The 12 steps are a simple program for complicated people - and man, can they complicate the hell out of it. So many people have added so many frills and trappings, bells and whistles, pomp and circumstance to the Program over the years that the primary purpose has become blurred.
Current popular opinion is that meeting attendance is of primary importance and that the steps should take a back. This moral inversion, this loss of purpose could render a very important and effective tool rusty and inoperable.
This book examines the odds and ends that have found their way into the rooms of 12-Step Programs, and how they have diluted and diverted the effects of Recovery. I have written it in an attempt to avert a trend that has proved the undoing of so many good causes:
Useless ritual and vacuous oratory.