Beyond the Controversy: What Research Really Shows About AA

When it seems like everyone on social media is criticizing 12-step programs, where can you find the truth about what really works for addiction recovery? Matt Brown dives into groundbreaking Stanford University research that examined 35 studies involving 10,080 participants to answer a simple question: Does Alcoholics Anonymous actually work?

The science is startlingly clear. AA was found to be "nearly always more effective than psychotherapy in achieving abstinence," while significantly reducing healthcare costs. This research, led by Dr. Keith Humphreys (who initially dismissed AA himself), provides compelling evidence that the social connection component of 12-step programs creates powerful healing that formal therapy alone often can't match.

Matt shares his own journey from homeless, penniless alcoholic to 22 years of sobriety, addressing his initial resistance to AA's core concepts: the disease model and belief in a higher power. His story reveals how the social connection and accountability found in meetings ultimately saved his life, despite his skepticism.

Whether you're questioning the value of AA for yourself or a loved one struggling with addiction, this episode offers research-backed insights without judgment. Matt emphasizes that while multiple paths to recovery exist, discounting effective options based on misconceptions can have life-or-death consequences. For anyone concerned about addiction, this evidence-based perspective on what truly works could be the most important thing you hear today.

Email your questions or comments to Matt at matt@partywreckers.com, and don't forget to join the new Sunday night meetings starting June 15th at 8pm Pacific time.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Party Wreckers podcast, hosted by seasoned addiction interventionist, Matt Brown. This is a podcast for families or individuals with loved ones who are struggling with addiction or alcoholism. Perhaps they are reluctant to get the help that they need. We are here to educate and entertain you while removing the fear from the conversation. Stick with us and we will get you through it. Welcome the original party wrecker, Matt Brown.

Speaker 2: 0:52

Welcome back. Thank you guys for tuning in for another episode. My name is Matt Brown, I'm your host. I am an addiction interventionist and have been for the last 22 years 21 years now. I've been sober for 22 and been doing this kind of work since I had a year sober and love every minute of it and I appreciate you guys giving me a little bit of your time today to listen in and I hope that you know today's topic will be of interest to you. It certainly was to me. I may fumble around a little bit as we get into this, just because I've got an article printed out in front of me here and I'm going to want to talk a little bit about some data. I found this to be very interesting, but before I launch into that, let me just announce that starting this Sunday, june 15th, and every other Sunday after that, intervention on Call is now doing a Sunday night meeting at 8 pm Pacific time. For those of us out here on the West, my friend Pej, who's an interventionist out of Los Angeles, and myself we will be hosting the Sunday night meetings If you have a loved one in active addiction and, for whatever reason, have found it difficult to make the Monday and Thursday meetings because they're at 5 pm Pacific time. We wanted to start a West Coast meeting that would be a little bit easier for families out West here to attend and hopefully have access to myself and Pej and other interventionists as they join in to answer questions and give you guys some guidance. Live on the Zoom meetings that we do every week, so I'd love to see you there. You can register at Intervention On Call.

Speaker 2: 2:33

Today's topic I want to talk about something that I have been seeing with a little bit more frequency on social media. I've been seeing a lot of content creators talking about the ineffectiveness and even the abuse of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step fellowships. There's a lot of people out there right now that are hating on the 12-step process for whatever reason, and we can get into that and just kind of the fundamental premise of AA, and some of them have experienced some abuse in treatment centers where the 12 steps were used. I won't get into, you know all of that. I'm sure you can find their content if you look for it. But you know, because I am a 12 step guy, you know my my initial reaction was to get a little bit defensive and to to come on here and, just you know, do what I can to try to defend AA and to defend the 12 steps, and once I did my best to move my ego aside, I realized that AA doesn't necessarily need me to defend it. Um, it's been doing quite well on its own without me. But I do want to bring some things to light here and hopefully maybe provide a different voice out there in all the noise that's going on. And so, if you'll indulge me, I would like to be a different kind of voice than maybe some of those that are out on social media talking about AA in a negative way. On social media talking about AA in a negative way.

Speaker 2: 4:08

Let me first and foremost say that AA saved my life when I decided to get sober. I had had an intervention two years prior, did not want to go to treatment, refused to get help, and it took me two more years before I finally decided that it was time to start looking into making a change. At the time, I was homeless, I was penniless and was not going to go back to my family and let them know like, hey, I think you were right, I think I have a problem and I think I need some help. My pride was still much too thick, much too heavy, whatever the appropriate way to say that might be uh, to really let to to admit that I had been wrong. So I went you know, privately to to an AA meeting and discovered that there were some people there that were happy that they were sober and, more importantly, that they they invited me to come back and there was a social element to it that really attracted me, more so even than whether or not they were getting sober.

Speaker 2: 5:13

Fundamental flaws, just in my initial glance at what AA had, there were two fundamental flaws in what they believed, or what I might have to believe should I end up going there. The first one was that the people who went to AA believed that they had a disease, and I absolutely rejected the idea that alcoholism was a disease. I thought that was a cop-out. I thought it was just a really easy way for people to avoid taking responsibility for all of the mistakes and bad decisions that they had been making and that alcoholism was a choice. And while I did believe I was an alcoholic, I did not want to believe that I had a disease. I felt like that was just a real cop-out and it was just. You know, if I went to AA, I was going to listen to a bunch of people come up with a bunch of excuses about how they had a disease and they couldn't help but be alcoholics.

Speaker 2: 6:13

The second reason that I avoided AA and 12-step rooms was because they believed in God, and growing up the way that I did, I experienced the idea of God as being very punitive, very hurtful, and by the time I was ready to get sober, I was calling myself an atheist. I rejected the belief in God. I rejected the idea of God and the idea that the only way for me to be sober was for me to have some sort of a belief in God or in a higher power. I wanted nothing to do with that. I would rather have a fistfight with you than talk to you about God, and so that probably kept me away from the 12-step rooms longer than I needed to be there.

Speaker 2: 7:05

But by the time life had beat me up to the point where I was ready to get some help, I thought well, you know what, what could it hurt to go in and take a look? Humility was starting to set in, and when I went and experienced my first meeting, it was a Sunday morning gratitude meeting and there were about five or six other guys in the room and there were all men. There were no women in the room and it wasn't a men's meeting, but there just happened to be a room full of men and they put their arm around me, they made me feel welcome, they invited me to come back the next day and for me that was an experience I hadn't had for a while. I was made to feel welcome, I was made to feel like I belonged and I was invited back. I had not been invited back somewhere in a long, long time. Once people got a little taste of what I was all about.

Speaker 2: 7:56

I rarely got invited back anywhere at that point in my life and so initially the hook for me was that I went because there was a group of people that I felt like might understand me, that might get me, and they didn't reject me right out. If you've listened to previous episodes that, you've kind of heard that. But after hearing me share a little bit about my story and my experience, these men while I thought that I was immediately going to get rejected, they didn't. They made me feel welcome and they asked me to come back, and that's been my experience throughout my journey in the 12 steps is that part of our responsibility is to hold out our hand to the newcomer and to make that newcomer feel like they're welcome because we do understand them. The details of our stories are very, very different. In many cases there's differences between the men and the women in the programs, the old and the young in the programs that we can always find the differences. But underneath it all, we all know what it's like to feel the way that that newcomer feels when they walk into the room scared and beaten and just whipped by the world.

Speaker 2: 9:15

Nobody comes to AA because they're sliding in on a winning streak. We've all had some consequences and we all come with our tail between our legs, hoping that maybe this isn't going to be as bad as it otherwise, as we're making it out to be in our head. And you know, some people come in because they they they're taken by a treatment program. Some people come in because the courts tell them that they have to and they've got to have so many signatures. You know so many. You know vouched attendance at at at different meetings signatures you know so many, you know vouched attendance at different meetings. But it's our job as people who have gotten our recovery in the 12 steps, to hold out our hand and make those people feel welcome. And so I say that just to kind of set the stage and maybe to paint a little bit of a picture as to why my initial reaction to some of the hate that I see out there is what it is Now, as I've been talking with families, especially in the weekly Zoom meetings that we're doing with families, there was a dad the other night that was talking about his son and his son had a real resistance to going to meetings and speaking in groups.

Speaker 2: 10:21

He says I don't want to go to meetings, I don't want to be in groups because all they talk about is alcohol and drugs and for me that makes me want to use more and I don't buy that. I think that's a cop out. I think that that is early recovery. It's what happens in early recovery for almost all of us. It's it's it's what happens in early recovery for almost all of us. Nobody wakes up one day and says you know what? I think I'm gonna get sober and and doesn't go through that, that process where we have that obsession. We have those, those cravings and and the idea that I'm gonna go to a meeting and somehow that's gonna trigger that response in me. That response is already there. That response in early recovery.

Speaker 2: 11:06

I couldn't walk past a bar without wanting to go in. Even that stale smell of beer. Walking past a bar is that what hit me. As it came out the door and hearing people laugh on the inside, there was something, just this romantic idea that, wow, I'm really missing out. The cravings, the obsession, all of those things my brain was telling me you need to be in there drinking with the rest of them. Thank goodness I didn't. But anybody that says that they don't go through that in early recovery, regardless of whether they're talking in a meeting or listening to other people speak in a meeting. It's not the meetings that cause that, it's the recovery process. As we get further and further away from our last drink and actually dive into the work, those things get easier. So don't buy it when your loved one is telling you I can't do this, because every time I go to a meeting, all I want to do is I come out wanting to drink more than I did when I went in. That's nonsense. I just want everybody to hear that. That is utter nonsense.

Speaker 2: 12:05

Now, having said all of that, I came across this article. It's actually it was put out in 2020 by the Stanford School of Medicine, and I would say that that's a pretty reputable source. The title of the article is Alcoholics Anonymous Most Effective Path to Alcohol Abstinence. Article is Alcoholics Anonymous Most Effective Path to Alcohol Abstinence. And the reason that I really am kind of diving into this particular article and you may have heard me talk about other articles or other studies in previous episodes, but the thing that I like about studies where I can really kind of dig into them is when you have researchers or scientists or doctors that will not just take a single sample size. You got in this particular study. They had 35 studies involving the work of 145 scientists and the outcomes of 10,080 participants, so it's not a single study. This is 35 different studies, and of these 35 studies sorry, I'm flipping pages here if you're hearing this the researchers found 57 studies on AA.

Speaker 2: 13:17

Of those, only 35 passed their rigorous criteria for quality, criteria for quality. So they excluded some of the studies that they found, just because the criteria that they were looking at in terms of measurements, these other studies didn't meet that criteria. They didn't feel like the data was solid enough to include in the research they were doing at the time. So I appreciate that they were willing to exclude some of the studies, even if the data was to back up what their findings were. They excluded those studies and it really, at least in my mind, helped solidify the fact that they went about this in an unbiased way. They went about this in a way that really they wanted to show whether or not AA particularly. They did not look at NA or any of the other anonymous organizations. They specifically looked at AA, but they wanted to see is this as effective as people say it is?

Speaker 2: 14:09

Keith Humphreys, a PhD professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and his fellow investigators determined that AA was nearly always found to be more effective than psychotherapy in achieving abstinence. In addition, most studies showed that AA participation lowered healthcare costs. It's free. You know that's the other benefit. Especially when I went to AA, I didn't have two pennies to rub together. I needed something that was going to be absolutely free, and so that was the other thing that attracted me to. That is that you know I can go and I could participate, and nobody expected me to contribute. Yeah, they passed the basket and you know we have the seventh tradition where we're self-supporting through our own contributions. But nobody looked at me in those early days and said, hey, buddy, where's your dollar for the basket? You know they understood where I was at. It's readily available. The thing that I appreciated about this is that they found that it was nearly always more effective than psychotherapy in achieving abstinence.

Speaker 2: 15:17

This was put out by Dr Keith Humphreys, a PhD professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. So and I'll get into this a little bit further in the article but you have somebody who's educationally accomplished and is discovering that this anonymous organization, this organization where there's no leadership, there's no clinical components, there's no therapists or doctors running the groups, that it was almost always more effective than psychotherapy alone. As we get into this a little bit, one of the things that he says is AA works because it's based on social interaction. And you know, like I shared from my own experience experience I believe, that that's the case for me. The hook for me was the social component. I didn't feel alone and you know, some of you may have heard from your loved ones, well, I hate being in groups, I don't want to go to groups, I don't want to go to meetings. I don't want to have to listen to other people, I don't want to talk in front of other people. I would rather just do one-on-one therapy. And I've heard several therapists who work primarily in behavioral health and addiction recovery who have said and I tend to see this this way is that if I were designing a treatment center or if they you know the way they put it if they were designing a treatment center, there would be no individual therapy, there would only be group. And I think there's some wisdom to that.

Speaker 2: 16:55

When you look at the social elements and really trying to break down those barriers of differences, you know people go into treatment all the time looking for differences. I'm not like them. I'm not like these people over here. Time looking for differences. I'm not like them. I'm not like these people over here. I'm too old, I'm too young, I'm a professional, I've made too much money or the opposite. There's always differences that we can look for.

Speaker 2: 17:19

But when you get down below the surface level stuff and you really start to dig in, I have everything in common with the homeless guy that's coming into his first meeting, as they had with me when I was the homeless guy coming into my first meeting and even though my life looks very different today than it did back then, the experience with how I felt back then is the same experience that I continued to struggle with both before and after I got sober. And so, you know, one of the things that he said in this paper was if you want to change your behavior, find some other people who are trying to make the same change. All of a sudden, you've got a common goal. You're all working for something, even though you're working for it individually in your own lives. Everybody's there with a common purpose. Everybody there wants to be sober and help others achieve sobriety. Everybody there wants to be sober and to help others achieve sobriety. And, you know, even though there's a lot of skeptics out there, there's a lot of people out there that really want to run AA down. It's. We are all there for a common purpose.

Speaker 2: 18:33

Nobody. You know I don't get anything. I don't gain any advantage over the new guy coming in. You know the people that were there before me weren't looking to take advantage of me or getting anything out of me. Are there people that I wish wouldn't say sometimes the things that they say? Are there people that get offended and don't come back because of what they hear in meetings. Absolutely, I've been that guy, I've been the guy that got offended and I've been the guy that said something that I shouldn't have. You know, and, and the idea is is that we have to. You know, we, we hear this in every meeting. You know that there's a reason for anonymity, there's a reason for that spiritual principle, and it reminds us to place principles before personalities, to place principles before personalities.

Speaker 2: 19:23

And when I find that my personality is in conflict with something that I hear in a meeting or something that I hear from an individual, you know, when I first came to AA, my thought was well, I have to remember that I have to practice principles instead of paying attention to all these people's awful personalities. I thought it was talking about all the people that were going to offend me and the personalities that would push me away, and I have to remember that I'm there to follow some principles. And it wasn't until later that I realized that it was talking about my shitty personality, my awful personality. That was the personality that really needed to change and that the principles would help me do that, the principles that recovery would allow me to learn and practice Things like forgiveness and honesty and integrity, and all of these things that we learn how to do as people in recovery that run completely contrary to what our personalities develop to be.

Speaker 2: 20:20

In addiction. We become these selfish and self-centered people that are only concerned about what we want, when we want it, how we want it. And as we practice these principles of recovery, we begin to develop different personalities. We begin to experience what oftentimes we refer to as a psychic change, where we begin to develop this new identity. And it only happens as other people hold this mirror up to me.

Speaker 2: 20:48

And while I love therapy and I have a therapist and I go to therapy even now, I think that it's important that people that have no vested interest in what my life looks like are able to hold a mirror up and I allow them to hold me accountable, because they're going home to their families, they're not going to spend their nights thinking about whether or not you know he listened to me, is he going to do what I told him to do, and there's no financial gain for them. Whether I do it or not. You know, I pay my therapist when I go to therapy, you know, and while I don't think she's in it for the money. It's a. It's a business just like as me as an interventionist. This is how I make my living. I'm an interventionist and I work with families who have addicted loved ones and and I think that's the difference where we have to really make that distinction of you know, is this service work or is this professional work, especially for those of us that work in this industry? Let me just jump to a different page here because there's a lot to go over. So, as it was getting into kind of the outcomes Of these 35 different studies that he did, you know, the 149 scientists, the 10,080 participants different studies had different results.

Speaker 2: 22:08

Of the 57 studies that were originally seen, the 35 that passed, they weren't all consistently universal in what their metrics were. They weren't all consistently universal in what their metrics were, but some of them were testing for different criteria, not just simply success rates across the board. In terms of abstinence, one study looked at okay, what does it save in terms of healthcare costs? One study found that it was about 60% more effective than other recovery programs or therapy or treatment. None of the studies found AA to be less effective and I found that to be pretty remarkable that, while there's a ton of naysayers out there and everybody's out there. I shouldn't say everybody. That's a sweeping generalization. Everybody's out there. I shouldn't say everybody. That's a sweeping generalization. When you have as many people that are out there on a platform on social media talking about how AA ruins lives, how it's a cult, how people get indoctrinated and they have to believe that they're powerless and their lives are unmanageable and you know, when you have so many different ways to get sober and stay sober and I'm not saying that AA is the only way. Please hear that. I am not saying that but what they found is that there were there were no studies found it to be less effective than any other recovery model. One study found that AA and 12-step facilitation counseling reduced mental health costs by $10,000 per person.

Speaker 2: 23:46

You know Dr Humphreys, who was the original author of you know the compilation of all these. You know he, the compilation of all these. You know he. I think he struggled a little bit and I'm trying to find it here. Forgive me for the page turning. He even says in this article he says early in his career, humphrey said he dismissed AA, thinking how dare these people do things that I have all these degrees to do.

Speaker 2: 24:15

It was almost as though you know from this lofty, you know mountaintop. He was saying I have gone to school and I have all these degrees. Therefore, the way that I believe this should happen should carry more weight and more validity than than these untrained, unprofessional people that are out there trying to help everybody. But through the course of going through all these different studies, the evidence was irrefutable and I found it pretty transparent and pretty honest for him to say something like that. How dare these people do things that I have all these degrees to do?

Speaker 2: 24:56

I'm really grateful for the recovery that I have and, while I certainly have a slant, because my own recovery started in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, like I said before, I don't think that everybody has to go to AA to get sober or go to NA to get sober, but I know that there's a lot of us out there that are giving ourselves reasons and excuses as to why we shouldn't have to do it that way. And, and you know, just like with me, I don't want to do this because I don't want to believe that I have a disease and I don't want to have to believe that there's a higher power. You know, I want to believe that I'm in control and I can do this my way in my time frame. And we wrestle for control and I think that you know a lot of these other recovery modalities while they may be newer, and you know you can call them evidence-based or best practices or all the buzzwords that happen that we hear in the circles of recovery. Right, I want to say this without trying to sound demeaning, because I think that everybody out there trying to help somebody else get sober is doing good work. I don't want to take anything away from them and if you have a loved one that needs to get sober, if you are listening and you're struggling with your sobriety yourself and you want to investigate a different type of recovery modality, please do.

Speaker 2: 26:21

I think any effort that any of us can make to try to stay sober is a noble thing. It's an effort that should be applauded and encouraged and supported. It doesn't have to be in AA. I know for me it worked. I know for me it gave me the tools early on to be able to start seeing myself and the way that I fit into the world in a very, very different way. It helped me to break that cycle of selfishness and self-centeredness and it helped me to really become more aware of who I was and how I fit into the world.

Speaker 2: 26:54

And yes, at one point I put down my bias against God and while I don't ascribe to any particular religion or any church, I do have a belief system that works for me. I do believe in God and I believe that there's a higher power out there that if I, you know, like the third step says, if I practice turning my will and my life over to the care of God, as I understand him, my life has improved because of that. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm successful at doing that every single day, but on the days that I do it, I find that I'm more at peace and I'm less likely to get into self-will and try to run the show myself and get back into some of those old behaviors. So you know, on a lot of this, guys, I'm just speaking for myself.

Speaker 2: 27:49

I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that have different opinions than the ones that I'm expressing today and the ones that this study expressed. Good, you know, I think the world needs all these voices. I don't think that, you know, you should even take my word for it or take the words you know. I think the world needs all these voices. I don't think that you know you should even take my word for it or take the words you know from this study. I'm just.

Speaker 2: 28:08

I, like I said in the from the, from the outset, I just wanted to provide a different voice than the ones that you may be hearing out on social media that are really trying to run. What I feel like is something that saved my life into the ground. Really trying to run. What I feel like is something that saved my life into the ground. And if it's not for you or if it's not for your loved one, hey, I get it. But if the reasons that your loved one or you may be staying away are superficial reasons like the ones that I had, I would say maybe it's worth looking at this from a different point of view.

Speaker 2: 28:41

Maybe it's worth challenging those beliefs that just don't serve you anymore, because I know that the beliefs that I had, as much as I thought that I was right, they weren't helping me live a better life and the results were there for me. The results weren't what I wanted them to be. And when you're dealing with something that, in a very literal way, is can can be life and death, the results matter. And so if you're struggling, or your loved one is struggling, with sobriety and they've gone to treatment and they've been encouraged to go to meetings and they don't want to because they don't like it, it doesn't it, it triggers them to, to want to drink or use more, or you know, whatever the reasons are, I don't want to have to believe the way those people believe. Well, I know, early on, my brain needed a little washing. I'm not saying that we're all brainwashed, but given the thoughts that I was having and the beliefs that I had, my brain can use a little bit of a good scrubbing, if you know what I mean. And and you know I was able to come into the rooms and and find a way to not be a mindless drone. Just you know, repeating 12 principles or 12 steps to you know, to help others get sober and to help myself get sober. I found a group of people very different from one another, all united behind a common purpose to get sober and to help others to achieve sobriety. And and while there were so many differences in that room and I could have found hundreds, I could have found hundreds of reasons once I got in to say you know what? I don't belong here. But the thing that kept me coming back is that, of all these differences and all the different personalities and all the things that were in the rooms that I could have balked at. People wanted me there, people loved me when I felt like I was unlovable. And if for no other reason, come on in the water's. Fine, let us love on you a little bit. Let us help Find a meeting in your local area.

Speaker 2: 30:47

If you don't get a good feeling from it, try a different one. You know there's some stinkers out there. I'm not going to lie to you. There's some stinkers of meetings out there. You know you'll get in there and you're just going to find like, hey, these are not the people that I want to get sober with. Okay, go find a different meeting. And and if, after really investigating it and really working through the steps, you find that, hey, this is not something that I want to keep doing. Man, good for you, go try something else. There are so many paths to the top of the mountain. You know this is one of many. It's one that's worked for me and millions of other people, many. It's one that's worked for me and millions of other people and, like I said, I just want to be a voice of maybe a positive outcome and seeing the positive outcomes that it creates for other people.

Speaker 2: 31:31

If you have questions, if you have comments, if you feel like I'm completely off base and you've got another study that you'd like for me to read, send me an email. Matt, at partyrecordscom, I'll put a link to this study in the show notes for anybody that wants to go and reference it. But if you've got other ideas or if you find other studies that refute what I've said, send them my way. Let's start a dialogue here. I really appreciate the interaction that I've been getting with you guys lately from some of the emails that I've been getting. We'll do another Q&A show here coming up soon, but until then, guys, I hope your loved ones will get sober and stay sober. Thanks for tuning in.

Speaker 1: 32:14

Thanks again for listening to the Party Wreckers. If you liked what you heard, please leave us a rating and a review. This helps us get the word out to more people, to learn more or to ask us a question we can answer in a future episode. Please visit us at PartyWreckerscom and remember don't enable addiction ever.