My Problem with 12 Step Groups

I know I’m in a co-dependent relationship with my father and that sooner or later, something’s got to give. The logical thing to do would be to head on over to the nearest Codependent Anonymous 12-Step program and find a sponsor and start doing the steps.

But I would rather eat glass.

Years ago, when I was seeing Dr. Archana Lal Tabak, I started attending Debtors Anonymous meetings on Magnolia Street. Dr. Tabak had nothing but the most glowing things to say about this group, which her husband, she claimed, attended. She told me that it was one of the largest 12-step groups in the city (a testament, apparently, to its success) and had a lot of women members. She said a lot of her other patients were going there at her suggestion. She was a firm believer in 12-step groups and regularly attended many herself.

So for three months during the entire summer I went every Thursday afternoon to the Debtor’s Anonymous meetings on Magnolia Street. And I found the entire experience demoralizing and negative and unhealthy.

The first thing I noticed was that there was this strange sort of social competition going on. It was palpable. As soon as the meetings were over, everyone would leap from their chairs and frantically start hugging each other as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. People would run across the room, arms outstretched, toward some other member who had given a particularly moving testimony. The room would become aflutter with all this manic, jubilant chatter as everyone raced around hugging as many people as they could. It was all very exaggerated.

This was when I would feel incredibly lonely. I just felt so alone. I’m a pretty introverted person myself so running up to strangers and hugging them was never going to be a natural act. What is more, nobody ever approached me and welcomed me to the group or had anything to say to me. I was eventually to figure out why.

There were many young women there my age as Dr. Tabak promised, but I found them standoffish and cliquey. This one clique of young women was basically being lead by this blonde woman who worked in the human resources department of a publishing company. Or something like that. Her name was Karen and as far as I could tell, she didn’t even really have money problems. One day she gave her testimony about how she realized she had money issues when she refused to pay her landlord rent because her landlord wasn’t making certain repairs that she had requested. Next thing she knew, she was standing before a judge, who ordered her to pay the rent. That was it. She had a minor epiphany and changed her ways. She didn’t have credit card debt or a compulsive spending problem. Just some unresolved anger issues. I’ve often wondered if she joined Debtors Anonymous just so she could become the leader of her own clique, just like in high school. She struck me as someone who didn't otherwise have any friends but who wanted a group of loyalists she could control.

There was another young woman in the group, a working class girl who was kind of rough around the edges. She was a singer and looked just like Janis Joplin. She was a recovering drug addict and was living in some kind of assisted living facility. The other women kind of looked down on her and on more than one occasion I saw Karen make a disparaging remark toward her and laugh it off.

Karen didn’t like me. I think she could tell right away I wasn’t the type who would give her my fealty like the others, so she did what any self-respecting Queen Bee would do in such a situation – she excluded me outright. She literally told me to go off and socialize with Janis Joplin, at one point pushing me towards her and saying, “Off you two go! You’re perfect for each other.” Then rolling of the eyes and some more laughing.

So yeah, there was social bullshit like that. But what was most disturbing was this strange dynamic that had taken over the whole meeting and permeated everything. The dynamic was: Those most in touch with their Higher Power prosper.

This is hardly anything new. Christians (Protestant, Calvinist) Christians have taught and sometimes still teach prosperity gospel and claim that God rewards the most pious with wealth. Televangelist Joel Osteen preaches this. Back in the day, they would ask: How do you know if someone is of the Elect? Because he prospers.

It was the same kind of thinking at this Debtors Anonymous group. If it was your turn to speak and you talked about getting promoted at your job or getting a better than expected Christmas bonus, you were suddenly the most popular guy in the room, a veritable rock star, and everybody would practically climb over each to give you a hug at the end of the meeting and get your telephone number. Abundance! Abundance! Conversely, if you had fallen on hard times and gotten laid off or had an unexpected auto repair bill that was straining your budget, you became a pariah and nobody would approach you or hug you at the end of the meeting. It was that predictable and stark. You were only welcome so long as you were in touch with your Higher Power and this was directly evidenced by your financial success.

I saw this over and over again. When I first started attending the meetings, one of the young women in Karen’s clique, Wendy, shared good news with the group that she had gotten a raise as a saleswoman at a high-end retail store. Sure enough, everybody couldn’t wait to give her a hug and get her phone number. She was super popular and everybody clearly wanted some of her mojo. But then, two months later, she was laid off and after sharing that piece of information with the group, not one single person approached her at the end of the meeting. Nobody wanted anything to do with her. I watched her closely and saw her sit forlornly in her seat for about a minute as everybody else chatted and hugged animatedly with each other only a few feet away. Finally, she got up and quietly left the room. She knew what the social rules were and wasn’t going to bother sticking around. Even Karen, who was supposed to be her friend, didn’t approach her. She was a pariah.

I tried explaining my observations to Dr. Tabak, but she would have none of it and kept insisting that those people were “spiritually advanced” and that I wasn’t interpreting things correctly. And as far as her husband was concerned, I only saw him attend the meeting once during that entire summer. And because he had the same kind of idealistic naivete as his wife and wasn’t terribly perceptive or intuitive, I highly doubt he ever picked up on the social dynamics of the room. To him, it probably looked like a wonderful social gathering of highly animated people getting in touch with their Higher Power. Because that’s what it looked like on the surface.

But really, it was the opposite. A lot of misguided pseudo-spirituality mixed in with a socially competitive atmosphere that was hardly supportive. Since there was no authority figure facilitating the room (as you would have in a drug rehab program or mental health clinic), everyone was left to govern themselves … with disastrous results.

Plus, there were other problems. A lot of the young men were there to pick up chicks. Seriously. They must have heard from their other guy friends that a lot of young women were at the Thursday afternoon Magnolia Street group. The few times a guy would approach me and talk to me, I’d notice right away that he’d be blatantly checking out my body while I talked about my credit card debt. Another time, a distraught young man came to the meeting sounding positively suicidal because he’d made a series of bad financial decisions which resulted in his wife threatening to leave him. “I’m in a lot of trouble,” he lamented with a heavy sigh. Then he looked up and stared at me from across the room. And I knew instantly that he was already thinking of having an affair with me. All I had to do was say yes and it would have happened like that. Because he was so lost and vulnerable and wanting for some kind of escape into the arms of another woman.

I should add here that during that summer, I invited an acquaintance of mine to join me at the meetings. His name was Tad and he was a homeless fellow I’d befriended while volunteering at an animal shelter. He had become an alcoholic when he was a teenager but had maintained sobriety by regularly attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings ever since. So he was quite familiar with how 12-step programs work, having been going to them for well over 15 years. I stopped going to the D.A meetings by the end of the summer because I was totally fed up with what I was seeing, but he continued. Months later, I was to run into him and when I asked him how it was going over there, he responded vaguely that he was still attending.

“Are they nice to you over there?” I asked.

“No, not really.” he replied matter-of-factly.

This didn’t surprise me. I saw how cold those people could be toward Wendy for simply getting laid off from a job, so I can only imagine how they would treat a homeless person. He would definitely be at the very bottom of the hierarchical wrung, a pariah for not being in God’s favor.

Besides, Tad had told me about some of his experiences with Alcoholics Anonymous over the years. He said he’d basically decided a long time ago that he wouldn’t try to make friends with people in 12 Step groups. He’d just learned over and over again from personal experience that it wouldn’t be a good idea. For example, when he was much younger, maybe in his early 20s, someone in the 12-Step group who was older preyed upon him. This older man, who was a photographer, was also gay and sensed that Tad hungered for some sort of father figure and was very lonely. Maybe he heard him talk about how he never knew his father, that his father abandoned him when he was a mere infant. Anyway, he reached out to Tad and became his “friend” – possibly even his sponsor? It wasn’t long before this older gay man was inviting Tad over to his studio to pose naked for these homoerotic photo sessions. Tad went along with it because he was so hungry for some kind of love and attention from a father figure and was easy to manipulate, being as young as he was. He was emotionally vulnerable and the guy totally took advantage of that. Year later, he would demand to have the negatives back. The guy handed them over and that was that.

And I’ve heard so many other fucked up stories like that. In the 90s, my co-worker’s best friend became a cocaine addict and got clean by going to Cocaine Anonymous. It totally worked for her and saved her life. I’m sure to this day she’s still clean and sober. But while all this was going on, she was working as a stripper at night to pay for school to become some kind of medical technician. So it goes without saying that she had a killer bod and huge tits. This also meant that she was wildly popular amongst all the men who, at the end of the meetings, would all rush up to her and say “Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing.” Then they would try to hug her tight so they could feel her tits against their chests. It was so obvious. Oh, and eventually she would go on to have an affair with a married real estate tycoon in that same group.

One of my dad’s former secretaries was a recovered alcoholic. Her husband was recovered as well. They’d been sober for a long time and she told me about going to 12 step meetings and all the bullshit that went on. For example, whoever is sober the longest is considered the most respectable and so on down. But it doesn’t really matter what kind of person you really are. You can be the biggest asshole in the world but if you’ve been sober the longest, you get the most respect no matter what.

I just don’t see these 12-Step Groups as having any real integrity. I’m very wary. When I did go to those meetings, I wasn’t hearing anything terribly meaningful or profound or enlightening. I kept listening for it and listening for it. I’d found much more meaningful, spiritual discussions on OPRAH and in my creative writing classes.

The one thing I like so much about the women’s support group at the City Clinic is that there’s always a facilitator in the room. An authority figure. A professional, licensed therapist who keeps everybody honest and in check. She may not even say hardly anything at all, but her presence alone will keep things kosher.

The Bipolar Support Group I go to once a month is also pretty good. There’s no facilitator there, so I don’t quite understand why the meetings don’t disintegrate into total bullshit like with some 12 Step Groups. Maybe it’s because there’s no pretense to spirituality and the approach is practical and grounded?

But I need to change. These things I’ve been doing – the therapy, the women’s group, the medications – it’s not enough anymore and I have to figure something out. I’ve been thinking a lot about spirituality lately and now I think I should start going to church, even though Christianity never did much for me before. It’s just that two of the soldiers from BLACK HAWK DOWN, Sargent Jeff Struecker and Ranger Keni Thomas, are real-life Christians of admirable character and positive outlooks in life. It’s not surprising that the former is now an ordained minister and the latter a motivational speaker. And unlike televangelist Joel Osteen, they’ve been truly tested and can speak from real experiences. They know what fear and uncertainty is.

But what I like most about these two is that neither of them seem to have a Messiah complex. They’re not out to be spiritual rock stars. They’re humble.