There are about 15.3 percent of adults in Arkansas who are alcoholics and that is just the adults. There are two AA meetings that take place in Pocahontas and the others are 30 to 70 miles out. Only one of the meetings takes place in a church which shows that there is a christian influence. Whether they use Bill Wilson’s twelve step method is unknown and also not significant. Sources show that it isn’t important, the specific beliefs that they have or religion, but that just having faith is enough. Personal faith provides a moral foundation for different and better behaviors and having faith in a higher power lets the person feel comfort and peace. Brandon McCall, a local man who suffered from addiction, is the perfect example of how God really does affect your life. Mr. McCall was an addict who attended a faith based rehab in 2015. He said that when he first entered rehab that he knew he would make it. “I wanted it. You have to want it. I wanted to change, I just didn’t know how. A lot of people don’t know how.” Mr. McCall now has a full time job, a wife, and two children.

About 1 in 13 Americans are alcoholics. There are a number of reasons why one would turn to alcohol, but there isn’t a specific one that most people can pinpoint. It is possible that it can stem from the fact that the person was exposed to the substance from an early age. The psychologist Carl Jung, however, believed that people drank to find spiritual satisfaction. Jung wrote a couple of letters back and forth with Bill Wilson, who became the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Their letters started when Wilson contacted Jung on the matter of alcoholism in which Jung wrote that the craving was “equivalent to the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God”. Mr. McCall commented “people who suffer from addiction, any type of addiction, usually come from ungodly or broken homes.”

The Oxford Group, a christian organization founded in 1921, had what they called the four absolutes. The four absolutes are guides to help a person keep in tune with God’s will in their life. They were written originally by the Christian author Robert Speer and then later became a part of the teaching in The Oxford Group. The four absolutes of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love, also inspired Bill Wilson to write the book “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions”. One of the first quotes that Mr. McCall learned while staying at the faith based rehab was the Serenity Prayer and mentioned that there were many quotes in the Bible that discuss addiction and alcoholism. When asked about the selfishness experienced in addiction he said that it was “100 percent selfish… You not only have no care for yourself and what happens to you, but people around you. You have no remorse and this happens with any type of addiction.” Susan Cheever, an author who wrote a biography about Bill Wilson as well as a former alcoholic, said in the podcast “Spirituality and Recover” that there was “something mysterious that makes people feel whole” in AA. That there was a sort of “presence” that everyone felt and couldn’t overlook.