Abstract
This article reviews the dynamics of healing in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) through interviews with two women who are long-term members of the AA program. Donnel Stern’s relational psychoanalytic theory is used to describe how change might occur through the process of claiming one’s story and interpreting it through the structure of an empathic storytelling community. As the two women were recently married and locate their personal healing in the AA program, I consider how their alternative community influenced their coming to relationship. I conclude by imagining what the AA program might teach the Christian community, claiming that Christian congregations need to consciously and purposefully form relational and storytelling norms that foster an empathic listening environment.
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Notes
The names Willa and Stephanie are pseudonymous.
My favorable bias towards the spiritual and emotional aspects of AA does not dismiss the possibility of other methods of recovery. Project MATCH (1997, 1998), is the most extensive recovery research project to date. It claims that Cognitive Behavioral, 12-Step Facilitation, and Motivational Enhancement Therapy had approximately the same recovery outcomes, and patients in all methods reported a considerable reduction in drinking. For a review of this work, see Butler Center for Research (2010).
The term treatment refers to professional care at an inpatient or outpatient facility.
The quoted sayings are drawn from conversations with Stephanie and Willa. The general description is derived anecdotally from my experience as a pastor ministering to people in recovery and from attending AA meetings.
Stern’s language about a stable psychological spot created by listening is very close to Heinz Kohut’s statement about the mirroring self-object transference: “When, in the mirror transference, for example, a situation is established in which the patient feels he is being listened to and remembered by the analyst from hour to hour and week to week and imagines that he is in the analyst’s mind, that analyst becomes in the patient’s mind a stable psychological spot even when the patient is not there thinking of him” (Kohut 1996, p. 94).
To highlight the importance of relationship, in one study with 1-, 3-, 5- and 7-year follow-ups, having a sponsor increased the odds of maintaining abstinence over time, above the positive effect of meeting attendance (Witbrodt et al. 2012).
Stern’s interest in the creation of new stories has some resonance with the narrative approach to therapy (White 2007; White and Epston 1990). The narrative approach focuses on techniques that help create a new empowering story, often from what has been ignored in one’s life history due to a problem-saturated narrative. This approach implies an empathic listener but does not theorize on the effects of intersubjective space. In contrast, Stern is interested in unformulated and dissociated experiences and in the empathic, mentalizing relationship that allows a story to come into being. For Stern, the story does not drive the change. Change occurs inter- and intra-psychically, which then leads to the healing possibilities of story.
While there are AA meetings geared towards atheists, and members are encouraged to conceive of a Higher Power in any way that is helpful to them, the concept of religious conversion undergirds AA literature. For instance, the basic tenet of recovery is to first recognize one’s powerless over alcoholism and then, in Step Two, to believe “that a Higher Power could restore us to sanity.” In Step Three, the alcoholic is encouraged to say a prayer offering herself to God (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. 2001, p. 63).
Lewis Rambo (1993) describes relationship as an influential aspect of conversion in Understanding Religious Conversion. According to Rambo, relationships are often the most potent avenues of connection to the new faith, and establishing a relationship forms the foundation upon which a new way of life is built. This ties to story, because “central to the converting process is the convert’s reconstruction of his or her biographical memory and deployment of a new system of attribution in various spheres of life” (Rambo 1993, p. 170).
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Waters, S. Identity in the Empathic Community: Alcoholics Anonymous as a Model Community for Storytelling and Change. Pastoral Psychol 64, 769–782 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-015-0649-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-015-0649-1