the vapider the cliché, the sharper the canines
‘Getting In Touch With Your Feelings’ is another quilted-sampler-type cliché that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out. It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.
Context
The scene's thesis about why the program speaks in banalities, and the mechanism behind the through-pain doctrine. The clichés are not shallow despite the depth beneath them but shallow because of it — a "quilted-sampler" surface stretched over something "ghastly deep and real," the vapidity in exact proportion to the danger it caps. "Getting In Touch With Your Feelings" sounds like a greeting card precisely because the feelings, once contacted, have canines. The theme's account of AA's language is that its corniness is a form of protection, letting the newcomer approach unbearable truths in tolerable increments. (The cliché-that-works register is irony-sincerity's — cross-ref.)