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1961 and after

Legacy

Bill’s last word on sudden and slow, a shelf of members’ own accounts, and researchers who set out to measure what AA calls an awakening.

“…they are certainly all of the same piece.”

Bill W., of sudden and gradual awakenings, introducing the Grapevine’s accounts of spiritual experiences · AA Grapevine, July 1962

All of the same piece

A year after Carl Jung’s death, the Grapevine set out to print members’ accounts of spiritual experiences now and then, and in July 1962 Bill W. wrote a few words to introduce them. People set the sudden ones apart, he wrote, and they drew mixed reactions: some readers wished they could have one, and others thought it all too far out on the mystic limb. His own, in 1934, had come with a sense of white light, and the only special things about it, he now felt, were “its electric suddenness” and the conviction it carried. In every other way it was no different from what came to any member who worked the program hard.

Members who asked him how to come by a sudden experience, he wrote, had probably had one just as good, only “strung out over a longer period of time.” He could see no great difference between the two kinds, and gave one test for both: “By their fruits, ye shall know them.” No one’s change should be questioned, sudden or gradual, and no one should demand a special kind for himself.

Members’ own accounts filled books. Came to Believe, gathered over five years and published by AA in 1973, has more than 75 members telling what “spiritual awakening,” “Higher Power” and “God as we understood Him” mean to them. The Grapevine collected its own in Spiritual Awakenings (2003) and Spiritual Awakenings II (2010).

The words stayed in the book. The second, third and fourth editions of the Big Book, in 1955, 1976 and 2001, kept Step Twelve’s “spiritual awakening” and the appendix headed “Spiritual Experience.” AA’s later pamphlets stretched what the words could hold. In Many Paths to Spirituality (2014) one member writes that it is possible “to be an atheist on matters of the supernatural but still have a spiritual awakening,” and in 2023 AA told reporters that members “need not hold any sort of religious or A.A.-defined spiritual beliefs to find help for their drinking.” (Good for God, in Suggestions Only, tells how those pamphlets came.)

Researchers, meanwhile, set out to measure it: whether such changes come suddenly, whether they make a difference, and for whom (Measured, below, gives six studies).

Listen Legacy About 1 minute

Since 1991

Measured

Since the 1990s researchers have tried to measure what AA calls a spiritual awakening: whether it comes suddenly, whether it makes a difference to drinking, and for whom. Here are six studies, in the order they were published.

From the studies’ own published summaries, and for Quantum Change from its publisher, its authors and their university. Each card says how many people were studied. These pages take no side, and nothing on them is medical advice.

  1. 200155 people

    William R. Miller and Janet C’de Baca, Quantum Change

    Two researchers at the University of New Mexico asked, in a local newspaper, to hear from people whose lives had been changed in a short time, and interviewed 55 of them. They found two kinds: insightful, a sudden flash of understanding, and mystical, a sense of being acted on by something greater.

    Keep in mind: these were people who came forward to say they had changed. Ten years later 30 of them were interviewed again, and none described going back to the old ways.

  2. 20021,526 people

    J. Scott Tonigan, William R. Miller and Carol Schermer, of Project MATCH’s clients

    Atheists and agnostics went to AA less often than religious clients, but going went with more abstinence whatever people believed, and abstinence didn’t differ between unbelievers and believers. Those unsure of their belief drank more often.

    Keep in mind: they wrote that belief in God seemed relatively unimportant to benefiting from AA, but that unbelievers were less likely to start going and to keep going.

  3. 2003587 people

    Lee Ann Kaskutas and colleagues, of people entering treatment, followed for three years

    Those who said at three years that they had had a spiritual awakening had the highest odds of having stayed sober all that year. Calling oneself religious wasn’t linked to significantly higher odds once other things were counted.

    Keep in mind: the summary doesn’t say how many reported an awakening, and an awakening reported at the end can’t show which came first.

  4. 20111,726 people

    John F. Kelly and colleagues, of Project MATCH’s clients over fifteen months

    Going to AA went with more spiritual practice, most of all in people who started with little, and AA’s benefit to drinking was “partially mediated by increases in spirituality.”

    Keep in mind: partly. Spiritual practice carried some of AA’s effect, not all of it.

  5. 201510 people

    Michael Bogenschutz and colleagues, of people with alcohol dependence given the drug psilocybin

    How intense the first session was predicted how much drinking changed afterward, and so did scores on a questionnaire of mystical experience.

    Keep in mind: ten people, no comparison group, and other effects of the session went with the change just as strongly.

  6. 201725 years of studies

    John F. Kelly, reviewing the research on how AA works

    Recovery through a spiritual awakening, as the Big Book puts it, may be true only for a minority, those with the most severe addiction. For most members AA seems to work through social, thinking and emotional changes, above all changes in the company they keep.

    Keep in mind: his institute’s summary adds that the best studies explain only about half of AA’s effect.

By their fruits

The studies found sudden changes that lasted, unbelievers doing as well in AA as believers, and spiritual change carrying part of AA’s effect, perhaps most for the hardest cases. None of them says what the experiences are. What they measured is close to Bill’s own test: what came of them.

For a closer look

Go deeper

Bill’s test in William James’s book, a study of sudden change, and a review of AA’s research for the Cochrane Library.

By their fruits

Bill’s one test was older than AA. In the first of his lectures William James wrote that those who had to judge visions and trances in the history of Christian mysticism, even those who insisted most that such things came from beyond nature, were forced in the end to the same test, what he called “our empiricist criterion”: the Gospel’s line about a tree and its fruit, to which James added “not by their roots.” Where an experience came from mattered less, he argued, than how it worked out in a life, and he pointed to Jonathan Edwards, who had argued the same in the 1740s.

Bill’s 1962 introduction gives the same Gospel line as its one sure test. Whether he had James’s page in mind, he didn’t say.

Quantum change

William R. Miller, a psychologist best known for motivational interviewing, a way of counseling people toward change, began his own study of sudden change in 1991. His 2004 paper defines a quantum change as sudden, dramatic and lasting, and cites William James’s book.

In the insightful kind, as Miller described it, a person suddenly sees something about his own life in a new way. In the mystical kind, like Paul’s on the road to Damascus, he feels acted on by something outside and greater than himself. Miller also worked on the 2002 study of atheists and agnostics in AA.

Twenty-seven studies

A review of AA’s research by John F. Kelly, Keith Humphreys and Marica Ferri for the Cochrane Library in 2020 gathered 27 studies with 10,565 people in all. It found high-certainty evidence that manualized programs built to steer people into AA, called twelve-step facilitation, did better at continuous abstinence than other established treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy, about 42 percent against 35 percent at a year by its publisher’s summary. Programs that weren’t manualized, it found, may do as well as the other treatments.

It counts outcomes, not what lies behind them, and so says nothing either way about spiritual experience. Its authors noted that 11 of the 27 studies were at high risk of bias in how people were assigned.

Sources