How The 12-Step Program Ruins Lives

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I've done a video on the 12-step program before but it's been a while so I figured it was time I addressed this again with a fresh pair of eyes should you follow the 12-step program it's it helpful what do their numbers look like and for that matter what are the 12 steps let's get into it [Music] before we get into it I just want to mention that there are a few really good ways to show your support I consolidated all the ways on my website tell-tell atheist comm so if you want to read my blog articles check out my retro game store find out when I'm having meetups or conferences next or any of that stuff that's a pretty good central hub to find out if you do go there you'll find links to my patreon which is one of the best ways to support me my merchandise store which is also really good and my retro game store you also find links to my Twitter and Facebook and all kinds of other stuff links to all that stuff are also in the description so check it out also give my retro game channel a look I just launched it recently I talk about all kinds of game related subjects I think it's pretty interesting but I'm probably biased anyways let's take a look at the 12-step program I want to preface this video by saying that I was an addict for a long time and eventually I went to school for substance abuse counseling so this is a very personal subject to me I'm heavily invested in it in fact if you guys are curious I'll tell you this for context I take suboxone now I have four years since I got clean I tried quitting it recently and it did not go well I'll touch on it later but this is another part of my personal life but I haven't talked about at great length so let me just start from the beginning when I was a kid like 12 13 years old I was heavily isolated from society as a young Jehovah's Witness I wasn't supposed to talk to or hang out with outsiders really and there really weren't any Jehovah's Witnesses my age in my congregation a couple but they didn't like me much anyway so I was left on my own then I started homeschooling around that time from that point on I was completely isolated from society couldn't have friends from the outside world didn't have friends from within Jehovah's Witnesses both my parents have bipolar disorder so the only people I was ever around were two bipolar people now I was lucky enough to make it out with mental disorders like bipolar disorder which is really very lucky because bipolar disorder is hereditary I could just as easily have had it as enough but either way my personality was heavily shaped by the only people I was ever around for years so even though I don't have bipolar disorder which means I don't have massive emotional swings being alone with nobody to talk to except for them for you still deeply affects your personality I still say strange things sometimes I make connections other people wouldn't make that kind of thing it stayed like that for four years my mom worked and my dad slept because he was on intense painkillers so the vast majority of those four years were spent completely alone I remember watching live TV because I knew somewhere in the world the person I was watching at that very moment was doing what I was watching them do it was a connection to the outside that I didn't have by any other means so when I turned 16 I went back to public school at this point everybody I knew was in eleventh grade but since I hadn't really done any schoolwork for that entire four years I tested into tenth grade but I still had to get all the credits for high school the same as everybody else so I was in ninth grade classes at that point I'd pretty much just spent the past four years not speaking to another living human so I started trying to learn some social skills I made a few friends and from there I pretty much completely discarded Jehovah's Witness doctrine I decided to live my life the way I wanted to live Jehovah's Witnesses weren't working for me at all so 11th grade world's around and I was hanging out with people going to parties and drinking a little bit I had a girlfriend who was basically worldly non Jehovah's Witness she had some loose affiliation but it wasn't much to speak of at one of these parties I ended up smoking a cigarette and one of the Jehovah's Witnesses I went to school with caught wind of everything I was doing and decided to tell the elders about it he was kind of spying on me so the elders approached me and asked me about it and I just told him everything I had just turned 18 at this point I think I might have been in eleventh grade by now taking tenth grade classes basically still had two years of high school remaining so the elders set up a Judicial Committee and they'd his fellowship to me on my 18th birthday still in 11th grade I was kicked out of my house I had to crawl in the window of this girl I knew and stayed in her bedroom for three weeks before I finally found a place to live people don't realize what goes into hiding in a bedroom from a family for three weeks I tried to plan when I'd use the bathroom because I didn't want them to know I was there she would bring her food to the bedroom and eat it there so we could both eat I'd sneak back out the window to go to work every day she'd go outside and watch to make sure nobody was around so I could climb out eventually I ended up marrying her nine months later and my daughter Kylie was born nine months to the day after the wedding anyways I found a place to live a few weeks later with a co-worker he had an extra bedroom at his place the bed he had in his bedroom was smaller than a twin I don't know what size goes below twin but it was basically a kid's bed my feet hung off the end but it was a place to sleep and as time went on I found myself around more and more questionable people and eventually I got into drug use I know I've told this story before but it's been a while and I feel like the story is relevant to understanding why I found myself where I am today all of this was the result of leaving religion if I hadn't been abandoned by my friends and family if I hadn't been isolated from society for a good portion of my life I wouldn't have found myself in those types of situations now I can't blame it entirely on jehovah's witnesses i did make those choices myself but i wouldn't have been faced with those choices if I hadn't been abandoned by everybody like that drug use was a coping mechanism for the terrible shit I had just experienced for everything that I'd lost after a couple years of drug use I finally discovered a medication called suboxone which gives you the opportunity to deal with the emotional issues that led to drug use in the first place while preventing physical withdrawal this is about eight years ago that's how long I've been on suboxone here's a layman explanation of how it works you've got four opioid receptors in your brain each one acts on certain things if you have opioids in your body the receptors will affect your physical body which is what morphine does by killing pain they'll affect your mental state by giving you euphoria and they'll affect other stuff too an opioid that affects all four receptors is called a full opioid agonist like oxycontin or heroin and opioid that affects only some of the receptors is called a partial opioid agonist tramadol or ultram are partial opioid agonists because they affect a single opioid receptor suboxone affects two of the four so when I take suboxone it doesn't give me euphoria the only thing it does for me is it puts off withdrawal symptoms eventually I'll have to get off of it but that's really gonna suck because of withdrawal pain from suboxone lasts about 3 times longer than withdraw pain from heroin but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it I did try fairly recently about 6 months ago I started cutting my dose dramatically and it literally felt like my skin was being melted off with a blowtorch sorry for the graphic description but I felt like it was valuable so people understand what's involved so how does a 12-step program fit into all of this well when I entered recovery for addiction the 12-step program also known as Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous wouldn't take me because I was on suboxone they said it was trading one drug for another which is a perspective I can understand but first of all that's a little rich coming from a a and second maybe it is trading one drug for another but I'm not getting high from it and I'm a productive taxpaying member of society now where I wasn't before so it's preferable whether they like it or not suboxone allowed me to become a productive member of society where I wasn't before so why do I say it's rich coming from Alcoholics Anonymous because eventually I ended up going to school for substance abuse counseling and I learned all about how things affect your brain on a basic level let's take a look at the 12 steps and see what they're really doing to people step number one we admitted we're powerless over alcohol that our lives had become unmanageable of course this applies to narcotics too not just alcohol this one is a little ambiguous but at its face without the context you gain from going to an a a meeting it seems pretty innocuous admit that you have a problem okay I can get on board with that especially because it's one of the five stages of grief denial admit it's a problem and go from there number two came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity what what's this doing here came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity now the last ones starting to make sense you're powerless alone and you need God to help you quit just wait it gets even more questionable number three made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God something else the 12-step program likes to bake into you is that once you're an addict you're always an addict for life you're always sick you can never get better and you will always need the 12-step program and or God to prevent you from falling short it's an extremely religious message I am NOT an addict anymore I used to be an addict I understand I have the predisposition to get addicted to substances but I refuse to listen to somebody tell me I'm sick I'll always be sick and I need their program to get better for the rest of my life modern 12-step programs are kind of moving away from the God model but you still have a higher power it's really hard to have a program built this way without having the nations upon which it's built how do you exclude God from a 12-step program that hasn't through so many of these steps number four made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves I guess I can see how reflecting on how far your morals have fallen since becoming an addict could be helpful I'll let this one slide but again it's completely based around gun number five admitted to God our selves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs why is God even in this step because God acts on the brain in the same place as drugs do so their goal is to replace the drugs with a belief in a divine being more specifically the Christian God in a benevolent dictator who's always watching what you're doing and judging you for it but here's one of my main qualms with that philosophy what happens when your faith is challenged you can't face having your faith challenged it risks sending you right back into addiction it's objectively a bad idea to have people replace drugs with Jesus yes I said objectively BAM the reason I say that is because their long-term success rate is terrible the success rate is hard to pin down because addicts aren't going around reporting that they went back to addiction after leaving but it's estimated to be around five to ten percent who stay clean long term now I understand addicts or addicts and they might want to get help but might not be ready yet that happens but I'd be a lot more understanding of this program if it was based off of psychology in any way it's not it was founded by a church it's run by churches the meetings are held in churches it isn't a psychology based counseling program it's a church program number six we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character there is no God number seven humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings this is the same as step six number eight made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to all of them this one from a psychology perspective could be okay I guess but it isn't really for the addicts benefit it's for the others benefit more than anything so take that for what you will number nine make direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others they could have combined steps eight and nine number ten continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it this is an okay step but again not based on psychology there are secular drug rehab programs that are written up and planned out by actual psychologists unfortunately we don't know their long-term success rate yet because the 12-step program has had a monopoly on drug rehab for decades court systems order people to go to a a or NA not to secular therapy still working on getting studies for secular programs but it's a very long process number eleven sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out again trying to get people to replace the drug with God I would love it if they base the program on science instead of religion number twelve having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps we try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs you find this one in pretty much every religion proselytized spread the message I hear the same thing from every major religion they got some of these points right but the ones they did get right were pretty much just by chance not because they knew what they were doing a broken clock is Right twice a day if you struggle with addiction or if you know somebody who is do yourself a favor and find a secular therapy group the 12-step program is not based on science it was founded and run by religion anyway so that's all I've got for you don't forget that there are a few really good ways to show your support I consolidated all the ways on my website telltale atheist calm so if you want to read blog articles are right check out my retro game store find out when I'm having meetups or conferences next or any of that stuff that's a pretty good central hub to find out but if you do go there you'll find links to my patreon which is one of the best ways to support me my merchandise door which is also really good at my retro games store you also have links to my Twitter and Facebook and all kinds of other stuff also give my retro game channel look I just launched it recently I talked about all kinds of game related subjects links to everything are also in the description so check it out okay thanks for watching guys [Music] [Music]
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Channel: Telltale
Views: 32,564
Rating: 4.9091702 out of 5
Keywords: 12 step, alcoholics anonymous, narcotics anonymous, religious, religion, cult, telltale, bible, psychology, secular, how the 12-step program ruins lives, dont follow the 12 step program, addiction recovery, 12 steps, twelve-step program
Id: J0_3FEG-BSQ
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)
Published: Thu Aug 01 2019
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