The Cult That Cures

Blown to Smithereens...

About a half lifetime ago, I was asked if I remembered anything about my first girlfriend.

I answered, "Are you kidding? I remember everything about my first girlfriend."

Thinking back to what was then about a half lifetime before, I wondered how anyone could forget that first time of getting a sense that a person you wanted actually loved you back.

Last year, as an Internet sleuth with pretty good memory, I found her again... Immersed in so many, and so many kinds of, "Anonymous" 12-step program activities that she came across as rigid, obsessive and cultish... But the real killer was, that to her new frame of mind, our mutual "I Want You To Want Me" attraction as teens was pathological.

Ouch... A memory of a crush, crushed.

It’s rare to get an inside glimpse of A.A. because attendees observe a code of silence about what goes on at meetings. It's kind of like Fight Club in that way. But, Clancy Martin, himself a recovering alcoholic, discloses a lot about the "what" without revealing any identifiable "whos" inside the movement in this month’s Harper’s magazine cover story “The Drunks’ Club, A.A. The Cult That Cures.”

Examining AA's Inner Workings Audio Embed: BBC, PRI & WBUR's Here & Now 1/13/11, Host: Robin Young.

This segment generated an atypically large number of comments.

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We're not gonna take it!
Gonna break it, gonna shake it,
Let's forget it better still.
-- Pete Townsend (1969)