causal attribution is death: Cause slides into Excuse — "how to keep the seductive ghost…"

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.)