Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Community
Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts
Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users
Free resources
Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors
The significance of confession and storytelling in alcoholics anonymous (aa) recovery. The paper argues that these practices, rooted in both religion and communication theory, have contributed to the success and growth of aa as a fellowship. The historical context of aa's founding, the influence of theology and psychology, and the role of narrative in the recovery process.
Typology: Papers
1 / 24
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
Running head: Confession and Storytelling in AA Recovery
The Role of Confession and Storytelling in Recovery: The Merge of Theology and Communication Theory in the 12-Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous Laurie C. Porter Regent University
The Role of Confession and Storytelling in Recovery: The Merge of Theology and Communication Theory in the 12-Steps of AA According to the National Institute of Health, alcoholism is the fourth largest health problem in the United States, and over 1,400 college students die each year from alcohol related accidents (Hingso et al, 2002). Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has been regarded as one of the most important movements in the 20 th century (Lee, 2004, p. 1). The four editions of the AA “Big Book”, a compilation of recovery stories and the guide for the 12-step program, have been read and shared by more than 40 million people, with translations into forty-three languages (p. 2). Alcoholics Anonymous has become one of the only known international programs to treat a psychosocial problem with a spiritual “talking” cure. Aufill (2005) wrote of the success of the AA program: The twelve steps of AA drew on both religion and psychology to show alcoholism as a synthetic problem requiring a synthetic remedy, and [it] took seriously the quasi- compulsive nature of addiction while rejecting both absolute determinism and the attendant pitfalls of a purely therapeutic approach. (p. 1) This paper will defend the following thesis: The shared tool drawn from religion and social psychology, central to the success of AA recovery, was simply storytelling. The use of confession and the sharing of “one’s story” enfolded the isolated sufferer into the collective narrative of the fellowship of AA. The symbolic convergence of the individual
confession, interpersonal disclosure, and identification in the recovery/conversion process reflected the axiology and epistemology of its co-founders, Bill Wilson (Bill W.) and Dr. Robert Smith (Dr. Bob). The sharing of stories between two desperate alcoholics in the 1930s grew into a recovery program for over two million recovered alcoholics in the year of 2003 with meetings in approximately 150 countries (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1952, p. 15). In 2004, the fellowship of AA had reportedly over 104,000 active groups across the world not including all programs modeled after the flagship organization (p. 15). The fellowship of AA has remained a strong, growing entity based on 12 simple traditions and 12 steps of recovery. Alcoholism became a classified disease, alongside epilepsy and diabetes, under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1989, yet the main line of treatment remained the narrative, spiritual approach of AA’s 12-step plan. The program, praised for its simplicity, seemed to defy all organizational models for long- term stability since it had no outside funding, no elected leaders, and no religious affiliation. However, the consistent growth of the movement implied a strong organizing rhetorical vision or a shared saga defining its unity and sustaining its cultural hegemony. Organizational Structure and Primary Purpose In order to support the claim that AA has survived and grown based on its use of storytelling and confession, it is important to understand its organizational structure. In other
words, to understand what AA is as a fellowship and how it works, one must first clearly understand what the program is not. AA was founded and still functions by deliberately avoiding any political or religious affiliation, rejecting formal leadership or professional organization, and refusing outside funding of any kind. The twelve traditions, published in the book referred to as the "Twelve and Twelve,” have defined AA’s unique anti-structure since 1939. AA groups explicitly designated God as the main authority over its members and established sobriety as it’s primary purpose. Groups were self-supporting, anonymous, and neutral on public issues while also avoiding media exposure or public relations campaigns. The fellowship was to be a program of attraction versus promotion where the only requirement for membership was a desire to stop drinking. Second, AA was not founded as a therapeutic, self-help type of support group nor was it established as a denominational or nondenominational religious group. Alcoholics Anonymous was established as a fellowship of men and women who joined together to share their experience, strength and hope in order to help the suffering alcoholic to achieve sobriety. The program was unapologetically spiritual and required rigorous honesty, close fellowship, and systematic completion of the suggested 12-step plan of recovery. How It Works The co-founder Bill W. (1895-1971), a New York stockbroker, spent most of his younger life in and out of asylums as a
The first three steps involved admitting powerlessness over alcohol and a belief that a Higher Power could restore sanity upon complete surrender. After a conscious decision to turn one’s life over to the care of God in Step Three, the fourth and fifth steps involved moral housecleaning and confession to God and another person the exact nature of one’s past behavior. Step Five’s self- disclosure and confession aspect, discussed in more detail later, was considered to be the most important, mandatory action in the process of achieving and maintaining life-long recovery from alcoholism. The sixth and seventh steps examined character defects; and the eighth and ninth steps required making amends to those harmed in the past. The tenth and eleventh steps demanded more action and a resolve to seek only God’s will for one’s life through increased daily inventory, prayer, and meditation. Finally, Step Twelve explained that in order to maintain sobriety the alcoholic must carry the message to others still suffering from alcoholism and they must apply the spiritual principles of AA to all aspects of their daily lives. Epistemological Foundation of the Fellowship Religious Worldview The Oxford Group. Bill W. and Dr. Bob were active members of the Oxford Group before forming the fellowship of AA. The Oxford Group was a non-denominational Christian organization, born in Britain, and led in America by two influential clergymen, Episcopal Samuel Shoemaker, Jr. and Lutheran pastor
Dr. Frank Buchman. The primary purpose of the group was to attract people to a new life through a dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ. The group avoided formal organization and claimed the Holy Spirit was the only needed leader of the movement. The fellowship of AA, modeled after the Christian group, has received criticism for what some claimed to be “the directly religious tilt of the 12 steps, four of which specifically invoke ‘God’” (Gelman, 1991, p. 15). John Norfolk, a Maryland man court ordered to AA following a drunk driving conviction, sued and won by arguing: “They were praying and talking about God half the time at the meetings I went to” (p. 16). Although one would never hear the name Christ or the word Christian referred to in any approved AA literature, the Oxford Group directly influenced the spiritual 12-step program. In fact, the first alcoholic fellowship was named “the James Group” after the book of James in the New Testament. When asked about his inspiration for the program, Bill Wilson recalled: “The early AA got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgement of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Group and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and from nowhere else” (Friends in Recovery, 1988, p. xxi). Central to AA’s principles, the Oxford Group’s teachings operated with the assumption that human beings are sinners, but they can become changed through confession. They believed that the changed soul had direct access to God, and that the changed soul was obligated to change others. In addition, Bill W.
an immanent presence concerned with the needs of the poor and suffering. Bonhoeffer, who started prison ministries in American inner cities, believed that each individual had the privilege of bearing a predestined “cross” or trial of suffering to serve Christ. In the case of Bonhoeffer, he was jailed by Hitler and later killed in opposition to the Nazi perversion of scriptural interpretation. Therefore, his “cross” in essence allowed him to reach other prisoners in the name of Christ. For Bill W. and Dr. Bob, their “cross” was alcoholism. They embraced this suffering as a vehicle to a new life completely surrendered to God through the brokenness inflicted by their drinking. Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” was strongly reflected in AA’s focus on humility and servanthood. The German theologian and the members of the Oxford Group viewed religion as something you do or live. They rejected pious, rote church rituals. Bonhoeffer described this “cheap grace” as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, [and] absolution without personal confession” (p. 44). Mostly, the Christian movements maintained that “costly grace” required action, confession, and a life-long commitment to discipleship. Niebuhr and Narrative Theology. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892- 1971), a classmate of Bonhoeffer at Yale, was the final obvious religious influence on the AA recovery program. Niebuhr, a narrative theologian, wrote the Serenity Prayer recited at the opening of AA meetings across the world. The prayer was written
by Niebuhr and casually given to his neighbor who passed it along to Bill Wilson. The prayer was adopted in a shorter version in 1939 and published in AA’s Big Book. The longer form included AA’s central concepts of approaching sobriety “One Day at Time” and embracing suffering as means to a new life. A portion of the short and simple prayer read: God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the Wisdom to know the difference. Living One Day at a Time: Enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as the pathway to peace...Amen. Narrative theology, gaining popularity in the 1920s and 1930s was a radical approach to faith where the transcendence of God was found within the story or narrative. Niebuhr preached that revelation occurred when an individual vocalized their internal history in the form of a story. Narrative theologians maintained: “one’s community is indispensable in the process of revelation, for it functions as the bearer of the narratives and the symbols, which when internalized by the individual become the occasion for revelation” (Grenz & Olson, 1992, p. 274). The Big Book, AA’s primary text, was essentially a book of stories. The first chapter began with “Bill’s Story” followed by a description of the recovery program. The remainder of the book was devoted to personal narratives of all types of recovered alcoholics. The Big Book’s devotion of 410 pages to personal narratives attested to the strong belief in the power of
AA’s Narrative Approach to Recovery The Influence of Carl Jung on Bill W. In the 1930s, Bill W. credited psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961), a student of Freud, for having a significant influence on the emergence of the AA healing program (Jackson, 2001, p. 30). The notion of the “wounded healer” articulated by Jung became the therapeutic approach to alcoholic recovery (p. 31). One recovered alcoholic carrying the message to another alcoholic served several purposes. First, Jung believed that Christ was the ultimate suffering servant and that man was starved for the symbolic life represented by Christ. Second, the shared experience of pain by the healer served to provide vulnerability, sincerity, and empathy to the one being healed. Finally, the sharing of similar stories functioned in the individuation process where the individual consciousness became integrated with the collective consciousness of the group. It is important to note Jung’s approach to Christianity and the mission of the founders of AA, Bill W. and Dr. Bob. The mission of the recovering alcoholics in purging Christian terminology from the 12-steps to recovery was in the literal sense only. The founders believed that the suffering alcoholic would be turned away by the perception of a religious affiliation and they believed that many people hitting a level of desperation had sworn off the church and its ability to compassionately help them.
Bill W. and Dr. Bob, whether consciously or unconsciously, represented the teachings of Jung about Christ in their symbolic approach to a spiritual life. Jung believed that the symbolic figure of Jesus Christ gave meaning to life and served as a reflection of the Self. He believed that the Christian myth and the rediscovery of a symbolic God would alleviate the plague of stale, rational approaches to religion. Just as Jung believed that the archetype of Christ as the suffering servant and redeemer represented the Self, the founders of AA believed that the archetype of the recovered alcoholic represented the hope of a new Self for those still suffering with their addiction. The AA archetype and the Christian archetype both represented the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth by focusing on the wounded healer, the suffering servant, and the redeemer from a past life of sin. Both Jung and the founders of AA believed that the use of confession and storytelling were the only path to psychological change. For them, the community and its symbolic interaction with the individual shaped the personal consciousness to the ideology of the collective consciousness. American Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism The uniquely American concepts of Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism were recognizable in the structure of the AA program. In particular, American Pragmatism promoted by William James (1842-1910) viewed truth as that which pays off or something with “cash value” (James, 1995, p. 84). AA’s utilitarian approach to religion promoted the spiritual life as a means to an end. If one became spiritual, there was a pay-
underlying epistemology of the co-founders in the meta-narrative embedded in the 12-step rituals, particularly as it reflects the religious and sociological belief systems outlined in this paper. Finally, the application provides support for the main thesis that Alcoholics Anonymous “works” and is sustained through its reliance on confession and storytelling in the narrative approach to recovery. Symbolic Convergence Theory Rhetorical Vision and Shared Consciousness Symbolic Convergence Theory, developed by Ernest Borgmann, John Cragan, and Donald Shields, maintained that individuals created their perception of reality by sharing stories within a particular culture. These shared stories, or narratives, were established through symbolic interaction within small groups, and they were “chained out from person to person and group to group” (Littlejohn, 2002, p. 157). The theory demonstrated that people formed their personal identity through interpersonal bonds created by story-telling. Symbolic exchanges forged a shared identity among members of a particular group or culture. Symbolic Convergence Theory, also known as fantasy-theme analysis , focused on the role of communication in persuasion and conversion. Fantasy or narrative themes, reflected in the language or symbols used by a particular group, defined their rhetorical vision. Rhetorical visions pulled people together in the following way: As rhetorical visions get established through the sharing of fantasy themes within a limited group, they fulfill a
consciousness-creating function. They make people more aware of a certain way of seeing things.... In other words, they build or maintain a group or community’s ‘shared consciousness.’ (p. 158) Definition of Key Concepts Symbolic Convergence Theory identified three underlying structures, or master analogues , that “compete for our attention and vie for truth”:
The act of confession was modeled after the Christian repentance process dating back as far as St. Augustine (354- AD). Augustine believed that solitary confession was not enough, rather man had to expose his sins to man for complete healing (St. Augustine, 2004, p. 190). The Book of James in the New Testament also was reflected in this step. The first AA “James Group” followed the scriptural instruction in James 5: that read: “Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed” (Selby, 2000, p. 117). Even though AA’s co-founders intentionally avoided the overt promotion of Christianity, the emphasis on confession as a means to healing symbolically made a clear statement about the ecclesiastical nature of the 12-step process. According to Michael Foucault, Christianity was “a confessing religion” where one was obligated to acknowledge transgressions and “to bear public or private witness against oneself” (Humphries, 1997, p. 131). He believed that at the heart of this practice was “a break with one’s past identity” (p. 131). Within the master religious analogue, the fantasy theme was arguably Christian. The characters were the confessor and the trusted spiritual mentor. The sanctioning agent was the “wounded healer” or “suffering servant” of the symbolic Christ. The social setting was believed to be one where God was present in Spirit. The action was the sacrament of penance involving personal confession, communion with God, and the forgiveness of sin. This symbolic ritual enfolded the recovering alcoholic in
to the spiritual life of AA culture as modeled by Christ and other recovered alcoholics in the fellowship. The Social Analogue Social Analogues tell the individual how to relate to other people. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung claimed that “Protestants are much more likely to end up on the psychiatrist’s couch than Catholics who practice the sacrament of penance” (Macquarrie, 1966, p. 484). Jung’s approach to psychology involved self- discovery through self-disclosure. Confession and disclosure of one’s authentic self allowed the individual to identify and connect with shared characteristics possessed by people of a unified culture. In the case of the alcoholic archetype, many qualities were considered to be shared traits among people from extremely different backgrounds. Alcoholism was viewed as a disease of isolation where the individual developed a bifurcated sense of self in order to hide addiction. Bill W. (1939) wrote: “More than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life. He is very much the actor. To the outer world he presents his stage character” (p. 73). Step Five was the beginning of authentic communication and the joining of the outer persona with the internalized sense of self. The AA philosophy maintained that the alcoholic was only as sick as their secrets (Hamilton, 1996, p. 149). Self-disclosure was an important aspect of interpersonal theories of communication with a focus on “honest communication” in interpersonal exchange. Carl Rogers (1902-1987) claimed that “the goal of communication is accurate understanding of self and
