AA is... Bullshit.
For people who can't accept ownership for their lives. Call it a disease. It's easier than growing up and you get to hang out with a bunch of other losers just like you.
Leukemia is a disease.
I think you're misunderstanding me. My point is that anxiety and stress are not automatically linked to depression. I can stress about my job without being depressed. I can have certain social anxieties without having to have depression.
Well once again I think we would have to define the parameters here, if someone has social anxieties and they have a glass of wine to take off the edge, I wouldn't consider it abuse.
Well then I'm sorry you misunderstood me.
I'd be more sympathetic to your feeling condescended to by how he worded that, except that responding with name-calling only makes the interaction worse.
How would you locate people with eating disorders in this portrait? Because a lot of eating disorder therapy groups/support programs are based on 12 Step, too--which makes sense, I think most people who've lived with an anorexic or bulimic would agree there's a glaringly obvious addictive component to it--yet, you cannot go "cold turkey" on food, either in the sense of consuming it or in the sense of regulating your intake of it; both activities are essential.
The 'higher power' thing is basically just a conceptual device meant to help people come to terms with the reality that the addiction (or more correctly, the impulses, rationalizations, and other psychological processes sustaining it) has effectively been controlling them rather than the other way around, isn't it? It's not, as I understand it, some kind of stealth way to inflict religion on them or something, and AA doesn't actually give a crap if you Come To See Yourself As A Theist or not.
Interesting, that first quote sounds a lot like what a housemate of mine back in grad school who was in AA at the time (and whom I guess I'd describe as an atheist-leaning agnostic) said about it. I dunno, it just made sense to me, why this way of approaching it would work--which, after all, is the whole point, right?--for many people. That by externalizing the problem in a sense, you open up a kind of conceptual space that allows you to begin gradually extricating yourself from a tangle of f*ed up thought processes that you're pretty much drowning in right now. And from seeing what this guy was like when he was drinking (and some others with various addictive problems I've known, as well), I feel like I've seen how much damage that whole ongoing delusion of "I can quit anytime, in fact, I'll quit tomorrow!" can do. Sure, in an absolute sense you CAN quit tomorrow and I know some people actually successfully do that, great for them, but for so many others, that thought is really more a way of giving yourself permission to drink/shoot up/binge/whatever today, and worse, leads to overwhelming shame when you unsurprisingly fail at the 'quit tomorrow' part too, which only heightens the tendency to keep doing it.
Eating Disorders and Genetics - Genetic Component to Eating Disorders
This is a tangent from the alcoholism topic, so I'm not inclined to bother with hunting down more properly scientific sources for those points, but there is quite a growing body of research in this area, and it's not at all controversial to suggest that genetic predispositions may play an important role in many eating disorder patients. Doesn't mean that any resulting neurochemical abnormalities are necessarily all that similar in nature, and anorexia and bulimia at least do seem 'culturally dependent' in the sense that growing up surrounded by idealized images of certain body types seems crucial somehow to the emergence of *those particular forms* of abnormal eating behavior as a medical phenomenon. But it simply isn't true that eating disorders don't run in families.
