AA is a religious organization. Not everyone wants to be “saved”. Nor should they have to be in order to get treatment for alcoholism.
> Say you’ve been diagnosed with a serious, life-altering illness or psychological condition. In lieu of medication, psychotherapy, or a combination thereof, your doctor prescribes nightly meetings with a group of similarly afflicted individuals, and a set of 12 non-medical guidelines for recovery, half of which require direct appeals to God. What would you do?
You can ignore the religious stuff and still make use of AA's highest-impact features:
- regular meetings, no appointment required
- being open and vulnerable in front of other people who understand the hell of addiction in ways your partner or family won't.
- having an accountability partners to call during moments of temptation, and having that reciprocal commitment is a far stronger deterrent to relapse than calling a crisis hotline offering scripted responses.
I spent a lot of my childhood at AA meetings with my alcoholic mother. I am also an alcoholic and struggled for years because the only answer I was ever offered was AA/NA. I tried it for myself a few times (usually to please others) but was always instantly turned off by it's cult like attributes. I eventually found help through a few different paths.
disclaimer: my half-sister's mother was in a cult (Alive Polarity Fellowship) for 20 years.
So thanks anyway but I don't need any help, especially brainwashing. My mind is too analytical to respond to it anyway ;)
I'm an atheist, and I've been to years of AA meetings. There is no requirement of religious belief for participating. The concept of a "higher power" is an important part of dealing with our narcissistic ego defenses, but it's not necessarily a religious concept. God just happens to be a convenient implementation of a "higher power" that works for a lot of folks.
Now, there are plenty of people in AA, attending and running meetings, who DO have religious beliefs. A lot of AA literature is written by people who have religious beliefs... The people who founded AA had religious beliefs. So I think it's understandable that religion appears a lot in the mix.
Plenty of modern AA groups explicitly address the "God not required" issue... Maybe it helps that I live in a big city, but I've never had a problem with being an atheist and participating in AA.