How Does Alcoholics Anonymous Work As a Treatment Source?

Steps

There are those people who believe Alcoholics Anonymous is more of a mutual help organization than treatment. But others, especially those who have had success through AA, explain the program as a process that causes positive changes in a person's life, much like therapy does. Because AA includes a series of 12 steps, each step prepares the person for the next and the steps relate to each other in the same way treatment processes are connected in order for a recovery to take place.

Trust

The first step in therapy requires a person to take responsibility for a problem, explains Jack W. Tobin in his article on addiction and recovery. In the first step of AA, the person admits being powerless over alcohol, making life unmanageable. The person overcomes denial, an initial step in treatment. Trust is a key ingredient of any successful therapeutic process and that is where the second and third steps come in, Tobin notes. Step two helps the person realize that a higher power can restore people to sanity, and step three helps the person turn over care to God. A recovering person must trust a counselor or group of people in therapy treatment.

Life Guide

The remaining steps help the person continue the therapeutic process for recovering alcoholics. The steps include making a moral inventory of themselves, admitting the nature of their wrongs, readiness to have God remove these defects of character, asking God to remove their shortcomings, making a list of people they have harmed, making amends to those people, continuing a personal inventory, seeking to improve a conscious contact with God, and carrying these messages to alcoholics and practicing them in all affairs. These principles become lifetime guides throughout life, it is explained in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. The idea is not to be spiritually perfect, but to practice spiritual progress. The program or treatment leads the recovered alcoholic to the well-known Serenity Prayer: "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."

Treatments

People who enter self-help groups such as AA and also participate in professional treatment are more likely to achieve remission, according to a study published in the October 2005 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, the official journal of the Research Society on Alcoholism and the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism. The study examined 362 men and women, and followed them one, three, eight and 16 years later. The ones who participated in substance abuse treatment settings and quickly joined AA were more likely to stay in AA over the years. The study also suggests that individuals who achieved remission but discontinued participation in AA are at an increased risk for relapse. This indicates that AA is an important treatment source.