1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—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 alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Like, there's a few good things in there, but you can say that about most cults.
It's still "culty" in the sense that they're explicitly seeking out desperate people. If you have an evidence-based way to manage your consumption of alcohol, by all means do it. Such routes help a ton of people, and they have no need of AA.
AA is for people who "hit rock bottom" after having tried everything else. It's that mechanism that appeals to nonbelievers: you realize that you can't trust yourself and are so desperate you'll try anything because the alternatives are worse (dying, or living in agony).
That won't work for everybody, either. It probably works no better than placebo. But if that's the placebo that works for you, then you've found something.
Not everyone in AA sees it as I've just described it. AA brings out the worst in some people. Going there is a choice you should take only when you're willing to risk that. But you do at least have some control over what meeting you find. Large cities especially will have lots of different meetings, and you keep looking around until you fine one that works for you.
I do need to put in a caveat: I'm not an alcoholic and I know AA only through people who are close to me. My description is secondhand at best. But it's a view that makes sense to me: it helps who it helps, and for those for whom it doesn't, find something else. Unlike other cults, it's not demanding your money or your recruitment efforts. (That's something they're very clear on regardless of the meeting; anybody evangelizing AA to any except the absolute most desperate is doing it wrong.)
I know some people have great experiences with these orgs, but I'd also caution people about how there are sometimes people with agendas exploiting the trust and vulnerability within these groups.
You are correct, NA and AA are primarily social clubs, and there's no harm in that. But if the point is to recover from addiction, keep looking.
no one claims attending a meeting with a few random people and talking is a "recovery program" by any stretch of imagination. they're completely different things.
In my experience that is a false claim: AA/NA proponents frequently assert that they can help you recover from addiction.
Their religion-based system has about the same probability of helping you recover from addiction as not going to AA/NA.
