Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease Review

I copied this verbatim from Orange Papers. Org.

I used to be a 12 step aholic.

What, Lois? Me go get a job? Oh dear, I can feel an anxiety attack coming on. I think I'm about to relapse...

Bill would not let even Lois, who was dying to do so, write the chapter titled "To Wives." After all, she was the wife who had endured Bill's drunken years and the houseful of alcoholics he was trying to wrestle into sobriety. "I have never known why he didn't want me to write about the wives, and it hurt me at first," she said.
Getting Better Inside Alcoholics Anonymous, Nan Robertson, pages 70-71.

Bill had a grandiose sense of self-importance, and exaggerated his achievements and talents, and expected to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements, like his belief that he was essential to other alcoholics' recovery, and his wildly exaggerated claims of success in drying out alcoholics, and his years-long nationwide tours, grandstanding and promoting his own legend.

Bill was preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love, like the Oxford Groups' "Absolute Purity, Absolute Honesty, Absolute Love, and Absolute Unselfishness". Bill also liked to imagine that he was launching a movement that would sweep the entire world and save all of the alcoholics. Bill even claimed that A.A. was "the miracle of the century", and "probably one of the greatest medical and spiritual developments of all time."

Bill believed that he was "special" and unique -- the only man in the world with the answer to alcoholism (or, before that, the first American to make a working boomerang, or the only man on campus to truly understand calculus). Bill thought that he understood God, alcoholics, and alcoholism better than anybody else in the whole world.

Bill required excessive admiration.

Bill certainly had a sense of entitlement, and felt that he deserved the best of everything, like all of fame, credit, and prestige, all of the money, and all of the women, and even a house in the country and a Cadillac car supplied by the A.A. organization. Bill also felt entitled to dictate the terms of other people's recovery from alcoholism, and even to dictate their religious beliefs.

Bill Wilson was outrageously, heartlessly exploitative. He used everybody, and he discarded and drove away people when they refused to kowtow to him.

Bill Wilson lacked empathy -- he didn't even think about the welfare or recovery of the women alcoholics whom he was thirteenth-stepping, and he disregarded the recovery of the unbelievers whom he drove away from A.A.. And Bill even disregarded the feelings of his own wife Lois while she supported him for years.

Envy of other people seems to be the only characteristic of narcissism that Bill Wilson did not overtly display, but I think that he was envious. Bill spent his whole life trying to prove that he was just as good as other people. He must have felt envious of those other people who were born with a higher status than him, and who were never cursed with alcoholism, whose honor and morality was never questioned.

Bill certainly showed arrogant, haughty behaviors and attitudes.

Bill strongly displayed "Vulnerability in self-esteem". He couldn't stand criticism. He lashed out in defiant counter-attack whenever he was criticized, as shown in the cases of his wife, his calculus professor, his business partner Henry Parkhurst, and Ed the atheist who dared to challenge Bill's bombastic religiosity. When Bill was criticized, he often nursed a bitter resentment over it for years, until he could get his revenge, or he went into a fit of deep depression that often lasted years.

Bill's interpersonal relations were very impaired due to "problems derived from entitlement, the need for admiration, and the relative disregard for the sensitivities of others". Bill fought with everybody from his wife to his best friend and partner Henry "Hank" Parkhurst to the A.A. members who wouldn't believe in God as Bill dictated. Loud screaming matches were routine behavior for Bill Wilson.

And Bill certainly suffered from "Major Depressive Disorders":
A one-year-long depression in his childhood when his parents divorced and his mother left Bill and his sister with his grandparents.
A three-year-long depression when his high-school girlfriend died.
Various sporadic depressions throughout his drinking career.
Then, while sober, an eleven-year-long deep, crippling, clinical depression from 1944 to 1955, from indeterminate causes.
And Dr. Alexander Lowen added one more characteristic of narcissism:


The tendency to lie, without compunction, is typical of narcissists.
Narcissism, Denial of the True Self, Alexander Lowen, M.D., page 54.
That fits Bill Wilson too.


A.A. began as a branch of another cult religion called "The Oxford Group", which was the creation of an evil fascist renegade Lutheran minister named Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, who actually admired Adolf Hitler and praised the Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler as a "wonderful lad".

The cofounders of Alcoholics Anonymous, William Griffith Wilson and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, were both enthusiastic true-believer members of the Oxford Group cult, and they simply adapted Buchmanism to their own ends when they created Alcoholics Anonymous. For all practical purposes, Alcoholics Anonymous is simply Frank Buchman's cult religion dressed up in a different suit of clothes.

The A.A. religion pushes a concept of God that is worse than medieval.
According to A.A., God is a fascist dictator, an authoritarian, vindictive Old-Testament-style patriarchal God Who will kill you with a painful slow death by alcoholism if you don't
believe in Him, and
constantly confess your sins to Him, and
grovel before Him, and
Seek and Do His Will every day.
According to Bill Wilson, God uses "the lash of alcoholism" to force people into the A.A. religion, where they will find endless "Serenity and Gratitude" while working as slaves of God.

The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are not "spiritual principles", they are cult practices that Bill Wilson got from Dr. Frank Buchman's Oxford Groups. The Twelve Steps are a recipe for building a cult religion, not a formula for quitting drinking:
The Twelve Steps do not even tell you to quit drinking, or to help anyone else to quit drinking, either.
The Twelve Steps don't even mention sobriety, recovery, or health, but they do mention surrender to the cult, and going recruiting for the cult, and guilt-inducing confession sessions.
The 12 Steps also mention God, directly or indirectly, in 6 of the 12 steps. The Ten Commandments of Judeo-Christian religions mention God fewer times than that -- only 4 or 5 of the 10 commandments refer to God, directly or indirectly1 -- but the A.A. true believers still insist that A.A. is not a religion.
Seven of the 12 steps, Steps Four through Ten, are designed to induce guilt in members by having them make long lists of every sin they ever committed, and every fault, moral shortcoming, and defect of character they have, and then they have to confess it all to another member and God. Then they make another list of everybody they ever hurt or offended, and confess that, and try to make amends. And then they have to repeat the whole process again, and again, for the rest of their lives.
The Twelve Steps tell people to surrender their wills and their lives to "God" or "Higher Power" or the A.A. group, and to pray to "God" or "Higher Power" or the A.A. group, and then the Twelve Steps tell people how to pray and what to pray for, but the A.A. true believers still insist that A.A. is not a religion.

Twelve-Step enthusiasts declare that the Twelve Steps, just like good old-fashioned snake oil, will cure anybody of anything. They claim that the Twelve Steps are equally applicable to everybody from drug addicts to gamblers, from compulsive shoppers to emotional wrecks to rape victims, from divorcees to diabetics, from schizophrenics to fat people. The 12 steps really do have just as much to do with being a rape victim as they have to do with being an alcoholic -- absolutely nothing.

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