Why do so many people leave Alcoholics Anonymous?

This is an interesting question, and is one that gets ignored by nearly everyone in the business of helping people with substance use issues.

AA has an extremely high membership turnover rate. According to reported figures, 95% of those who enter AA in any given year leave before that year is over, with the majority departing within the first three months. That is a staggering attrition rate for a fellowship that claims to save so many lives while promoting lifelong participation as essential to lasting recovery. This raises two important questions: Why do so many people walk away from AA, and perhaps more importantly, what is this overwhelming pattern of departure summarily dismissed or ignored?

AA as a Social Function

AA as an international institution provides a social function; it’s a place for the socially unwanted and troublesome to be shuffled away – out of sight and out of mind of the public. I realize that sounds horrible, and in a sense it is. In other ways it’s unfortunately, quite understandable. Heavy drinkers can be difficult to live with and even be around at times. I know because I grew up around plenty of them, and I became one myself. I was an emotional drain to all those I encountered when I was drinking heavily, and I’ve since seen and worked with tens of thousands just like me. So I get it. In the context that AA is the dumping ground for these social challenges, it serves that function extremely well.

The treatment industry with its rehabs, sober living, sober colleges, sober communities, therapeutic communities, and countless other institutions, exists primarily to serve this single function: to banish problematic substance users, including criminals seeking to avoid incarceration, to church basements and various institutions under the guise that “it’s good for them”. AA provides the universal model that underpins and sustains this system, facilitating a mass migration of people in and out of its “rooms” and affiliated institutions around the world.

We have to ask ourselves, if there was no social need or motive by loved ones to make heavy substance users disappear for a while, would AA be here today? Would the rehab and recovery society exist at all? Probably not, or it would most certainly be a fraction of the size and scope it is today.

Why Do People Leave AA?

Having coached and interviewed tens of thousands of heavy and habitual users of all manner of drugs and other compulsive behaviors over the past 37 years, the most common reason I’ve heard for rejecting AA is simple: its message of powerlessness, its rhetoric, and its 12 steps simply don’t resonate with them. Admittedly, some of this can be attributed to the fact that The Freedom Model, the book we published in 2017, naturally attracts people who already reject the 12-step paradigm. However, long before that book was written, my coaching practice was made up almost entirely of people who had rejected the AA and NA models. This was a consistent pattern well before The Freedom Model ever existed.

In the late nineties, AA World Services conducted a series of internal meeting surveys across the globe and found to their astonishment, that very few people who attended their first meeting were still there after 90 days, and that 95% of them had left by the end of that year.

The answer as to why is not a mystery. Simply ask them. I did. And here is what they said:

• “I know I don’t have an illness, that just doesn’t make any sense.”
• “There’s no way I’m sitting around with a bunch of losers griping endlessly about what I used to drink.” (I realize this one is a bit rude – but unfortunately it is a common thing I hear.)
• “My family comes first, not meetings.”
• “My career comes first, not meetings.”
• “My kids come first, not meetings.”
• “I don’t see how sitting in a church basement for years talking about drinking does anything but make me think about drinking more. It’s ridiculous.”
• “I hated rehab – I hate the meetings more.”
• “I did the steps, and to be honest, none of it really made sense.”
• “I don’t want to believe in a Higher Power or a God. If God didn’t fix (add whatever sad or tough historical issue here), then I don’t think he gives a shit about whether I take a drink or not.”
• “It feels like a cult.”
• “I got 13 stepped and was sexually abused (assaulted, molested) by my sponsor (or group member).”
• “I didn’t want to go to meetings with a bunch of pedophiles and criminals who are mandated to be there.”
• “I drank/used because I liked it, not because I had some metaphoric disease.”
• “I don’t believe my brain is conspiring against me – I just like getting fucked up and avoiding responsibility.”
• “I don’t have a problem. Everyone else thinks I do, but I don’t.”
• “I was mandated to go to AA but I have zero desire to change.”
• “I was mandated to go to AA for one DUI and now I’m stuck in the system. It’s bullshit!”
• “I have pending charges, so the drug court sent me to meetings. I hate them.”
• “The brain disease thing never made sense to me. I stop when I want to, and I get hammered when I want to. It’s that simple. I don’t need a bunch of self-righteous ex-drunks telling me what I should do.”
• “I don’t want to follow a pseudo religion from 1935.”
• “The founder of AA was a cult leader and I don’t want any part of it.”
• “AA is a cult.”

And the list can go on and on. This isn’t a mystery. And if more mental health professionals, counselors, physicians, families, and society as whole would stop and listen to the people they’re sending to AA things would likely change. There are valid arguments to be made here.

It is true that some people need immediate help because they are in a real crisis situation with their substance use. But labeling them with a false disease or disorder and shuffling them into treatment that will then prescribe they join a cult for the rest of their lives shouldn’t be the model we make the “gold standard”! It’s time to look at the data, listen to those who are struggling, and adapt our approach to a more scientific, logical approach that has proven positive results. The good news that already exists; it’s called The Freedom Model!