“A sober
alcoholic’s journey back to individuality
The other day I was lurking around in the children’s section of my favorite bookstore, trying to figure out what a four-year-old grandgirl might want for her birthday. Flipping through the $30 board books and propaganda about toilet training and environmentalism, I heard someone call my name.
I looked up. Oh, hi, Jim. Oh, I’m doing OK. Yes, really. Just doing a little shopping here. No, really, I’m OK. How are you?
It’s hard to be looked at with a mixture of embarrassment and pity, but that’s what I was seeing in Jim’s eyes. Clearly he didn’t want to run into me, as he had been making certain assumptions: that I had either “gone back out” and was drinking again, or else was in such a state of “dry drunk” rampage that I was making myself and everyone around me miserable.
Welcome to the wonderful world of an ex-AA. As with an ex-con, the sense of ensnarement never ends, at least not without a sense of Velcro-like ripping away and endless guilt.
There was a time when I needed AA like I needed to breathe. Yes, I am a real alcoholic, and I didn’t fully realize it until I crawled into a meeting on my belly in 1990. Scared sober, I became enmeshed in an organization that quickly took over my life.
Moreover, the more embroiled I became, the greater the praise heaped upon me. If I went to a meeting every day, I was a “good AA member”; more than once per day, and I was a spiritual giant.
It’s often said at meetings that you never graduate. That might have been OK if I’d at least had a sense of moving on to another level, but this was discouraged. People with 20 years sober are supposed to say at meetings (whether they believe it or not) that they are at exactly the same level as the newcomers, and are only one drink away from disaster.
I have to agree with this part: It will never be safe for me to drink again, and I’d better not forget it. After years and years of having this fact jackhammered into my head, I think I’ve come to accept it (for after all, “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”).
But from the very beginning, I was disturbed by certain pervasive beliefs deeply entrenched in the organization. Conformity is one. Don’t ever speak “outside” the AA rhetoric, or other people will assume you’re just not getting it, or (even worse) fighting the mighty and immutable truths of sobriety.
There is such a thing as AA dogma, often promoted by the elder statesmen: one elderly man, a veteran of World War II, came to the same noon meeting every day (supplementing it with evening meetings nearly every night) and talked at length about the war.
He talked about the war as it applied to AA, of course, about how he drank his way through the horrors of the battlefield (who wouldn’t?), came home to a wrecked life, and began to set himself straight on the Road of Happy Destiny.
I can’t begrudge an old man the comfort and safety of sobriety, but the war is all he ever talked about. And why do exactly the same dynamics that saved a grizzled old war veteran have to apply to a 15-year-old street kid? In AA, one size fits all, and if it doesn’t fit, YOU are made to fit yourself to it. If you ever hear a criticism from anyone, it’s always couched in terms of “well, I used to object to this and that” (I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see).
The 12 steps, forged in the ‘30s by a failed stockbroker and an inebriated doctor, are all about breaking the will, surrender, and absolute reliance on God “as we understood him”. Though the founders were in some ways quite spiritually evolved, leaving the door open to diverse interpretations of the divine, the actual practice of the program involves the God of Sunday school and revival meetings and “that old-time religion”. The practice of the program is light-years removed from the actual text.
We constantly hear slogans like “ninety meetings in ninety days”, “it works if you work it”, and reams of other cute sayings (my favorite of many acronyms: sober stands for “son-of-a-bitch, everything’s real!”). None of these are found in the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous, usually known as the Big Book. Though many members preface everything they say with “the Big Book says”, their interpretations are often pretty far off the actual content.
But that’s not what made me quit. Though there was one defining crisis that caused the actual split, there had been a steady accumulation of episodes that disturbed me (beyond the fact that one of my sponsees had been secretly draining my bank account to buy heroin). No one seemed to be willing to talk to me about any of this, as they were too busy going on and on about humility, surrender and the “incredible journey”.
Many AA members I knew literally had no friends or even business associates outside the program, and had brought their spouses and children on-board. This was encouraged. Those who didn’t usually ended up divorced: AA widows abound, and affairs rage on in spite of the organization’s ban on relationships in the first year and unnaturally pure assumptions about human nature.
Item: I was a couple of years in, doing well, stable, sober, and going to five or six meetings a week. Anything that bothered me about AA and its principles was relegated to some sort of seething pit of doubt that was without question my fault, due to my arrogance, lack of surrender and refusal to absolutely rely on God. This pit was a lonely, forbidden place that I seldom visited.
For you see, “everything happens for a reason”; everything happens “the way it’s supposed to happen”. (When my son’s roommate was savagely kicked to death outside a bar, an AA member told me it was “all part of God’s plan.”)
You hear this at every meeting. Though I didn’t voice my objection, because you just don’t do that at meetings, it struck me as alarming passivity. “Self-will run riot” was the ultimate evil, but it often seemed that having any individual will at all was somewhere between a sin and a crime.
My friend Louise told me this story: she had been horribly abused as a child, bullied by a sexual tyrant who was now beginning to abuse his grandchildren. As she sat around a campfire meeting, an exclusive club in which your deepest feelings were expected to be revealed, she finally shared the agonizing decision she had made: “I’m going to lay charges against my Dad.”
There was a brief, embarrassed silence, followed by this from the meeting’s ringleader: “Louise, I believe you have a resentment.” There followed a long discussion (or rather, a series of uninterrupted soliloquys: AA doesn’t do “cross-talk”) about how Louise had to surrender, let go of her resentment and anger, forgive. This was what she “should” do. And she'd feel so much better if she did.
I met her several months later and asked her how she was doing. “Much better. I formally charged my Dad with sexual assault, and he's going to trial next month. And I've left the program. I was tired of twisting myself into a pretzel.” I congratulated her, hugged her, and she looked at me, teary-eyed.
"I don't hate my Dad," she said. "I just want to stop the abuse." "Louise," I told her, "you may not realize this right now, but you're a hero."
Another episode, even more harrowing, involved a young woman who had been systematically tortured by her father for years. Her sponsor told her she must pray for the person who abused her, and wish for him everything she would want for herself.
If she forced herself to keep doing this for long enough, she would actually want these things for him. She was also told during her Step 5 (the confessional step) that she must always look for her part in everything that ever happened to her. She wrenched her brain around trying to figure out what her part was in being sodomized at age five.
She stood up at the meeting, looking fragile as glass, with tears running down her face. “I just don’t know how to make amends to my Dad. My sponsor says I’ll feel so much better if I do. But I feel like killing myself. I guess I’m just a lousy AA member. This is supposed to work. I’m not supposed to feel this way. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
I would have talked to her after the meeting (God knows what I would have said) except that a phalanx of members swarmed her afterwards, eager to make her case fit the immutable model. I wonder what happened, if she ended up like Hannah whose background was similar. Unable to endure what had happened to her, she committed suicide. Members buzzed about “those with grave emotional and mental disorders”, and carried on.
If I am painting AA too darkly, if I am leaving out the tremendous compassion and real help I found at those early meetings, then I apologize. But as time went on, I found I just couldn’t keep the dogma fresh. Except for some of the stories in the back, the Big Book has not changed since its first printing 70-some years ago.
What other self-help program wouldn’t update itself in so many decades? What about all the discoveries we’ve made about family dynamics, about heredity, about mental illness? What about issues of race, religion and sexual orientation? (There are a few “gay AA” meetings in which members are held in quarantine. But in the general assembly they have to keep their mouths shut. I once saw a man at an open meeting refer to coming out, prompting an old geezer to literally stomp out of the meeting saying, “I didn’t know this was a meeting for queers!”)
No, it’s all swept into the great gulf: obviously the program “works if you work it” the way it is, so why change it? But I have come to believe that if the program works, it is because people sublimate their individuality, their power to differ, discern and object. The fact that the 12 steps have been applied to every addiction and disorder in existence alarms me, as if the steps truly are the holy grail of recovery, unassailable, irreplaceable, and beyond question.
My irritability mounting as the years went on, I finally hit a real crisis in 2005. I had suffered from some kind of psychiatric disorder all my life, and in spite of many years of good remission I always feared a return. I was repeatedly reassured in AA that it would never bother me again if I stayed sober and constantly "turned it over" to God. It was obvious to them (though not to me) that it had all been caused by the demon alcohol.
I secretly took two drugs to control my whatever-it-is (and in all that time I’d never had a correct diagnosis, because the psychiatric system is so incompetent, abusive and full of shit that it deserves to be torn down forever. Another post!) Suddenly I learned over the ‘net that both these drugs had been recalled at the same time.
My doctor had no idea this had happened. So I was left with a choice: try something new, as my doctor recommended, or go “drug free”, as all my AA friends had been pressuring me to do. My first reaction was a huge flush of euphoria, of tremendous energy, and an eerie turning back of the clock. I had never had so many complements about my appearance: I looked ten years younger! Looking back on photos of that time, my eyes were like pinwheels and I was constantly beaming, but apparently no one thought this was strange.
My first book launch. No problems here.
Oh, and the compliments on finally being “clean”! “Thank God you’re finally off all that stuff.” “I knew you could do it!” “See, you don’t need to lean on those pills because now you have God in your life.”
My sleep was whittled down slowly, but by the time I was down to two hours, strange things were starting to happen. In deep hypnosis to restore my sleep (by a friend who didn’t know what he was doing), I had an encounter with the Divine that was completely shattering. My fried neurons and complete lack of emotional balance took me to a place that no person should ever go. Almost at the cost of my life, I learned that “meeting God” is not necessarily peaceful or pleasant. The ancient belief that we will die if we see God face-to-face very nearly turned out to be true.
The sickening free-fall that followed, the whistling plunge into a depression that pushed me deep below ground, is beyond my powers to describe. It was three years before I began to feel like a human being again. I am now on five drugs and have finally found a decent, competent psychiatrist on the recommendation of a friend. He has ascertained that I am bipolar, have always been bipolar, and always will be bipolar, and this is a huge relief.I no longer take medical advice from people who aren’t doctors or try to “heal myself” on things people "swear by", such as milk thistle, birch bark or coffee grounds. But when I think how close I came to giving up and committing suicide, it makes me shudder.
AA did not help me during the most harrowing time of my life. All I got was more unhelpful rhetoric. I wasn’t surrendering, I wasn’t practicing the principles, I wasn’t adhering to the tenet of “no mind-altering substances” (another thing that’s not in the Big Book, but often “quoted” by members with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other).
In other words, it was my lack of commitment that had made this happen. Almost everyone assumed I had “slipped” and was drinking again (which I wasn’t – I had a healthy terror of the stuff by then). At first it was subtle, but eventually I felt roped off, excluded, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone. I stood in the crowd after meetings looking at a lot of turned backs. Even my sponsor always seemed to be busy.
I had been a loyal, sober, contributing member of the program for 15 years. It didn’t really occur to me, because I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that there were other, equally effective ways to stay peacefully sober. But I knew it was time to venture out.
I rediscovered a close friend who had also dropped out, and we compared notes. I began to realize that in any other situation, if a human being were relentlessly exposed to the same simplistic information over and over and over again, it would be reasonable to assume they “got it” and wouldn’t need any more exposure. Do we go to Sunday school until we’re 47? Do we need to have the Golden Rule blasted into our ears by loudspeaker every morning?
OK, I realize that if AA no longer means what it used to, I don’t have to go. But it was often said at meetings that the program was a "life sentence" (preferable to the death sentence of alcoholism). In other words, it's just assumed you will keep "working it" until you die.
The guilt still sometimes jabs at me like pinpricks, even two years after I left. The pity in Jim’s eyes, the sense of “oh, she’s going to fly apart at any minute” was palpable. In his view, there is simply no way that an alcoholic can ever stay sober and be happy and productive (though the program is not very big on “productive” - meetings always come first -and subtly discourages normal ambition) without relentless exposure to the principles of the program.
I hope I don’t drink again, but I know there is no guarantee I won’t. I am profoundly committed to the sober life. I do appreciate what I was able to learn from my many years in AA, but I don’t think I’ll attend meetings again unless my view changes or I find myself in a dangerously slippery place.
And if I do, I will not expect “fellowship” or any kind of welcome (unlike the penitent "slippers" who are taken back with open arms). I can only imagine what they would think if they saw me again. They would either turn the cold shoulder like they did before, or pounce.
I've come to realize some things in the last couple of years. Longtime members creep me out. They're just a bit too Stepford for me: broken records of recovery, parrots fed on the same bland diet, grateful to be huddling together in a place where everyone accepts them and nothing ever changes.
But that’s not life. Things don’t stand still except in old Jimmy Cagney movies. Life necessitates constant adaptation to change which is often unexpected, wrenching and unwelcome.
But we are not taught that in AA. We are taught to rely absolutely on a "God of our understanding," believing there are no mistakes in God's world. When adversity hits, we’re told to accept it and"turn it over", because it’s “all part of God’s plan”.
It would be nice if it were true. In the meantime, I think I'd better make a plan of my own.”
The other day I was lurking around in the children’s section of my favorite bookstore, trying to figure out what a four-year-old grandgirl might want for her birthday. Flipping through the $30 board books and propaganda about toilet training and environmentalism, I heard someone call my name.
I looked up. Oh, hi, Jim. Oh, I’m doing OK. Yes, really. Just doing a little shopping here. No, really, I’m OK. How are you?
It’s hard to be looked at with a mixture of embarrassment and pity, but that’s what I was seeing in Jim’s eyes. Clearly he didn’t want to run into me, as he had been making certain assumptions: that I had either “gone back out” and was drinking again, or else was in such a state of “dry drunk” rampage that I was making myself and everyone around me miserable.
Welcome to the wonderful world of an ex-AA. As with an ex-con, the sense of ensnarement never ends, at least not without a sense of Velcro-like ripping away and endless guilt.
There was a time when I needed AA like I needed to breathe. Yes, I am a real alcoholic, and I didn’t fully realize it until I crawled into a meeting on my belly in 1990. Scared sober, I became enmeshed in an organization that quickly took over my life.
Moreover, the more embroiled I became, the greater the praise heaped upon me. If I went to a meeting every day, I was a “good AA member”; more than once per day, and I was a spiritual giant.
It’s often said at meetings that you never graduate. That might have been OK if I’d at least had a sense of moving on to another level, but this was discouraged. People with 20 years sober are supposed to say at meetings (whether they believe it or not) that they are at exactly the same level as the newcomers, and are only one drink away from disaster.
I have to agree with this part: It will never be safe for me to drink again, and I’d better not forget it. After years and years of having this fact jackhammered into my head, I think I’ve come to accept it (for after all, “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”).
But from the very beginning, I was disturbed by certain pervasive beliefs deeply entrenched in the organization. Conformity is one. Don’t ever speak “outside” the AA rhetoric, or other people will assume you’re just not getting it, or (even worse) fighting the mighty and immutable truths of sobriety.
There is such a thing as AA dogma, often promoted by the elder statesmen: one elderly man, a veteran of World War II, came to the same noon meeting every day (supplementing it with evening meetings nearly every night) and talked at length about the war.
He talked about the war as it applied to AA, of course, about how he drank his way through the horrors of the battlefield (who wouldn’t?), came home to a wrecked life, and began to set himself straight on the Road of Happy Destiny.
I can’t begrudge an old man the comfort and safety of sobriety, but the war is all he ever talked about. And why do exactly the same dynamics that saved a grizzled old war veteran have to apply to a 15-year-old street kid? In AA, one size fits all, and if it doesn’t fit, YOU are made to fit yourself to it. If you ever hear a criticism from anyone, it’s always couched in terms of “well, I used to object to this and that” (I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see).
The 12 steps, forged in the ‘30s by a failed stockbroker and an inebriated doctor, are all about breaking the will, surrender, and absolute reliance on God “as we understood him”. Though the founders were in some ways quite spiritually evolved, leaving the door open to diverse interpretations of the divine, the actual practice of the program involves the God of Sunday school and revival meetings and “that old-time religion”. The practice of the program is light-years removed from the actual text.
We constantly hear slogans like “ninety meetings in ninety days”, “it works if you work it”, and reams of other cute sayings (my favorite of many acronyms: sober stands for “son-of-a-bitch, everything’s real!”). None of these are found in the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous, usually known as the Big Book. Though many members preface everything they say with “the Big Book says”, their interpretations are often pretty far off the actual content.
But that’s not what made me quit. Though there was one defining crisis that caused the actual split, there had been a steady accumulation of episodes that disturbed me (beyond the fact that one of my sponsees had been secretly draining my bank account to buy heroin). No one seemed to be willing to talk to me about any of this, as they were too busy going on and on about humility, surrender and the “incredible journey”.
Many AA members I knew literally had no friends or even business associates outside the program, and had brought their spouses and children on-board. This was encouraged. Those who didn’t usually ended up divorced: AA widows abound, and affairs rage on in spite of the organization’s ban on relationships in the first year and unnaturally pure assumptions about human nature.
Item: I was a couple of years in, doing well, stable, sober, and going to five or six meetings a week. Anything that bothered me about AA and its principles was relegated to some sort of seething pit of doubt that was without question my fault, due to my arrogance, lack of surrender and refusal to absolutely rely on God. This pit was a lonely, forbidden place that I seldom visited.
For you see, “everything happens for a reason”; everything happens “the way it’s supposed to happen”. (When my son’s roommate was savagely kicked to death outside a bar, an AA member told me it was “all part of God’s plan.”)
You hear this at every meeting. Though I didn’t voice my objection, because you just don’t do that at meetings, it struck me as alarming passivity. “Self-will run riot” was the ultimate evil, but it often seemed that having any individual will at all was somewhere between a sin and a crime.
My friend Louise told me this story: she had been horribly abused as a child, bullied by a sexual tyrant who was now beginning to abuse his grandchildren. As she sat around a campfire meeting, an exclusive club in which your deepest feelings were expected to be revealed, she finally shared the agonizing decision she had made: “I’m going to lay charges against my Dad.”
There was a brief, embarrassed silence, followed by this from the meeting’s ringleader: “Louise, I believe you have a resentment.” There followed a long discussion (or rather, a series of uninterrupted soliloquys: AA doesn’t do “cross-talk”) about how Louise had to surrender, let go of her resentment and anger, forgive. This was what she “should” do. And she'd feel so much better if she did.
I met her several months later and asked her how she was doing. “Much better. I formally charged my Dad with sexual assault, and he's going to trial next month. And I've left the program. I was tired of twisting myself into a pretzel.” I congratulated her, hugged her, and she looked at me, teary-eyed.
"I don't hate my Dad," she said. "I just want to stop the abuse." "Louise," I told her, "you may not realize this right now, but you're a hero."
Another episode, even more harrowing, involved a young woman who had been systematically tortured by her father for years. Her sponsor told her she must pray for the person who abused her, and wish for him everything she would want for herself.
If she forced herself to keep doing this for long enough, she would actually want these things for him. She was also told during her Step 5 (the confessional step) that she must always look for her part in everything that ever happened to her. She wrenched her brain around trying to figure out what her part was in being sodomized at age five.
She stood up at the meeting, looking fragile as glass, with tears running down her face. “I just don’t know how to make amends to my Dad. My sponsor says I’ll feel so much better if I do. But I feel like killing myself. I guess I’m just a lousy AA member. This is supposed to work. I’m not supposed to feel this way. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
I would have talked to her after the meeting (God knows what I would have said) except that a phalanx of members swarmed her afterwards, eager to make her case fit the immutable model. I wonder what happened, if she ended up like Hannah whose background was similar. Unable to endure what had happened to her, she committed suicide. Members buzzed about “those with grave emotional and mental disorders”, and carried on.
If I am painting AA too darkly, if I am leaving out the tremendous compassion and real help I found at those early meetings, then I apologize. But as time went on, I found I just couldn’t keep the dogma fresh. Except for some of the stories in the back, the Big Book has not changed since its first printing 70-some years ago.
What other self-help program wouldn’t update itself in so many decades? What about all the discoveries we’ve made about family dynamics, about heredity, about mental illness? What about issues of race, religion and sexual orientation? (There are a few “gay AA” meetings in which members are held in quarantine. But in the general assembly they have to keep their mouths shut. I once saw a man at an open meeting refer to coming out, prompting an old geezer to literally stomp out of the meeting saying, “I didn’t know this was a meeting for queers!”)
No, it’s all swept into the great gulf: obviously the program “works if you work it” the way it is, so why change it? But I have come to believe that if the program works, it is because people sublimate their individuality, their power to differ, discern and object. The fact that the 12 steps have been applied to every addiction and disorder in existence alarms me, as if the steps truly are the holy grail of recovery, unassailable, irreplaceable, and beyond question.
My irritability mounting as the years went on, I finally hit a real crisis in 2005. I had suffered from some kind of psychiatric disorder all my life, and in spite of many years of good remission I always feared a return. I was repeatedly reassured in AA that it would never bother me again if I stayed sober and constantly "turned it over" to God. It was obvious to them (though not to me) that it had all been caused by the demon alcohol.
I secretly took two drugs to control my whatever-it-is (and in all that time I’d never had a correct diagnosis, because the psychiatric system is so incompetent, abusive and full of shit that it deserves to be torn down forever. Another post!) Suddenly I learned over the ‘net that both these drugs had been recalled at the same time.
My doctor had no idea this had happened. So I was left with a choice: try something new, as my doctor recommended, or go “drug free”, as all my AA friends had been pressuring me to do. My first reaction was a huge flush of euphoria, of tremendous energy, and an eerie turning back of the clock. I had never had so many complements about my appearance: I looked ten years younger! Looking back on photos of that time, my eyes were like pinwheels and I was constantly beaming, but apparently no one thought this was strange.
My first book launch. No problems here.
Oh, and the compliments on finally being “clean”! “Thank God you’re finally off all that stuff.” “I knew you could do it!” “See, you don’t need to lean on those pills because now you have God in your life.”
My sleep was whittled down slowly, but by the time I was down to two hours, strange things were starting to happen. In deep hypnosis to restore my sleep (by a friend who didn’t know what he was doing), I had an encounter with the Divine that was completely shattering. My fried neurons and complete lack of emotional balance took me to a place that no person should ever go. Almost at the cost of my life, I learned that “meeting God” is not necessarily peaceful or pleasant. The ancient belief that we will die if we see God face-to-face very nearly turned out to be true.
The sickening free-fall that followed, the whistling plunge into a depression that pushed me deep below ground, is beyond my powers to describe. It was three years before I began to feel like a human being again. I am now on five drugs and have finally found a decent, competent psychiatrist on the recommendation of a friend. He has ascertained that I am bipolar, have always been bipolar, and always will be bipolar, and this is a huge relief.I no longer take medical advice from people who aren’t doctors or try to “heal myself” on things people "swear by", such as milk thistle, birch bark or coffee grounds. But when I think how close I came to giving up and committing suicide, it makes me shudder.
AA did not help me during the most harrowing time of my life. All I got was more unhelpful rhetoric. I wasn’t surrendering, I wasn’t practicing the principles, I wasn’t adhering to the tenet of “no mind-altering substances” (another thing that’s not in the Big Book, but often “quoted” by members with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other).
In other words, it was my lack of commitment that had made this happen. Almost everyone assumed I had “slipped” and was drinking again (which I wasn’t – I had a healthy terror of the stuff by then). At first it was subtle, but eventually I felt roped off, excluded, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone. I stood in the crowd after meetings looking at a lot of turned backs. Even my sponsor always seemed to be busy.
I had been a loyal, sober, contributing member of the program for 15 years. It didn’t really occur to me, because I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that there were other, equally effective ways to stay peacefully sober. But I knew it was time to venture out.
I rediscovered a close friend who had also dropped out, and we compared notes. I began to realize that in any other situation, if a human being were relentlessly exposed to the same simplistic information over and over and over again, it would be reasonable to assume they “got it” and wouldn’t need any more exposure. Do we go to Sunday school until we’re 47? Do we need to have the Golden Rule blasted into our ears by loudspeaker every morning?
OK, I realize that if AA no longer means what it used to, I don’t have to go. But it was often said at meetings that the program was a "life sentence" (preferable to the death sentence of alcoholism). In other words, it's just assumed you will keep "working it" until you die.
The guilt still sometimes jabs at me like pinpricks, even two years after I left. The pity in Jim’s eyes, the sense of “oh, she’s going to fly apart at any minute” was palpable. In his view, there is simply no way that an alcoholic can ever stay sober and be happy and productive (though the program is not very big on “productive” - meetings always come first -and subtly discourages normal ambition) without relentless exposure to the principles of the program.
I hope I don’t drink again, but I know there is no guarantee I won’t. I am profoundly committed to the sober life. I do appreciate what I was able to learn from my many years in AA, but I don’t think I’ll attend meetings again unless my view changes or I find myself in a dangerously slippery place.
And if I do, I will not expect “fellowship” or any kind of welcome (unlike the penitent "slippers" who are taken back with open arms). I can only imagine what they would think if they saw me again. They would either turn the cold shoulder like they did before, or pounce.
I've come to realize some things in the last couple of years. Longtime members creep me out. They're just a bit too Stepford for me: broken records of recovery, parrots fed on the same bland diet, grateful to be huddling together in a place where everyone accepts them and nothing ever changes.
But that’s not life. Things don’t stand still except in old Jimmy Cagney movies. Life necessitates constant adaptation to change which is often unexpected, wrenching and unwelcome.
But we are not taught that in AA. We are taught to rely absolutely on a "God of our understanding," believing there are no mistakes in God's world. When adversity hits, we’re told to accept it and"turn it over", because it’s “all part of God’s plan”.
It would be nice if it were true. In the meantime, I think I'd better make a plan of my own.”
(our
emphases)
Comment:
We cannot subscribe to all the points made above. However the
article does illustrate the dangers of the dogmatic approach
especially when it has absolutely nothing to do with the AA program
as outlined for example in the Big Book (archaic though it might be
in some areas) . Here there is no mention of AA members advising on
medical conditions, no mention even of sponsorship (and certainly not
of the 'do as your told' style), and it certainly does not advocate
the level of interference or intrusion on personal privacy so widely
practised by the 'pointed headed' ones (ie. the cult). Moreover AA
was never intended to be turned into some kind of ghetto with the
'normals' living on the outside whilst the elect few huddle together
'inside' congratulating each other on their own special brand of
'spirituality'. Such a perspective can lead at best to an unhealthy
self-absorption, at worst to the kind of abuses we are currently
witnessing in some parts of the fellowship
And
remember ….. if anyone should take offence: Our Critics Can Be Our Benefactors!
Cheerio
The Fellas
(Friends of Alcoholics Anonymous)
