In many cities across the United States, I have spoken with feminist therapists who have told me - cautiously, almost fearfully, because 12-step programs are now sacrosanct, the new religion - that these programs are not freeing the women they see in their practices. They would agree with Diana Rabenold who argues that such programs
...emphasize family background and 'damaged' personal histories as the major culprits... at the expense of examining the political nature of the problems. Psycho-dynamic therapy lacks a cohesive analysis of power, a theory of internalized oppression... An approach which over-emphasizes past and personal history often overlooks the ways in which behavior patterns are being reinforced in the present by social and economic factors.[1]
To talk about social/interpersonal/political aspects of women's oppression as addiction is to keep us on a treadmill of meetings and "support" groups that don't seem to be pointing the way to liberty. All of us know women in our communities who have been in recovery groups for years, who feel as if they cannot miss a meeting, whose lives revolve around their victimization, their addiction, or their co-dependency, who align themselves with the most negative aspect of their lives by defining themselves as it: I am an alcoholic, I am a co-addict, I am a relationship addict, I am an incest survivor.[2]
Where is the recovery program for addiction to the 12 steps? Perhaps it is better to be dependent upon Alcoholics Anonymous than upon alcohol, but it seems to me that the better goal is to be dependent upon oneself. What I see happening in this country is that women's reliance on 12-step recovery and support groups is causing a pre-Movement fembotitude to set in.
I think we must recognize that no male institution is essentially different from any other. I think we are required to hold none of them exempt from our fiercest, most self-loving scrutiny. Alcoholics Anonymous is simply another male institution, different in neither quality nor kind from the churches or schools or political parties or from any other group dedicated to maintaining men's oppressive and destructive value structure and hierarchy.
There are no new values there, nothing that is recognizable as nonparadigmatic to patriarchy. Particularly appalling for what it says about the integrity of a group that purports to care about human well-being is that there is no reverence for the body, no honor given to its health, no generalizing from the effects of alcohol to coffee and cigarettes; instead, AA exhibits as much scorn of the material world, of women's creation in it - human bodies - as any Fundamentalist church.
Recovery groups - particularly when they center around the 12 steps of AA - often have the same self-abasing, powerless, external focus, and ultimate rejection of responsibility inherent in male religion and politics. I perceive little difference between AA's "turning our will and life over to the care of God," christianity's "resting in Jesus," and the reliance of millions on legislators and presidents.
Some feminists tell me they replace "god" in the steps with "higher power," by which they often mean their "higher Self." This has no meaning for me, since apparently unlike theirs, my Self doesn't come in high, medium, and low like a hairdryer. I am whole, all of a piece, all at once. This, at least, is my desire and my direction, and therefore how I must speak of and perceive myself.
But though I cannot live as if it were true, I am aware that many of us feel as if we are still only coming together, that the wise old women inside us are still apart from us, informing and instructing us seemingly from outside our conscious minds, that there is much to be said for turning hard questions over to them and relaxing in trust, knowing that they will lead us to the answers.
In my present interaction with my wise woman, I am learning to keep hold of the reins. My role as a member of our team is to be awake and to test the assumptions at the center of my perceptions, beliefs, and behavior. I formulate the questions (sometimes needing her nudges), listen for answers, and am then very much involved, very actively part of the decision-making process. Putting the ultimate onus on anyone, anything, even on my wise old woman, would be an abnegation of responsibility that would make and keep me ill and victimized.
It is crucial for me to remember that the conscious Sonia is responsible for her life, no matter how strongly her Self speaks to her from what unconscious depths.
Another problem with the fact that the phrase "higher self" implies a "lower self" is that it maintains intact the hierarchical, dichotomous mind, the one-up/one-down, sadistic paradigm. In this light, the concept of a "higher" self is quintessential patriarchy. It is very important for me as a feminist to remember at all times that my wise old woman is not "higher." She is my peer.
The addiction movement's ideas seem to me to come out of a mind very like that of Fundamentalist religionists. I see no important difference between the addiction addicts who say, "You are all sick!" and the preachers who thunder, "You are all sinners!" It is the same model. The political model, the medical/therapeutic model, the religious model - all of them the patriarchal model.
In this model, norms are based on "sick" people, on victims. When sickness is the norm and we are all sick, the perception is that sickness is inevitable, that we can never be entirely well, and certainly can never save ourselves but need ministers and doctors and therapists and countless programs and support groups to rescue us and keep us at coping level.
And that we need them not just for awhile but for years or even for most of our lives, because, we are told, once born we are always sinners, once alcoholics we are always alcoholics, once victimized in whatever way, we are victims for life. In this way we can always put the blame for our misery on something external, refuse responsibility, and choose to be weak, unable to stand on our own, in constant need of support, never free.
It seems to me that in such groups women's lives center around a healing that is perpetual, that can never be completed: recovery programs in which no one ever recovers, in which recovery is not even the goal, not even considered a possibility, programs, in fact, in which to be a "good" and accepted member one must always assert one's illness, one's pain, one's inability to recover.
In patriarchal models, health and joy are not posited as options; we can only hope to be less unwell, in less pain, to cope, to have ordinary lives.
But, obviously, concentrating on sickness can never make us well, any more than concentrating on sinfulness can make us feel worthy. Defining ourselves as our oppression both internalizes and eternalizes our oppression, viewing ourselves as sick keeps us sick. To keep us from finding the tools of liberation, patriarchy always begins from sickness to describe "health," from addiction to describe liberation.
Feminism, the most profound deprogramming, the most thorough revolution of ideas, thoughts, and feelings the world has ever experienced, does not allow us to underestimate the scale and depth of patriarchal conditioning in our lives; it will not let us go to sleep again. It will not allow me to speak of its enormity, as it manifests itself in our every interaction with ourselves, others, and the world, in the same breath as I speak of addictions to chocolate or even to alcohol or cocaine.
When in the past I have ventured hesitantly to say to true 12-step believers that "the program" seemed over-poweringly in the old paradigm, they have pooh-poohed me into silence. "I just ignore all that stuff," they shrug. But they can only have said that out of an ignorance of the dynamics of terror-induced brainwashing, out of ignorance of its subtlety, its pervasiveness, its invasiveness.
Or out of denial. Like women in the churches, like women in the political parties, like women in the universities, women who belong to any organizations set up on male models to serve men, they woefully underestimate their vulnerability to the barrage of propa-gandistic disease and psychic maiming that rips into them from the very sectors to which they have turned for health and wholeness and "support."
In order to do this, they must accept the patriarchal chicanery that meaning can be separated from form. The fact is that meaning and form are inextricably fused. Meaning dictates form; in return the form, when it is not the entire meaning, is always a significant part of it. Form and meaning are causally intertwined in such a way that to understand one the other must always be taken into account. Since the form of AA, churches, and universities is patriarchal, any overt nonpatriarchal meanings that may be conveyed there will be canceled out by the meanings inherent in the format (for instance, hierarchical and competitive), the purpose, the setting, the values expressed by the format, purpose, and setting, and so on.
Members of AA talk a good deal about "denial," but I have noticed that women who are ardent worshipers at the foot of the 12 steps - "It saved my life!" - fiercely deny the profoundly masculinist world view inherent in those steps.
What is most noticeable about the steps at first reading, for example, is their thoroughgoing negativity: in the first step the words "powerlessness" and "unmanageable" appear; in subsequent steps, adherents guiltily confess to "wrongs," "defects," "shortcomings," admit having "harmed" and "injured," and concentrate upon making "amends" and on admitting when they are "wrong." The steps fairly groan under their load of self-abasement.
Women want and need a new world, a life ennobled by self-love. We do not need further humbling. For 5,000 long years, men have carefully trained our eyes upon our shortcomings and our faults, our evil proclivities and our weaknesses. They have taught us how to scrutinize ourselves for wicked intent and behavior so well that we came long ago to the point of searching out faults we didn't even have, inventing shortcomings to please the men, to feel righteous and god-fearing. We learned our lesson of self-hatred all too well.
We do not need to look any longer at what is wrong with us, because as long as we do we will never rise out of the slough. We need to see what we are doing right, what we are doing that is strong and good and loving and free. That's the "fearless inventory"[3] women need to make of our lives.
And then, of course, the woman-hating male god lurks in nearly every line of the 12 steps, ready to pounce upon the unwary, vulnerable psyche, the maleficent presence that women in AA-like programs (and churches) deny changes their feelings about themselves at all. I often wonder what makes them more immune to brainwashing than the rest of us. Although the steps purport to give one the option of thinking of god as one wishes, the text is riddled with unambiguous male god concepts and language, saturated with a rigid patriarchal worid view.
It is also very other-directed. Since men have not been socialized to think of others, to be as concerned about the welfare of others to the extent women have, this may be fine for them. But women, who have been deeply conditioned to put everyone else's needs and wants before their own, to take responsibility for everyone and everything except their own freedom and happiness, women, who apologize when men step on their feet or run into them, who apologize to posts they run into - women need to stop feeling apologetic about living and learn to think of and put their own welfare first. They need no more brainwashing to consider others' lives, no more mandates to apologize.
Negativity, remorse, repentance, giving up of ultimate responsibility -i.e., immersion in patriarchal power politics - can never lead to independence and personal power, can never free from conditioned assumptions.
"But," women protest, "the 12 steps help me! And my reality is valid for me." I was once a Mormon, and for a large part of my life I perceived the church as "helping" me. I had what I thought of as "spiritual experiences" in relation to it. I had what I regarded as answers to prayer. But when I no longer believed in god, when I no longer thought the church was holy and full of power, I sat on its benches and felt shocked at its barrenness, its echoing emptiness.
I knew then that what I had once regarded as the doctrine's rich, sacred, and transcendent stuff was in reality my own rich, sacred, and transcendent stuff: I had answered my own prayers, I had filled the church with my own glory. But I had projected all this onto the church because I could not conceive of myself as so powerful. I could not accept my own divinity. I had been taught to externalize my power and to call it god and his priesthood, to give it up to that figment and his priests so that I could never claim it for myself. By doing so, women threaten to bring down the whole house of cards around the men's heads.
Neither AA nor any other patriarchal organization will ever be the first with the good news about how to make deep and lasting change in our lives and in the world. In my opinion, women who get well through AA get well because they so desire health that out of themselves they pull the threads of self-love that form their web of safety. I believe that motivated women have learned to use any impetus, any excuse, to grab any plank in the heaving seas, to get well. Unfortunately, AA has been almost the only plank floating by.
Women have been angry when I have said this about AA, insisting that though they can see all its defects, it has after all helped many women, and they are glad that it is there. I tell them that during my long life as a Mormon I heard countless people bear testimony that the church had saved their lives, but I do not now conclude, for example, that because Mormonism keeps millions of people from drinking, everyone with a drinking problem should join it.
These women then often respond that they know AA is not good in many ways, but it is already there and they are too frazzled from trying to make a living to take on organizing some group based on more feminist principles. Now that seems to me a far more legitimate reason for a woman's attending AA than any other I have heard.
Fortunately, at least one group other than the depressingly moralistic christian AA exists for women with drinking problems, a group based on the knowledge that men's comfortable reality is alien territory for women.
Though I could wish that it contained a more thoroughgoing woman-centered political analysis, Women for Sobriety, a national organization exclusively for women is based on the understanding that women have been programmed differently from men in patriarchy and that feelings of self-worth, not self-mortification, are basic to our ability to free ourselves from alcohol.
Women for Sobriety's 13 steps[4] are as different from men's 12 as night from day. They are present-time oriented (women are not asked to rehearse their drinking histories), positive, self-affirming and self-directed, guilt-free, and have some metaphysical sophistication:
This program keeps what is good about AA and dumps the rest. Using women's life experience as the norm, it is designed by a woman specifically to give women what they need to recover - insisting on women-only meetings, for instance. Jean Kirkpatrick, founder of Women for Sobriety, understands that women's problems "are tied to the male-female relationship"[5] and that these problems cannot be thoroughly explored in a mixed group; that in mixed groups men do most of the talking, giving women little chance to speak about what is bothering them; and that men consider women's frustrations - crying children, no adult company - petty and boring and not deserving of a place in the general discussion. In short, patriarchy prevails in AA as it does in most mixed support groups.[6]
But according to Kirkpatrick, the most disabling patriarchal characteristic of 12-step programs for women is that they attack their already diminished self-esteem. Recognizing that a woman's self-image is the most accurate predictor of her ability to change, Kirkpatrick tried consciously to build positive steps toward self-respect and independence into Women for Sobriety.
"The program is an affirmation of the value and worth of each woman," she writes.
It leads each woman to assert her belief in herself, to see herself in a positive and selfconfident light, as forceful and compassionate, assertive and warm, capable and caring, resourceful and responsible.[7]
Kirkpatrick, an active alcoholic herself for 28 years, tried nearly every available therapy, dropping twice out of AA. By the time she kicked the habit, she was convinced that none of the programs addressed the problems of America's five million women alcoholics.[8] In her opinion,
All women in our culture feel a modicum of guilt for not being "perfect," for not fitting into the unrealistic mold that American society has cast for them. For alcoholic women, this guilt is almost unbearable at times. When the feelings about this guilt are shared with other women who also experience it, it can be alleviated, become a thing of the past. Women alcoholics have this strong feeling of having failed as a wife, as a mother, as a sister or daughter, as a woman. Their alcoholism and recovery are all involved with the removal of this guilt.[9]
She believes that the reasons men and women drink are also entirely different. "Men drink for a sense of power," she says, "while women drink out of frustration, helplessness and dependency."[10]
In Women for Sobriety groups, women introduce themselves by affirming their dignity and self-respect: "My name is Jean and I'm a competent woman." Instead of repeating the lord's prayer, they conclude their meetings by joining hands and affirming: "We are capable and confident, caring and compassionate, always willing to help another, bonded together in overcoming our disease of alcoholism."
Another difference is that this group, in a more holistic, womanly sort of way, is interested in improving and maintaining each woman's health in every way, not merely in keeping her alcoholism at coping level. Part of the program emphasis, for instance, is "the use of meditation, taking vitamins, avoiding candy, drinking little or no coffee, and cutting down on smoking" - i.e., loving oneself, including her body, and taking her body and health seriously.[11]
But predictably enough, Women for Sobriety gets little recognition and less prestige, primarily because it does not include men, and almost none of us is able to take womenonly groups as seriously as we do those that include men. Neither is it based in men's value system. It is unacceptable and even fear provoking because it comes out of women's mind, is based on women's experience, and is directed toward women.
Because it does not have the masters' imprimatur, because it is positive and affirming and therefore does not sound familiarly and comfortably like patriarchy, many doubt its efficacy. AA goes beyond this and actively persecutes individual members as well as the organization itself.[12] It is very hard for women to believe that women understand us better, know better what we need, and can provide it better than men - evidence of our internalized oppression, our self-hatred, our slave mind.
Why has men's 12-step program - negative, other-directed, conventionally blaming the victim, mortifying and abasing, god-oriented - been perceived by some women as lifechanging? Perhaps it feels comfortable and right to women precisely because it is the same old extemalization of power, the same old powerlessness, the same old negativity, the same old moralistic, abject, lack of self-love (any feminist who sits through the lord's prayer several times a week - even once a year - does not honor herself much in my opinion), and when we are in pain we find solace in the known, in the echoes from our childhood.
But more likely women find strength in any 12-step program simply because it is a program. When we feel as if our lives are out of our control, when we are in emotional chaos, finding such a solid, rigid structure must feel like coming upon a life raft in a shipwreck. Perhaps it didn't need to be the 12 steps of AA for those people to feel so welcome and safe; perhaps the relief would have been the same if any process had appeared, any dependable program in which there was group support and acceptance. As I say, thousands of people join the Mormon church yearly for this exact reason.
Though the Women's Movement began with consciousness-raising groups, since then it hasn't answered the conditioned need for external structure, programs, dogma, and ritual. Feminism has routinely required each of us to bring this forth for ourselves out of ourselves, but never insisted that we not have company as we do it.
Doing our own individual internal work, whether alone or with a group, is extremely difficult. In patriarchy, we are accustomed to having someone else set up for us what we need to do - parents, churches, schools, preachers, nuns, teachers, TV ads, how-to-do-it manuals - it seems as if in every direction we turn we are being told what to do and how to do it, given a regimen to follow: to get good grades, to win god's approval, to lose weight, to keep fit, to have satisfying sex. We hardly need to listen to our own internal voices at all anymore; certainly society neither encourages nor gives us any practice.
So it isn't surprising that women are attracted to one more program telling us how to get our lives in order, trusting in yet another externally imposed blueprint for success, rather than accepting that it is finally necessary for each of us to find our own internal map, to listen to our own voice, and to establish our own unique and individual regimen. Following someone else's plan has never yet worked for us, and I think never will, though we might get some ideas from it.
But we do need one another, we do need to be in the company of other women on similar journeys. Perhaps this is why the women's spirituality movement is having such success. It may be a group process that is providing a transition from the outer-directed, externally structured patriarchal world to the less structured, more ambiguous, freer, more open and ever-changing inner world. I believe that feminism postulates anarchy of the spirit - self-rule, self-government, an anarchy that will ultimately result in political, social, economic, and religious anarchy.
[1] Diana Rabenold, "Love, Politics, and 'Rescue' in Lesbian Relationships," pp. 1-2.
[2] It would be a good idea to cast the word "survivor" out of our vocabularies altogether. As a relational word, as a word that throws the mind instantly back into some dread, powerless past experience(s), the word "survivor" perpetuates women's feelings of powerlessness and their perceptions of themselves as victims. Words are energy. I would like to see us use them to create our own powerful, free reality. For instance, Susan Horwitz suggests that we use the word "thrival" instead of survival.
[3] One of the 12 Steps is that people will make fearless inventories of their lives.
[4] The 13 statements were originally published in Dr. Jean Kirkpatrick's book, Turnabout: Help for a New Life. Doubleday and Co: New York, 1978.
[5] [6] Jean Kirkpatrick, Women for Sobriety: A New Self-Help Program, 1978.
[7] Jean Kirkpatrick, Turnabout: Help for a New Life, p. 64.
[8] "Finding AA Too Male-Oriented, Jean Kirkpatrick Heads a Movement to Aid Women Alcoholics," People Magazine, June 29, 1987.
[9] Jean Kirkpatrick, Turnabout: Help for a New Life, p. 83.
[10] "Finding AA Too Male-Oriented, Jean Kirkpatrick Heads a Movement to Aid Women Alcoholics."
[11] To contact Women for Sobriety, write P.O. Box 618, Quakertown, PA, 18951, or call (215) 536-8026.
[12] Conversation with Jean Kirkpatrick, August 1988.