Further Along The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck

Author:M. Scott Peck [Peck, M. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857200891
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

A PROGRAMME OF CONVERSION

When I was in psychiatry training, back some thirty years ago, psychiatrists already knew that Alcoholics Anonymous had a much better track record in working with alcoholics than we psychiatrists had. But we dismissed it as nothing more than a substitute for the neighbourhood bar. We believed that alcoholics had what we called ‘oral personality disorders’, and that rather than opening their mouths to drink, they would get together at AA meetings and yap a lot and drink a lot of coffee and smoke a lot of cigarettes, and in that way they would satisfy their ‘oral’ needs. That was the reason, we psychiatrists smugly said, that AA worked.

I am ashamed to tell you that the majority of psychiatrists, including those who are training right now, continue to believe that the reason AA works is because it is a substitute addiction. I do not want to say that there is no element of this. ‘Substitute addiction’ is perhaps one half of one per cent of the reason AA works so well. But the real reason AA works is because of ‘the programme’. And there are at least three reasons why the programme works.

The first reason is that the twelve steps of AA are the only existing programme for religious conversion, although AA people call it ‘spiritual’ conversion, because they do not want in any way to imply that AA is an organized religion. It is not. However, the very core of the twelve-step programme is the concept of higher power, and the programme actually teaches people why they should go forward through the desert – namely, toward God ‘as we understand Him’.

Because it is the only programme for conversion, AA might be looked upon as the most successful ‘church’ in this country today. Any other denomination would envy its extraordinary, phenomenal growth. AA people are incredibly smart. They’re so smart that they don’t even bother about budgets and buildings. In fact, they use existing church buildings for their meetings. This is one of the positive roles the institutional church plays today – it hosts AA meetings.

About a year ago I was speaking in a modest-sized church in a Connecticut town, and during the break time I looked at the bulletin board and saw that that church hosted some fourteen AA meetings each week, along with four Al-Anon meetings and two Overeaters Anonymous meetings.

So, while AA people will use church buildings for meetings, they are not affiliated with organized religion. They will also soft-pedal even the ‘spiritual’ aspect of the programme in order to attract new members who are threatened by it. And lots of people are threatened by it. People simply don’t like to be converted very much. They resist it. Consequently, AA is a very tough programme.

To give you an idea of how tough it is, an alcoholic executive came to see me about a dozen years ago because ‘AA wasn’t working.’ By that he meant that for the past six months he had been going to AA meetings every other night, and on alternate nights he had been continuing to get blind drunk.

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