Why do Alcoholics say they are recovering alcoholics and the AA Big BooK?

Question by starflower: Why do Alcoholics say they are recovering alcoholics and the AA Big BooK?
to finish my question. refer to an alocholic as being recovered?

Best answer:

Answer by Kevin
I believe it is because they believe they will always have an addiction to alcohol so will always be theoretically in “recovery” which is to say each day of their lives they say no to alcohol.

Answer by raysny
The Big Book mentions “recovered in foreword. In other parts of the BB, Bill Wilson says that people are never recovered. Those in AA who talk of being recovered represent a more fundamentalist faction of AA, The Pacific Group, the Back to Basics crowd. Often when religions start losing members, they will splinter, some factions becoming more fundamentalist in an attempt to get back to their former glory.

When Wilson talks of the “first 100 men” who got sober through AA, there were actually less than 50 and most of them ended up drinking again. That why Wilson talked of “recovering”.
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-effectiveness.html#hundred

Wilson flat out lied about his numbers, he claims “50% got sober at once and remained that way; 25% sobered up after some relapses, and among the remainder, those who stayed on with A.A. showed improvement.” but privately figured AA’s success to be about 5%, the rate of natural remission, that is people quitting on their own without treatment.

“During Bill’s stay in Akron, he and Bob calculated their success rate to be about 5 percent, and among the few who seemed to catch on, not all of them were able to maintain consistent sobriety. The first edition of AA’s Big Book, published in 1939, contains the personal recovery stories of many of AA’s earliest members. Some years later, Bill made notations in the first copy of the book to come off the press, indicating which individuals portrayed therein had stayed sober. A good 50 percent of them had not.”
Bill W. A Biography of Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounder Bill Wilson, Francis Hartigan, pages 91-92.

That AA does not improve on people quitting on their own was confirmed independently by George Vaillant, former Harvard professor, researcher, and AA trustee who performed the largest study of AA at the time. He wrote of his findings: “Not only had we failed to alter the natural history of alcoholism, but our death rate of three percent a year was appalling.”

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