causal attribution is death: Cause slides into Excuse
an appeal to exterior Cause that can slide, in the addictive mind, so insidiously into Excuse that any causal attribution is in Boston AA feared, shunned, punished by empathic distress. The Why of the Disease is a labyrinth it is strongly suggested all AAs boycott, inhabited as the maze is by the twin minotaurs of Why Me? and Why Not?, a.k.a. Self-Pity and Denial
Context
The theme's central doctrinal boundary, illustrated by the hard-faced stripper whose horrific etiology of exterior Cause curdles the room's empathy. The insight is not that her story is untrue but that Why is fatal: in the addictive mind, explanation slides "so insidiously into Excuse" that the search for causes becomes a permission structure for using. AA therefore boycotts the whole labyrinth of Why Me?/Why Not? — Self-Pity and Denial — and replaces it with a "goofily simple practical recipe" for treating the Disease day by day. The program is deliberately anti-analytic: understanding your addiction is how you feed it; the only survivable question is How, never Why. (The abuse-etiology's "It" and the catatonic body are disability-deformity's; the Raquel mask-as-object is surveillance-disguise's — routed.)