told that most meetings are at least somewhat like this.
Members enter. Chairs, couches, mats, or whatever the group likes to sit on are laid out in a circle. On the floor are slogans, which are little phrases members use to remind themselves of important concepts. Some examples:
'Think'
'Let Go Let God'
'One Day At A Time'
'Easy Does It'
'Keep It Simple (Stupid)'
'Live and Let Live'
'Keep Coming Back'
All wonderful things, right? Well I'll come back to them later. Anyway, the group sits down and the following prayer is recited:
'God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference'
Again, nice prayer. Anyway, the meeting continues with an opening too long to duplicate here. The gist of it says 'we're here for you and offering you friendship and support, we understand like no one else does and we're offering you the gift of serenity if you follow the program.'
What is the program? The meat and potatoes of all groups, the Twelve Steps, read at the start of every meeting. Here they are:
1. We admitted we were powerless over ______-that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to _______, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
I'll come back to these soon enough. Anyway, then the group introduces a speaker who talks about a particular step or topic. For example, a meeting about the third step will have a speaker talk about how they made their decision to turn their lives over to God. After this, the floor is opened and everyone else talks about what made them turn to God---or a newbie expresses discomfort with the concept, at which point they are encouraged and given hope that they will find God in their own time.
Or if the meeting is on a topic, like 'anger', members will either talk about how they learned to handle anger through God's grace or confess that they still have trouble with it. This knowledge is used by the rest of the group to 'help' the newbie later.
Once everyone's shared, the meeting closes with an ending to the effect of 'keep the faith and keep coming back, you'll get help' and then everyone recites the Lord's Prayer. All Christians should know this:
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name...
And then it's over. People hug, talk (called 'the meeting after the meeting'), and eventually leave. Not so bad, right?
I want to address a couple points. First, my use of 'God'. In the actual program, they will tell you that a 12 step program is 'spiritual, not religious' and that a 'higher power' can be anything you want, as long as you believe there is a force greater than humanity in the universe. Most members believe this force is the Christian God, and the 12 Steps seem tailored around that interpretation.
Why do I think this? Well, the idea of surrendering to God, confessing your sins, and then receiving a 'spiritual awakening' sound pretty Christian to me. That, and every meeting ends with an unambiguously Christian prayer and most meet in Christian churches. Over and over again in the meetings, I've heard that people entered as atheists or of a non-Christian faith and became Christians while attending meetings. Gee, I wonder how that happens?
So by now you're probably thinking 'okay, so it's a pseudo-Christian organization in disguise and like an interactive church meeting. What's wrong with that?' Well, for one thing it's a bait and switch. They tell you that they're providing help for alcoholics/addicts/families of the above/whatever, but what they're really offering is a religious conversion. If you were already Christian before entering the meeting (as most Americans are), you likely won't have a problem with this. If you're not Christian, however...
There are also other cultish aspects of 12 step programs to consider. One is the anti-intellectual bent and control of information that members can discuss openly. Members are expressly forbidden from 'diluting' the program by referencing outside information. It doesn't go as far as other cults that forbid members from reading contradictory information outside meeting time, but if you try to bring up something you've learned in a neuro-psych course about how addiction happens you'll be told "that's not conference approved literature, you can't say that". During the meeting, God reigns supreme and no non-program knowledge is allowed.
Science is even mocked by some of the 12 step group's most popular sayings: it's said that there is no one too stupid to get the 12 steps, but some are too intelligent. "Your best thinking got you here" is another popular one. Members are taught not to trust themselves, but God.
((Conference approved literature, by the way, are books published by the twelve step programs themselves consisting of how the meeting runs, help interpreting the twelve steps, and published sharings/confessions from other group members.))
It's especially considered taboo to challenge one of the central tenets of the program---that alcohol or whatever addiction that group is about is a disease that can only be arrested by adherence to the 12 step program. It teaches that addicts can never be cured of their alcoholism/addiction/whatever and that they'll always be whatever, just 'recovering whatever's. Anyone who stops drinking/using/whatever while not in AA is called a 'dry drunk/addict/whatever' who will inevitably relapse, because most members believe that the 12 steps are the only true path to recovery.
One more aspect of the group that I find troubling is its tendency to isolate group members from non-group members. Something I hear often in meeting rooms is 'people outside the program just don't get it' or 'I wish everyone was in the program'. People like my mother, who's been in almost 20 years, seem to stop making friends with outsiders. Other than what addicts are told about staying away from people and places that have made them drink/use/whatever before, the 12 step programs have no firm restrictions on making friends with outsiders, but this isolation tends to happen anyway.
Related is the 'no graduates' problem. The group teaches that learning the 12 sreps is an ongoing process that occurs through life, so if you want to stay healthy you can never stop attending. And they collect members; names and phone numbers at the start of each meeting (optional, but there's social pressure to do so), so you can bet that people will call to ask why you haven't been to meetings if you just leave. When they do stop harassing you, there will be a collective shrug of 'he'll come back to us when he relapses'.
I won't even get into the relative effectiveness rates of 12 steps vs. real addiction curing methods, because this post is too long already and it's not relevant to the social nature of the group.
'But Zoki', you're probably thinking, 'if you hate this cult so much why do you go?' Answer: my mom forces me. She first tried to make me go six years ago, and I resisted for a while because I thought it was weird. So she waited for a day when I came home from school crying and emotionally vulnerable and forced me to go then. I'm not kidding. She even cheerfully brags about it. "Oh, I brought (Zoki) in when she was crying one day, I thought she'd be more receptive to the program when she was vulnerable and scared." She actually said this to her friends with me right there two weeks ago.
And I did get sucked into that trap of safety for six years, but I never felt any happier outside the meeting. I was taught to fear getting close to non-12 Step people because they 'didn't get it'. Now that I'm finally realizing I want a different path for myself (like maybe some true therapy that doesn't rely on committing myself to a religion), Mom's not letting me leave. She keeps saying "the group is small and will die without you, please stay" and "leaving is selfish, people helped you when you were in need so you need to help them".
Now, I want to reiterate that I have no ill will against 12 Step members except the ones trying to coerce me into staying. Your religion is fine, and I know it gives you strength to overcome your addiction. It's not a cult that's going to kill you like many other 'cults'. It's juts not the place for me, yeah?
One last thing---I applied my knowledge of twelve step programs to this cult test and scored 26 points. A group getting 10 points or above is a cult, and mainstream religions usually get 5 to 10 points.
My answers/rundown of cult characteristics of 12 step programs:
-Some pressure to do what the group says
-High confessional pressure (constant 'sharing', not sharing is a cause for concern)
-Doctrine infallible (any problem is due to 'not working the program correctly')
-Some redefined words ('serenity', 'spirituality', 'alcoholism')
-Knowledge is nothing, experience is everything (time in is a badge of honor, science is actively pooh-poohed)
-Salvation (serenity)
-Lovebombing (all the hugs and attention start from Day 1)
-Cognitive dissonance (the cure addiction-turn to God bait and switch)
-Deception in recruiting (effective cure and not religious? Haha.)
-Exploitation (people volunteer for positions that require lots of time, travel, and spending and are only compensated for gasoline expenses
-Separation from friends and family (not as actively encouraged as in other cults unless the friends and family are addicts, but tends to happen on its own)
-Non-critical thinking (Have doubts? You just don't get it yet)
-Discrediting outside information (Science? Not conference approved!)
-Fear of leaving (if you do, you'll relapse and you'll be lucky to make it back someday)
I think that about covers everything I wanted to explain. Any questions, comments, or debate, feel free to leave here.
The group I'm talking about doesn't portray all those characteristics. As far as I know, it hasn't driven its members to suicide. And as far as I know, though it asks for more and more money there is absolutely no requirement to give it to remain in the group. Members may dissociate with people outside the group on their ownm but it's not outright enforced the way it is in many other cults.
The cult I'm talking about, of course,is the twelve step program. If a self help group for people you've heard of is called _________ Anonymous, it is almost definitely one of these. They purport to cure different addictions such as alcohol, narcotics, gambling, overeating, sex, and more. In actuality, this 'cure' comes with a price that is not often advertised---a religious conversion to a very specific form of Christianity.
I'm sure some of you are gaping at me in shock. These groups, especially Alcoholics Anonymous (henceforth referred to as AA) have widespread acceptance and influence in American society. Some of you reading this may even be members of a twelve step group. If you are, please know that I am not judging you personally or asking you to leave. I could never do that. There is nothing wrong with going to a religion for comfort in hard times, and I am not advocating abolishing AA or forcing it to change. My only argument is that a religion should start advertising itself as exactly that, not as a 'cure'.
If you've never been to a 12 step meeting, this is what you'll find when you go in. All meetings have some autonomy to run their own ways, so others may not be as overtly Christian as mine, but I'm told that most meetings are at least somewhat like this.
Members enter. Chairs, couches, mats, or whatever the group likes to sit on are laid out in a circle. On the floor are slogans, which are little phrases members use to remind themselves of important concepts. Some examples:
'Think'
'Let Go Let God'
'One Day At A Time'
'Easy Does It'
'Keep It Simple (Stupid)'
'Live and Let Live'
'Keep Coming Back'
All wonderful things, right? Well I'll come back to them later. Anyway, the group sits down and the following prayer is recited:
'God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference'
Again, nice prayer. Anyway, the meeting continues with an opening too long to duplicate here. The gist of it says 'we're here for you and offering you friendship and support, we understand like no one else does and we're offering you the gift of serenity if you follow the program.'
What is the program? The meat and potatoes of all groups, the Twelve Steps, read at the start of every meeting. Here they are:
1. We admitted we were powerless over ______-that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to _______, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
I'll come back to these soon enough. Anyway, then the group introduces a speaker who talks about a particular step or topic. For example, a meeting about the third step will have a speaker talk about how they made their decision to turn their lives over to God. After this, the floor is opened and everyone else talks about what made them turn to God---or a newbie expresses discomfort with the concept, at which point they are encouraged and given hope that they will find God in their own time.
Or if the meeting is on a topic, like 'anger', members will either talk about how they learned to handle anger through God's grace or confess that they still have trouble with it. This knowledge is used by the rest of the group to 'help' the newbie later.
Once everyone's shared, the meeting closes with an ending to the effect of 'keep the faith and keep coming back, you'll get help' and then everyone recites the Lord's Prayer. All Christians should know this:
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name...
And then it's over. People hug, talk (called 'the meeting after the meeting'), and eventually leave. Not so bad, right?
I want to address a couple points. First, my use of 'God'. In the actual program, they will tell you that a 12 step program is 'spiritual, not religious' and that a 'higher power' can be anything you want, as long as you believe there is a force greater than humanity in the universe. Most members believe this force is the Christian God, and the 12 Steps seem tailored around that interpretation.
Why do I think this? Well, the idea of surrendering to God, confessing your sins, and then receiving a 'spiritual awakening' sound pretty Christian to me. That, and every meeting ends with an unambiguously Christian prayer and most meet in Christian churches. Over and over again in the meetings, I've heard that people entered as atheists or of a non-Christian faith and became Christians while attending meetings. Gee, I wonder how that happens?
So by now you're probably thinking 'okay, so it's a pseudo-Christian organization in disguise and like an interactive church meeting. What's wrong with that?' Well, for one thing it's a bait and switch. They tell you that they're providing help for alcoholics/addicts/families of the above/whatever, but what they're really offering is a religious conversion. If you were already Christian before entering the meeting (as most Americans are), you likely won't have a problem with this. If you're not Christian, however...
There are also other cultish aspects of 12 step programs to consider. One is the anti-intellectual bent and control of information that members can discuss openly. Members are expressly forbidden from 'diluting' the program by referencing outside information. It doesn't go as far as other cults that forbid members from reading contradictory information outside meeting time, but if you try to bring up something you've learned in a neuro-psych course about how addiction happens you'll be told "that's not conference approved literature, you can't say that". During the meeting, God reigns supreme and no non-program knowledge is allowed.
Science is even mocked by some of the 12 step group's most popular sayings: it's said that there is no one too stupid to get the 12 steps, but some are too intelligent. "Your best thinking got you here" is another popular one. Members are taught not to trust themselves, but God.
((Conference approved literature, by the way, are books published by the twelve step programs themselves consisting of how the meeting runs, help interpreting the twelve steps, and published sharings/confessions from other group members.))
It's especially considered taboo to challenge one of the central tenets of the program---that alcohol or whatever addiction that group is about is a disease that can only be arrested by adherence to the 12 step program. It teaches that addicts can never be cured of their alcoholism/addiction/whatever and that they'll always be whatever, just 'recovering whatever's. Anyone who stops drinking/using/whatever while not in AA is called a 'dry drunk/addict/whatever' who will inevitably relapse, because most members believe that the 12 steps are the only true path to recovery.
One more aspect of the group that I find troubling is its tendency to isolate group members from non-group members. Something I hear often in meeting rooms is 'people outside the program just don't get it' or 'I wish everyone was in the program'. People like my mother, who's been in almost 20 years, seem to stop making friends with outsiders. Other than what addicts are told about staying away from people and places that have made them drink/use/whatever before, the 12 step programs have no firm restrictions on making friends with outsiders, but this isolation tends to happen anyway.
Related is the 'no graduates' problem. The group teaches that learning the 12 sreps is an ongoing process that occurs through life, so if you want to stay healthy you can never stop attending. And they collect members; names and phone numbers at the start of each meeting (optional, but there's social pressure to do so), so you can bet that people will call to ask why you haven't been to meetings if you just leave. When they do stop harassing you, there will be a collective shrug of 'he'll come back to us when he relapses'.
I won't even get into the relative effectiveness rates of 12 steps vs. real addiction curing methods, because this post is too long already and it's not relevant to the social nature of the group.
'But Zoki', you're probably thinking, 'if you hate this cult so much why do you go?' Answer: my mom forces me. She first tried to make me go six years ago, and I resisted for a while because I thought it was weird. So she waited for a day when I came home from school crying and emotionally vulnerable and forced me to go then. I'm not kidding. She even cheerfully brags about it. "Oh, I brought (Zoki) in when she was crying one day, I thought she'd be more receptive to the program when she was vulnerable and scared." She actually said this to her friends with me right there two weeks ago.
And I did get sucked into that trap of safety for six years, but I never felt any happier outside the meeting. I was taught to fear getting close to non-12 Step people because they 'didn't get it'. Now that I'm finally realizing I want a different path for myself (like maybe some true therapy that doesn't rely on committing myself to a religion), Mom's not letting me leave. She keeps saying "the group is small and will die without you, please stay" and "leaving is selfish, people helped you when you were in need so you need to help them".
Now, I want to reiterate that I have no ill will against 12 Step members except the ones trying to coerce me into staying. Your religion is fine, and I know it gives you strength to overcome your addiction. It's not a cult that's going to kill you like many other 'cults'. It's juts not the place for me, yeah?
One last thing---I applied my knowledge of twelve step programs to this cult test and scored 26 points. A group getting 10 points or above is a cult, and mainstream religions usually get 5 to 10 points.
My answers/rundown of cult characteristics of 12 step programs:
-Some pressure to do what the group says
-High confessional pressure (constant 'sharing', not sharing is a cause for concern)
-Doctrine infallible (any problem is due to 'not working the program correctly')
-Some redefined words ('serenity', 'spirituality', 'alcoholism')
-Knowledge is nothing, experience is everything (time in is a badge of honor, science is actively pooh-poohed)
-Salvation (serenity)
-Lovebombing (all the hugs and attention start from Day 1)
-Cognitive dissonance (the cure addiction-turn to God bait and switch)
-Deception in recruiting (effective cure and not religious? Haha.)
-Exploitation (people volunteer for positions that require lots of time, travel, and spending and are only compensated for gasoline expenses
-Separation from friends and family (not as actively encouraged as in other cults unless the friends and family are addicts, but tends to happen on its own)
-Non-critical thinking (Have doubts? You just don't get it yet)
-Discrediting outside information (Science? Not conference approved!)
-Fear of leaving (if you do, you'll relapse and you'll be lucky to make it back someday)
I think that about covers everything I wanted to explain. Any questions, comments, or debate, feel free to leave here.