12-Step Programs do not Reach the Core Problem?

[teresaq]

12 Step Bureaucracy

“…where the AA and NA crowd continues to normalize boundary-breeching in its culture, many of the co-dependents have over-reacted and attempted to outlaw any form of communication they interpret as boundary-trampling, even when it isn’t.”

This is a further installment in the series of articles on the productive and counter-productive influences of adjunct therapy in 12 Step fellowships.

Background

Cognitive therapists working with patients participating in Co-Dependents Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, the Alanon Family Program, Relationships Anonymous, Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous and other 12 Step fellowships sometimes wonder why their patients have taken on “odd, new, dysfunctional beliefs” or even developed new pathologies. One commonly observed syndrome if greatly increased reference to absolutistic, black-and-white thinking, all-or-nothing, all-right (vs. all-wrong) interpretations of the particular program’s literature and cultural pronouncements.

It is well understood that “addicts” of various sorts tend to be addicts in part because of their concretism (see Piaget) and overly simplistic moralism (see Kohlberg). One of the requirements of long-term treatment of addicts is acquisition of awareness of their polarized dialectics (see Linehan, Follette & Pistorello, and Marra) and development of more intellectually mature, formal operational processing (see Piaget). The acquisition of the capacity to identify, question, reframe and either reject or revise dialectically positioned, opposing, core beliefs is widely understood among DBT and other MBCT-style therapists to be the key to relieving the “white knuckle” syndrome.

Read further:

http://sighkoblahgrr.blogspot.com/2011/05/12-step-bureaucracy.html

[phkrause]

I'd actually like to see Shane weigh in on this.