These groups are present in the UK as well, most recently going by the name of 'Roads to Recovery' and 'Vision for You'. However, in AA as an entire unit, it encourages thought-terminating language, phobic tendencies ["you can leave any time you want, although you may die"..etc] and an enforced religiosity manifesting itself as a 'spiritual' path. So although the wider sphere of AA is concerned about such groups as Midtown, it is AA as a whole that has specifically identifiable cult qualities that should be worrying to anyone being 'encouraged' to join.
In AA, people are immediately 'diagnosed' when they walk through the door as 'alcoholics', without any concern for their past, them as individuals or the complexities of people's lives. They are offered a blanket 'solution' to a problem, which involves making people feel bad about themselves by saying they are 'defective' and in need of a 'higher power' and by subsuming oneself in the group, only then can they feel better about themselves. AA does not allow any self-criticism whatsoever, with the neat get-out clause of 'group autonomy' and any logical criticisms are dismissed as 'resentments'. This thought terminating process makes people think that it is AA that has stopped the individual from drinking, instead of it being the individual themselves that has achieved sobriety. Dangerous stuff. No-one is 'powerless over people, places or things' and to believe so creates an army of automatons that really believe a group of people repeating the same stories every week has helped them stop drinking.
AA also disallows intellectual enquiry into the nature of addiction. It uses appeals to people's emotions, which is unbalanced. Fear is the watchword of the day in AA meetings. Fear of drinking, fear of other people and fear of the world. These things are not caused by drinking, but by being in the meetings of AA and by being surrounded by people who think in a similar way. It is such a powerful meme that within a couple of months of being love-bombed by the group and made to feel one of them, members start to see the world through these very strange AA tinted spectacles of 'sickness', fear and constantly self-checking for resentments.
The Midtown AA group is really no different from any other AA group, it just has the volume turned up. In the UK, people pay lots of money to see Clancy speak and he is treated as a sober super-hero, which is bizarre at its very least. Although they completely deny that they are in any way cult like, I am glad they exist because maybe at last AA as a whole is put under the microscope as a result of the Newsweek story and people can start to question whether this 1940's cult of Bill W is actually saving peoples lives or actually causing more harm than good. Enquiring, logical minds want to know.
A Struggle Inside AA
Recovering alcoholics say a Washington, D.C., group has hijacked the 12-step program's name.
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By the time May Clancy turned 15 years old, she was well on her way to drinking herself to death. A middle-school student from Potomac, Md., she had been through 11 different psychiatric and alcohol-rehab programs in two years. Each time, she started drinking again as soon as she got out. Her parents were terrified. "We'd taken her to hospitals—everything possible to get her the best care that we could," says May's father, Mike. "And all these places told us that they didn't think she could make it without Alcoholics Anonymous."
So in November 2005, when May agreed to begin attending meetings at Midtown, one of the oldest and largest AA groups in the Washington, D.C., area, it felt like a miracle. Other AA meetings in the city attracted mostly older men and women; Midtown was known as a place for recovering alcoholics in their teens and 20s. Some of the group's senior members were older, but there were also dozens of high-school and college kids with stories a lot like hers. From the moment she arrived, they seemed to go out of their way to welcome her. At first, May was thrilled to find a group of people who accepted her as she was. "When I went there," she says, "I didn't really talk to anybody, didn't trust anybody. And these people would hang out with me even if I didn't say anything, and include me in conversations. I was desperate to be liked at that point."
But something about Midtown was not right. After a few months, the group's embrace of May began to feel like a chokehold. She says the sponsor assigned to give her moral support and help keep her sober pressured her to cut off ties to anyone outside the group. Another member snatched her cell phone and deleted names in the directory. She says she was pressured to stop taking the medication a doctor had prescribed to manage her bipolar disorder: group members told her she couldn't be sober if she was taking any kind of drug. There was a hierarchy to the group. Younger members were sometimes expected to wash cars, clean houses and do other menial chores for more senior members.
May says she was especially uncomfortable with the emphasis on dating within the group and sex between members. She would listen as girls her age compared notes on the men in the group they had been encouraged to sleep with, some of whom were decades older.
Her suspicions were confirmed when she left Midtown and began attending a different AA meeting. She was surprised—and relieved—to find that many of Midtown's common practices were exactly the opposite of what Alcoholics Anonymous literature teaches. By design, there are no "leaders" in AA groups who exert control over other members. AA doesn't expect members to ignore doctors' prescriptions. It doesn't tell them to turn their backs on friends and family. And far from encouraging sex, AA groups overwhelmingly frown on intimate relationships for the first year of sobriety, when a recovering alcoholic is thought to be most vulnerable.
May's story isn't unique. Now 16, she is one of hundreds of recovering alcoholics who are taking sides in a bitter, unprecedented dispute among Alcoholics Anonymous adherents that pits members of Midtown, who insist the organization has saved their lives and kept them sober, against angry former members, who charge it is a coercive, cultlike group that uses the trusted AA name to induce young alcoholics into a radical fringe movement that has little resemblance to traditional AA.
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