I have been listing a lot of the negative characteristics of AA. There must be some positive qualities to AA for it to continue to exist. It must be giving its members something, or they would quit going to meetings. I would suggest these benefits:

1) Social group. The AA group is obviously a social group, almost by definition. It supplies companionship and familiar faces, and the opportunity to make some friends in the group. Some groups also sponsor social events like alcohol-free dances and picnics.

Some ex-alcoholics are very lonely people, having lost all of their friends from too many bad things happening during too many bad years of drinking, except for some other hard-core alcoholic drinking buddies who won't quit, and who are now the worst possible friends to hang out with. So the AA group may be the only social group that some ex-drinkers have left. Just the companionship alone is enough to keep them coming back.

Best of all, many of the people you will meet at AA meetings are wonderful people, not religious fanatics. Unfortunately, it's the old-timer true believers who run the show. The harsh, dogmatic fanatics ruin it for everyone, and the philosophies of the Twelve-Step organizations themselves are fatally flawed, but there are still a lot of good people who go to those meetings. And they go for all of the reasons on this list.

2) Moral Support. The social group can provide lots of moral support and encouragement. You get to brag about your milestones in staying sober, 30 days, 60, 90, 6 months, a year, multiple years... And they give you little coins or keytags to mark the occasion, and applaud you. Every little bit helps. In fact, this can help so much that lots of people just use the group and the moral support, items 1 and 2 here, sometimes going to meetings every day, for their therapy, and that is the magic that helps them to get ahold of themselves and break the addiction. And they don't even really bother with the Twelve Steps.

3) Group therapy. Every AA meeting features people "sharing" something: their past experiences, current feelings, thoughts, hopes, you name it. Nobody directly answers anyone else; that is called "cross-talk", and it is forbidden. Nevertheless, the meeting acts as a sort of one-sided group therapy session. So the meetings give people an opportunity to blow off steam, and vent frustrations, and get advice, help, and sympathy afterwards.

4) Understanding and acceptance. Often, nobody but another bunch of alcoholics can understand what it is like to be an alcoholic, or can hear the war stories and drunkalogues without freaking out. An alcoholic will quickly learn what things most "normal" people can't handle, and can't stand to talk about, and when he feels the need to talk about such things, a meeting is the only place to go.

5) Safety. The AA meeting is one place an ex-drinker can go, and know that he won't have buddies twisting his arm to just have one drink with them. And the AA meeting is one place where he won't be able to get a drink, even if the cravings get bad and he really wants to grab one.

6) Structured program. The much-ballyhooed Twelve Step program may not work, it may be totally useless, but it is still something to do. It is an answer to the command, "Don't just stand there, do something." It does indeed give the new ex-drinkers something to do, giving them a sense of purpose, and it keeps them busy.

7) Accumulated status. The more clean and sober time you have, the more status you have. The old-timers have a lot of status, so they will keep coming back if only to be big frogs in a little pond. But even relative newcomers can feel a lot of pride in accepting their 3-month and 6-month coins (not to mention a Year! Break out the Birthday Cake!).

And conversely, members hate to have to admit in front of the whole group that they relapsed and lost all of their clean time, and that they are back in their first 30 days of staying sober. So that alone keeps some people from relapsing. Note that their success has absolutely nothing to do with practicing the Twelve Steps. It's just a very mundane matter of preserving status within the group.

8) Absolution. I'm not going to debate whether AA as a church can really grant absolution for sins, but AA gives the impression that it can. First, you perform a fearless moral inventory, finding all of your defects of character, wrongs, and shortcomings, and confess them to man and God, and then you make lists of all of the people whom you have harmed, and make amends to all of them. First you wallow in guilt, and then you are absolved. That has to relieve some people of their feelings of guilt, and make them feel better.

9) It's there. There may be no easy, free, convenient, alternative support group available. AA is everywhere, almost all of the time.

10) A feeling of better safe than sorry. Many AA members are just playing it safe. They have been told repeatedly that if they quit coming, they will relapse. They know that they may well die if they relapse, so they just keep on going to the meetings, rather than risk dying.

11) Hope. The newly-quit drinker sees a bunch of people who have been dry for months or years, and that gives him the hope that maybe he can do it too.

12) Church. Some people like going to church, and AA certainly is one.

13) Placebo effect. The ex-drinker gets the comfort of a happy fairy tale. It can be very reassuring to a new ex-drinker, who is in great fear of relapsing, to be told that he or she is now in a program that always works, so just do this and that, and you'll be okay.

Do not underestimate the power of a placebo. Medical doctors are very familiar with it, in both senses: The opposite of the placebo effect is the nocebo effect, or the psychosomatic illness. Psychosomatic illnesses really do kill people; some people just give up and die because they believe that they are so sick that they should die. That is a big problem with doctors telling patients that they have incurable fatal illnesses; sometimes, the patients will drop dead almost immediately, fulfilling the doctor's prediction. And the placebo effect really can heal people: they feel so positive and high-energy about all of the "good, wonderful, life-saving medical treatment" that they are getting that they believe that of course they will recover soon, and they do.

14) Religious ritual. The meetings are just one long ritual. Like it or not, having a fixed ritual to perform gives everybody a great sense of familiarity and security. Everybody knows what is going to happen, and when it will happen, to the point that smokers look at their watches and know when they will get their next cigarette.

15) It cleans the gene pool. The Twelve-Step program gives stupid, gullible, superstitious, and obviously genetically inferior people something to put their faith in, something that will do absolutely nothing to help them stay clean and sober, thus increasing the odds that they will relapse and die drunk, or die from overdoses. In the very long run, this will benefit the human race by getting rid of a bunch of low-IQ individuals (hopefully, before they reproduce).

Last updated 29 May 2001.

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