Treatable

This disease of compulsivity is eminently treatable. Research from 1988 shows that, if we treat different populations in different ways, we're going to get different percentages. The best treatment available for a compulsivity is spiritual and the best delivery system is a twelve-step program. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Motivational Enhancement Therapy and other therapies may help under certain conditions but they don't work well as primary treatments. I don't give a damn what the researchers are telling us, some results-based research sucks. The clear consensus today is that the best treatment for compulsivity is spiritual.

We each have to decide what spirituality is for us. The twelve-step system delivers this to us, provided people go to meetings, have a sponsor, read the Big Book and do the steps. When I came into AA in Louisville in 1977, our program was: don't drink; go to meetings; get a sponsor; tell him what's wrong with you; he'll tell you what to do; then go and save a drunk. This left out the middle steps. So, I lived for 10 years on a three step program. I became a lethal weapon for God. That's exactly what I was. If you wanted to get straight, you'd get behind me and do what I'd tell you to do and you'd get sober. If not, you were a loser.  As you can imagine this polarized everyone around me. Some - the codependents - thought that I walked on water. Others thought that I was an a-hole. I was in an interesting place. Finally, at 10 years sober, I had no way of dealing with my self-centredness, dishonesty, resentment and fear, except telling my sponsor and going to meetings. Even my prayers were ineffective. So I had an affair.

God sent me the Big Book. I guess He was tired of me running around doing the things I was doing. I read the book and saw what a 12-step program was. Since then, in the last 22 years, I've always been in at least one and usually two Big Book studies a week, because that's where the design for living is. So I know what it's like to live out there with a 3-step program and what it's like to live with a 12-step program. The 12-step program is wonderful. A 3-step program is a crazy place to be. I had lots of faith but no works. In meetings, we weren't carrying the message, we were carrying the disease. We just got together so that we could all talk about it at the same time.