The cult that cures: Listening to stories

"It's not surprising that storytelling became so fundamental to the culture of A.A. What is more interesting is what it contributes to recovery. 'It's just confession,' you might think, or 'It's just free psychotherapy.' And that's partially right. But it's not just confession or psychotherapy when everyone in the room is doing it, and it turns out that listening to stories is just as important – and maybe more important – than telling them. Stories break through loneliness. And perhaps the worst thing about alcoholism - and the reason I tried to kill myself that night – is the conviction that you deserve your loneliness, that no one needs to be cast out more than you do."

Advice: In this holiday season, listen to and tell lots of stories with others.

Read another story about the therapeutic fellowship of A.A.. Thanks to Clancy Martin for this excerpt from his warm and poignant article in the January 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine, ”The Drunk’s Club: A.A., the cult that cures”.

More like an artist’s retreat than a treatment program: the communal GROW house

Bruce's story
The world where he was born, then where he was beaten and raped by relatives, did not invite him to open up. Understandably, he did not learn to communicate his true emotions in his family's abusive home. So early on, Bruce made a variety of survival adjustments. As a child, he learned to block out his pain by talking to an imaginary friend. When he joined the Navy at 17, right at the end of the Vietnam War, he was quickly introduced into drinking and getting high. The alcohol and drugs provided him with welcome relief from his psychic wounds. He couldn't just drink a little; he had to drink until he fell down, which led to a serious motorcycle accident. He was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics, resuscitated, pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, and brought back to life once more. After he recovered physically from the wreck, he decided to deepen his recovery by attending AA.

Bruce soon became a drug and alcohol counselor and got a Bachelor's degree, but the more he counseled others for their addictions, the more his own unexamined mental illness became apparent to him. His powerful capacity for denial, reinforced by his role as a mental health professional, allowed Bruce to ignore his worsening symptoms. After three suicide attempts and florid hallucinations and delusions of being possessed by demons, he ended up in a state hospital, where he heard of GROW.

Bruce went to a few GROW groups after his discharge from the state psychiatric ward. From his sporadic attendance, at the groups, he knew he needed to learn to be honest, to argue, and to disagree.

"I've got a lot of head knowledge," he said, pointing his tattooed, ropy arm to his head and chest. "But I've never been able to get it from my head to my heart."

Beaten into submission by mental illness, Bruce was willing to make the necessary sacrifices to find stability. Part of the GROW organization included a communal home, where people like him could live together and support each other in their suffering. He decided he was ready to take direction from someone else and willing to give up his privacy. He made his way to the GROW house.

It housed a nontraditional family. Its residents were all adults, unrelated to each other, who shared the burden of mental illness and the need for a place to call home.

He credited the balance of work, play, rest, eating and studying inside the community for the healing he experienced. AA meetings alone were not enough. Once he moved into the GROW house, Bruce learned how to handle himself maturely and began to generalize his new way of being to the larger community. Before GROW, Bruce could not keep a job because his living arrangements did not provide enough psychological safety to keep his overwhelming childhood memories at bay. Unexamined wounds resurfaced, and he would not show up at work, or he would fly into a rage if he got frustrated. Complete and honest disclosure was the norm for GROW residents, so Bruce never felt ridiculed or stigmatized for baring his soul. Residents talked about their illnesses in everyday terms, staying away from clinical labels.

"I learned to go by what I knew, not what I felt," Bruce explained, quoting GROW's own phrasing. "So instead of raging on a piece of equipment I couldn't fix, I remembered that I could do it after I calmed down."

The GROW house was more like an artist's retreat than a treatment program. People went there to retreat from the outside world and to work on their masterpieces: their own lives. The communal aspect of their daily interactions with other residents had more in common with writing workshops, where artists give each other feedback on ways to improve their respective work, than with the counseling of a therapeutic authority.

Bruce was surprised by how well people got along in the house, considering they were always in each other's company. People were at once able to follow a familiar routine and to cope with unexpected changes. Bruce found the daily household routine to be a reliable support, a guardrail that kept him on the road to rehabilitation, away from the pathological extremes of paralysis and extreme change. That link people felt with each other inside the house as they completed everyday tasks together was very spiritual to Bruce. The subtle levels of mutual support achieved inside the GROW house started with physical proximity and shared routines.

Advice: Find a supportive healing community for family members with severe mental illness.

Browse for related stories in the index at the very bottom of this page, or read a story about community of spirit.

Thanks to Leonard Jason and Martin Perdoux for the source story in their book, Havens: Stories of True Community Healing.

They got into the business sideways: Recovering physicians in addiction treatment

[Recovering physician] addicts increasingly encountered one another at ASAM events. One talked about a late 1980s review course for ASAM's certification exam where there was an AA meeting of the hotel hosting the event:

"There were probably 150 of us in that course…So I showed up for [the AA meeting], being a recovering person myself, and almost everyone from upstairs was downstairs. Out of the 150 who were there [for the review course], I would say there were about 120 in that [AA] meeting, which was a real eye-opener. So the first five or ten years that I was doing this, most of the other doctors that I talked to were like me – they were just old drunks who sort of got into the business sideways."

Like Dr. Douglas Talbott himself, the graduates of Talbott’s impaired physicians program (the Disabled Doctors' Plan] were inspired by their own recovery from addiction to reorient their careers to care for other alcoholics and drug addicts. "These people came out bonded into AA," said an addiction treatment expert familiar with this history. "And many of these people – surgeons, obstetricians, anesthesiologists...internists, family physicians – decided that they wanted to work in the field of addiction." Years later Talbott himself wrote that "most [state-run treatment] programs were initiated by physicians who were in the recovery phase of their disease."

Another physician in recovery recalls that there were "anesthesiologists galore…[and] a handful of…pathologists who didn't deal with 'live ones' at all. We even had a couple of forensic pathologists which I thought was great sport. Can you think of better people to be counseling you? But there they were. So it's been a grand hodge podge."

Advice: Help others who are making the same mistakes you made.

Browse for related stories in the index at the very bottom of this page, or read another impaired physician story.

Thanks to Dr. Christopher Freed for the source article in the Spring 2007 issue of Contemporary Drug Problems.

Nothing to lose but the price of a stamp: Al-Anon

Dear Ann Landers,

It is Sunday afternoon, and our 13-year-old boy went to a ball game, the 10 – and 12-year-old girls are in the neighbors pool, and my husband went to his favorite tavern to get drunk….A few years ago I would have been crying my eyes out, or pouring out my anger to a friend on the telephone. But today I am calm, content and very happy with my life. Why? Because I listened to you and joined Al-Anon. Every woman who is married to an alcoholic must at some point decide whether she is going to allow his problems to defeat her or learn how to live with it….Please, Ann, keep telling people about Al-Anon. It's a life-saver…in every sense of the word.

-Gage Park member

Ann Landers replied, "Not a week goes by that I don't receive at least three or four letters from readers in praise of Al-Anon." She gave the Al-Anon address for those who wished to write for literature, adding, "You have nothing to lose but the price of a stamp."


Advice for family members of problem drinkers: Check out Al-Anon.

Read an Alcoholics Anonymous story, or read more from the source book, Inside Alcoholics Anonymous, by Non Robertson.

You are how sober you are today: Caduceus A.A. groups for impaired physicians

A physician in the "Caduceus" group of doctors in A.A. described how each self-inflated newcomer gradually changed: "All the new doctors who come into Caduceus seem to be under tremendous compulsion to recite their curriculum vitae: their medical schools, their hospital affiliation. They try to make it clear to everyone else that they have great medical knowledge. They make references to some medical issue. In some way, without anybody saying anything, this kind of behavior gradually tapers off. The newcomers begin to realize that instead of 'I am what I do,' the group's silent message is, 'You are how sober you are today – and the rest of it doesn’t matter.'"

Advice to doctors with alcohol or drug problems: Go to Alcoholics Anonymous.

Read another impaired physician story, or read Inside Alcoholics Anonymous, the source book, by Nan Robertson.

Pulling in the same direction: Alcoholics Anonymous

I sat near the back and looked out over the room. Familiar faces, unfamiliar faces, all of us more or less like John, pulling in the same direction. Then I had an image of every person in that room climbing into bed that night, all fifty of us getting into our beds clean and sober, another day without a drink behind us. It was a simple image but it filled me with a range of complicated feelings: appreciation for the simple presence of all those people, admiration for their courage and strength; a tinge of melancholy for the amount of pain it must have taken each and every one of them to put down the drink; affection for their humanity.

I didn't realize until hours later that there was a name for that feeling. It's called love.

Advice to recovering drinkers: Find a sustaining source of love to support you in your recovery.

Read another of our AlAnon stories, or read more from Caroline Knapp's memoir, Drinking: A Love Story.