[FRIAM] Narrative bending

[uǝlƃ ☣]

So, your anecdotal evidence suggests the article is wrong and that AA does NOT bend their narrative far enough? ... that their spiritual experience of surrendering to a "higher power" is too wimpy to have a liberating effect?

If so, I think I can safely disagree. While it's true that some fraction of people who claim AA has helped them have only slightly modified their narrative. They rigidly adhere to whatever story they've told themselves and focus more on the day-to-day, like an impoverished form of CBT. But I think there's a significant fraction who genuinely discovered that the world is bigger than them. All this running around, apologizing for their drunken behavior, trying to make amends, relinquishing the control/guilt/self-made-myth, etc. has completely distorted, if not broken, their previous (self-centered) narrative. In that sense, AA is like any other (authentic) Christian ministry, where the intent is to turn individualists into socialists, or at least indoctrinate them into a tribe.

What irritates me, though, is this side-loaded indoctrination. The science we have indicates that a "spiritual" experience can break narratives like PTSD, alcoholism, end of life depression, etc. We no longer *need* to couch it in terms of ghosts, virgin births, and magic wafers. Those oracles can be replaced by challengable authorities in lab coats (even if those lab coats are soaked in pathogens: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/upshot/doctors-white-coat-bacteria.html).

On 5/9/19 11:20 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> I am ambivalent about AA.  There are many people I know whom I feel it has saved from death, but, at the same time, it doesn't seem to be able to move them beyond being "Alcoholics".  It's like you’re put on some crazy cruise from Hell to Bliss, which, three days out, you discover is only circling aimlessly in the Atlantic.  You're glad you're no longer in Hell, but you're getting awfully tired of Shuffleboard and Whist, and wouldn't be nice to actually get somewhere? 


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