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The Big Book Unplugged: A Young Person's Guide to Alcoholics Anonymous

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I work in a substance abuse treatment center, and I have found that people that started drinking or using when they were young relate to this book easily. It puts things in simple terms and uses real stories to portray the points. I feel the language is foul at times, but the author does use it to make a point and relate to younger people. I'm buying this book for my father who has been sober for 15 years through AA, and is still working the program "one day at a time."

One of my teenaged children's observations when I share the experience, strength and hope Recovery has brought to me, is that I'm "not speaking teen language," so they don't always grasp what I mean. They know the Recovery journey has helped me, they mainly see it in my life, but the language makes it hard to translate to their own struggles, or to the struggles they see their friends experiencing. THE BIG BOOK UNPLUGGED does speak teen language (using some VERY clear language in fact, that may offend those to whom the book isn't geared, but speaks VOLUMES to its intended audience!), and is a clear, conversational format that picks the very best of the BIG BOOK of AA, and presents it in accessible language. Don't know why it took me so long to find this, but it's just what I have been looking for!

Stories remain very personal, the big players in AA are presented in a human, contemporary context, which emphasizes our similarities, even though these founders began "way back there," and I was pleased with the comfortable use of humor and honesty. The style and language are so easy to process, that I would also recommend this book for those who wouldn't exactly view themselves as a "young person" and yet have trouble processing the BIG BOOK, both in size (we call it BIG for a reason!)and content.

Having said that, I would wish maybe for a follow up book, or maybe a few more elements included in this volume, but then that would likely detract from it's slim, non-intimidating size. So overall, it's a great book and a great option!

The Alcoholics Anonymous "Big Book" was first published in 1939. Newer editions were published in 1955, 1976 and 2001. The newer editions updated the personal stories in the back section, but the first 164 pages remain pretty much unchanged from what Bill Wilson wrote in the thirties.

Even though much has changed in our society and culture since that time, everything Bill wrote about is still 100 percent applicable today. Not a sentence is wasted in those first 164 pages. But at the time, most of AA's members were older white men, so a lot of it was geared more toward them, for instance, the "To Wives" chapter. But obviously husbands aren't the only alcoholics. Wives, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters can suffer from this dreadful disease also. So "The 12 Steps Unplugged" was written by John R. to better explain the "Big Book" to younger generations. John R. himself recovered at 17 years old (a very high bottom) and in the 20 years since has worked as an adolescent treatment counselor. He stresses two things: This is a program of action, and God will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. These two seemingly contradictory statements together mean that if we do the work, God will meet us halfway.

"The 12 Steps Unplugged" is for anyone new to the program or anyone who feels that the language of the "Big Book" is outdated. Each chapter is broken down and explained in a more practical manner without changing the original meaning.

David Allan Reeves
Author of "Running Away From Me"

1. The Twelve Steps do not work as a program of recovery from drug or alcohol problems.
o The A.A. failure rate ranges from 95% to 100%. Sometimes, the A.A. success rate is actually less than zero, which means that A.A. indoctrination is positively harmful to people, and prevents recovery. Some tests have shown that even receiving no treatment at all for alcoholism is much better than receiving A.A. treatment:
o One of the most enthusiastic boosters of Alcoholics Anonymous, Professor George Vaillant of Harvard University, who is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (AAWS), showed by his own 8 years of testing of A.A. that A.A. was worse than useless -- that it didn't help the alcoholics any more than no treatment at all, and it had the highest death rate of any treatment program tested -- a death rate that Professor Vaillant himself described as "appalling". While trying to prove that A.A. treatment works, Professor Vaillant actually proved that A.A. kills. After 8 years of A.A. treatment, the score with Dr. Vaillant's first 100 alcoholic patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking.
(Nevertheless, Vaillant is still a Trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he still wants to send all alcoholics to A.A. anyway, to "get an attitude change by confessing their sins to a high-status healer." That is cult religion, not a treatment program for alcoholism.)
o The A.A. dropout rate is terrible. Most people who come to A.A. looking for help in quitting drinking are appalled by the narrow-minded atmosphere of fundamentalist religion and faith-healing. The A.A. meeting room has a revolving door. The therapists, judges, and parole officers (many of whom are themselves hidden members of A.A. or N.A.) continually send new people to A.A., but those newcomers vote with their feet once they see what A.A. really is. Even A.A.'s own triennial surveys, conducted by the A.A. headquarters (the GSO), say that:
X 81% of the newcomers are gone within 30 days,
X 90% are gone in 3 months, and
X 95% are gone at the end of a year.
That automatically gives A.A. a failure rate of at least 95%. But the GSO does not count all of those people who only attend a few meetings before quitting -- they don't qualify as "members". (That amounts to "cherry-picking".) If we included them, then the numbers would be much worse.
And also note that the claimed five percent of A.A. newcomers who are still left after one year is exactly the same number as the usual rate of spontaneous remission among alcoholics -- five percent per year. That is, in any randomly-selected population of alcoholics, approximately five percent per year will finally get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and they will just quit drinking. And the Harvard Medical School says that 80% of those successful quitters do it by themselves, alone, without any "treatment program" or any "support group".
If we subtract the normal spontaneous remission rate for alcoholism of five percent per year from A.A.'s claimed success rate of five percent, we get zero for A.A.'s real effective cure rate.
A.A. does not actually make anybody quit drinking; it just takes the credit for the people who were going to quit anyway. A.A. is just taking the credit for peoples' efforts to save their own lives.
o The Twelve Steps are actually a hopelessly bad program for recovery:
X Cult religion is not a good cure for alcoholism, and A.A. most assuredly is a cult religion.
X One of the biggest problems with the Twelve-Step program is the learned helplessness caused by the First Step, where people are taught to confess that they are "powerless over alcohol." This leads many people to believe that once they have a drink, that a full-blown relapse and total loss of self-control is inevitable and unavoidable. So some people go on suicidally-intense binges, thinking that it is pointless to try to resist temptation.2 --
X Step Two is just as bad: it teaches people that they are insane, and that only a Supernatural Being can restore them to sanity -- which means that they are helpless, and cannot heal themselves.
X Then Step Three teaches a lifestyle of infantile narcissism and passive dependency, where A.A. members turn control of their wills and their lives over to "the care of God as we understood Him", and then they expect God to take care of them and run their lives for them, and solve all their problems, and wait on them hand and foot, and do all of the hard work for them from then on...
"Let Go And Let God"
is their official motto, their lifestyle, and their approach to problem-solving.
X Then Steps Four through Ten induce guilt in the members by forcing members to make lists of all of their sins and flaws, and "defects of character" and "moral shortcomings", and confess every intimate dirty little secret to another A.A. member who isn't even ordained clergy, or even sworn to secrecy.
X In Step Eleven you are supposed to "channel" God and receive psychic work orders and power.
X Then Step Twelve tells you to go recruiting, to draft more alcoholics into this madness.
o There is also experimental evidence that the A.A. teachings about powerlessness lead to binge drinking. In a controlled study of A.A.'s effectiveness, court-mandated offenders who had been sent to A.A. for several months were engaging in five times as much binge drinking as the no-treatment control group which got no A.A. "help".
o A.A. boosters and propagandists constantly repeat the Big Lie that A.A. works great, and A.A. with its Twelve Steps is the way that everybody recovers: