12 Step Program Research Paper

Sewtana Nash

The 12-step Program isn’t for everyone Growing up with an alcoholic can drastically affect a child’s life. One in five Americans has lived with an alcoholic relative while growing up (“Children of Alcoholics”). I am one of those five. Yes, my father was an alcoholic while I was growing up. It is a touchy subject for me, but it is safe to say growing up with an alcoholic dad was very difficult for my family. After an emotional separation, my father realized what his life had become, and he worked to overcome his alcoholism. Many of these efforts to recover died out quickly, and my dad had to jump from organization to organization until he finally recovered through Help Incorporation. Whenever I ask my dad about why it was so
The 12 steps were written in the overall guiding book AA uses called “the Big Book”. The program and book were created in December of 1938 by a newly-sober alcoholic named William Griffith Wilson. The only requirement for participation is a desire to stop drinking. The 12-step program is completely confidential and has helped many people recover from alcoholism. However, research has suggested it is not a well-developed program due to several insufficiencies such as creating an environment that inflicts low self-esteem. Many researchers such as Senior Research Scientist and EBT Coordinating Center Director Susan Harrington Godley, Rh.D., advise against participating in the 12-step program due to its ineffectiveness and inability to motivate clients to commit to sobriety. Godley writes in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment that other alcoholism treatment approaches such as the Community-Reinforcement Approach (CRA) provides alternatives to the more traditional treatment and intervention approaches such as the 12-step program by positively reinforcing sobriety unlike the 12 steps fail to do. CRA produced an overall patient engagement of 67%, whereas the 12-step program produced a disappointing rate of only 18% (Godley 463). Reasons as to why the 12-step program is not effective for everyone is due to the fact that it makes abusers feel
The 12-step program is very time consuming with all of their frequent meetings and checkups. Most of the AA meetings occur a few times a week, and if an abuser is too busy to attend, people begin to question that abuser’s commitment to recover, or even worse; they begin to think you are using again. Some sponsors even make abusers call every night to ensure that they are keeping clean of substance abuse. The 12-step program is unproductive because it forces members to drop one addiction; alcoholism, and adopt a new one; becoming a successful and dedicated member of AA. In the 12-step program, sponsors also tell recovering abusers that they have to get a home group meeting where they will have to lead discussions on their own time outside of the normal AA meetings. Then sponsors assign addicts who have been a part of the program for a while to new coming abusers, which include “driving people around and helping them get their lives together – it may even include being sent on missions to talk a dangerously intoxicated person to attend an AA meeting (Perkins 10). This could be especially dangerous to a recovering alcoholic because they are putting themselves in the position where they must be surrounded by someone who has access to alcohol. Clearly the 12-step program is very time consuming, and other programs such as the Saint Jude Program,