My Thoughts on AA

The PEOPLE that sit in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, that owe their lives and their freedoms to Alcoholics Anonymous, that will give you the shirt off their back and make sure you know how to put it on, are fabulous people.  They are NOT stereotypes.  They are not fall-down drunks with seven DUI’s and a breathalyzer attached to their ignition and children that long ago disowned them.  Yeah, they might have some crap they are still recovering from or dealing with – some MANY YEARS later – but they are fabulous people.

I’ve honestly never met a group of people who appreciate life more, who understand why and how a village supports its weak and debilitated, who have no interest in giving up on people, and who intensely embody a philosophy of hope for every person that walks into those rooms.  

I say all of that because I’m not sure AA is a lifelong commitment for me.  And it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the people and the doctrine of AA.  You don’t claim millions of members and millions of lives saved and millions of families reconnected and, hell, even millions of dollars saved on beer, wine, and liquor if you aren’t doing something right.  I think AA is a fabulous organization of fabulous people with fabulous intentions.  I even think their methods and steps and traditions are fabulous.

For most people.  Not me.

By the end of my first year, I dreaded going.  Every week for that first year, I went every Tuesday and Thursday night and I think I threw in a weekend or two here and there.  The meeting place I went to had a meeting specifically for beginners on Tuesday nights, and I really enjoyed that for the first 6-8 months.  Sobriety was new and exciting (ha, not) and there were these milestones where they gave me plastic chips for getting to 30 days and 60 days and 90 days and then 6 months and 9 months and a year (I’m not special; they do that for AA newbies around the world.)  New people came and went almost every week, I made some decent acquaintances there, I even got a sponsor, but by the end of year one, I didn’t want to be there anymore.

I knew I was done drinking.  But now I wanted to live.  Like REALLY live.  I had no idea how, but I knew I wanted it. And I also knew that I was NOT going to find the answer to HOW to live at AA.  And the reasons why are the very same reasons that AA works wonders for literally MILLIONS of people.

Repetition and God.

We’ll start with repetition.  Repetition is good for addicts.  It helps us get into a new routine, helps us find habits that are NOT drinking, it gives us something to depend on when our brain is telling us to give up this shit and go have a drink.  Eventually, the repetition of clean living becomes your life.  That’s the kind of repetition that helped change MY daily habits, too.  But that is not the kind of repetition I’m talking about in this article.  

Every meeting starts off the same way.  Somebody from the homegroup is leading the meeting (I did it all of one time.)  That somebody introduces themselves.  They then lead the group in the Serenity Prayer.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  Amen.”

Awesome.  I actually like the prayer.  I didn’t and don’t say it voluntarily outside of those meetings, but we’ll address that later.  After the Serenity Prayer, the leader chooses somebody to read “How it Works” and the “12 Steps and 12 Traditions.”  This literally takes about 10 minutes out of a one hour meeting.  The.  Same.  Words.  Over.  And.  Over.  And.  Over.  Every.  Single.  Meeting.

I don’t do well with repetition.  At all.  It’s an issue I probably need to address within myself.  It’s definitely a personality defect.  I just never understood why they needed to repeat the same exact stuff at every single meeting.  I get that there are new people at almost every meeting, and I mean so new they still smell like a Keystone Light, but can’t we give them a pamphlet or something?

Here’s an example of how much I hate repetition.  Let’s say the family and I are all in the minivan cruising down the road listening to the radio.  Eventually – just to be nice and loving – I will go to a station my daughter likes, and inevitably the song will be some stupid little computer-generated voice and her name is like Icky Pop Pop and there’s another person that is “featured” on the song named Zooface Knocka and my daughter is like, “Oh my god, I love this song.”

Begrudgingly, I stay on that station.  And then I hate myself.  I tried to be sweet because my beautiful kid said, “Oh my god, I love this song,” but then it gets a minute and a half into the song, and the song is called something like, “Clubbin’ Bitch” or “Dancing With My Ho’s” and the chorus – it’ll be something like “Ho’s and Bitches, yeah.  Ho’s and Bitches, yeah.” – repeats seventeen times before the producer/synthesizer guy decides to get his face out of the pot brownies and start the next verse.  By the time this happens, I am ready to dig my ears out with a melon baller.

That’s how I feel about repetition.  I just don’t like it.

I like it even less when grown people are reading to me.  If I’m in some kind of professional development seminar at work, and another grownup thinks it’s necessary to read to me (when I developed this skill about 35 damn years ago,) it angers me.  I just don’t like it.  I don’t know how to tune it out or accept it.

And that’s the first ten minutes of an AA meeting.  And it’s also the last five minutes because they then read something called “The Promises.”  So that means that about 25% of AA meetings involve two of my biggest pet peeves:  repetition and grownups reading stuff I’m perfectly capable of reading all by myself.  Also, if you go to a meeting where they’re studying the Big Book or doing a “Step Study,” they might read for 10-15 MORE minutes.  That’s half the damn meeting!!

Lastly, the very reason AA works – the wise, old vets helping out the newbies – has repetition as its core ideology.  It is the vets JOB at AA to talk about how and why they got sober.  It is their JOB to scare the shit out of them with their dances with death and their jail time and their ten year pilgrimage to win back their families.  They are doing EXACTLY what they should be doing by repeating these stories week after week because there are new people there who have never heard those stories.

But I have.  I guess it’s pretty obvious by now that I don’t have much interest in hearing the same stories dozens of times.  Again, it’s a personality defect.  I just can’t stand being there when better than half of the time I am there, I am wasting my time listening to repetitiveness.  Yes, somebody is going to argue that I am NOT wasting my time, but that’s an opinion, now isn’t it?  The vets at AA have chosen their presence and their stories as their form of service.  I chose to write about mine.  Either option is completely acceptable – and even admirable, in my opinion – as long as sobriety is maintained.

I promised myself before I wrote this that I would NOT give only the reasons why AA wasn’t for me.  I want to present all the reasons why my sorry ass should just get over myself and appreciate every aspect of AA, because I do owe those people a little kudos for helping me out in year one.  But again, I have NO issue with the people.  The people are fabulous.  I just don’t like repetition.

But some people NEED that repetition.  In this case, those people are raging, irrational addicts whose best efforts at controlling their lives found them crawling into Alcoholics Anonymous – sometimes by judge’s order – as defeated and worthless a human as they will ever be.  I know I did.  Thank heavens mine did not involve a judge’s order, but I was pretty damn worthless when I finally gave up trying to maintain a life that was killing me and ruining my family.

In the beginning, that repetition is good.  I heard something different every time somebody read “How it Works” and I always followed along on my AA phone app when they read the steps and traditions.  I always got something out of it.

About a month into sobriety, the last line of the first paragraph of “How it Works” grabbed my attention.  I’d heard it about a dozen times at that point, but heard it new that night for reasons I don’t remember.  The last sentence ends with, “but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.”  

It’s amazing what honesty means to an active addict and then what it means to a newly sober addict.  All the years of dishonesty and deceit and telling lies to cover up lies.  You lose the capacity to live with honor and integrity because your entire life is a lie.  Honesty has no place in the life of an active addict.  That one line stayed with me for a good month.  And in that month, I listened to the repetition.  I tried to get more out of these grownups reading to me.  I’d look around the room and some people would read along EVERY week.  Like it was part of their daily prayers.  Like they needed it to breathe that day.

And you know what?  They probably did.  I do not, will not, and should not have an opinion on how other people take their AA.  If that’s what kept them sober, then by god I hope they read that shit twenty-five times a day.  And you know what else?  The same process, the same 25% of every meeting where grownups are reading to other grownups, has worked for millions of alcoholics to the tune of more than 80 years.  Something is clearly working.  Just not for me.  

A second issue I had with AA is one of the reasons I decided to start writing about my journey through sobriety.  Over 20 years, I turned into an antisocial recluse.  I didn’t really want to go to AA to make friends.  I didn’t really want to become buddies with my sponsor.  In saying that, I completely realize that this behavior and these feelings are abnormal, but that’s who I became.  That’s why I’m writing about it.  I’m safe right here with my computer.  I can be whoever I want to be.  But why can I only be whoever I want to be when I sit at the computer?  I want to fix that.  I just don’t know how yet.  Moving on.  For now.

The biggest issue I had with AA, however, came with those damn 12 steps.  Step one is easy.  It’s the only one you have to get correct every day.  “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Done.  A++.  Because I was FINALLY ready, because I was finally done drinking, that one was as simple as a good fart.  It just felt good to get it out in the open.  There was relief and a release of years of stress and pressure and it somehow smelled like a Yankee Candle called Vanillaberrycinnergreenlinenfruit.  I got up every morning for that first year, sans hangover, and I looked back at the day before proud as hell to have survived another day, and then I farted Vanillaberrycinnergreenlinenfruit and just breathed in the intoxicating aromas of sobriety.  I kicked Step One’s ass another day.

It was step two, however, that immediately constipated me.

Step Two:  “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”  Followed immediately by Step Three: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

Because I want nothing more than to make honesty my new normal, even when I only have to be honest with myself, this was remarkably tough for me.  So tough, in fact, that I sit here 15 months sober and I can’t say I have completed but ONE measly step.  Somewhere along the way, any relationship I had with whatever God I barely understood growing up just became nonexistent.  I’ve always believed that nothing around us makes any sense whatsoever if there was no one responsible for it.  They tell me Big Bang, I ask them “Well who put all that matter up there to start with?”  They do not know.  That makes no sense.  Somebody must be responsible.  That someone must be the “God of our understanding,” a buzzword phrase of required obedience should you reach the end of your recovery steps in Alcoholics Anonymous.

The God of most “Christians” understanding is barely three dimensional.  In describing their God, a lot of them sound more like a ventriloquist’s puppet, just believing and regurgitating somebody else’s words – be it preacher or biblical scribe – rather than taking the time to form their own beliefs and find their own unique understanding.  You just listen next time somebody dies in a car accident where the lives in the other car were spared.  Somebody will say to those survivors, “God was with you the whole time, protecting you.”  Soooo, God wanted the other people to die?  He wasn’t with them? 

If so, I don’t really have much interest in associating with their God.  They’re not giving God any credit whatsoever in their assessment of that accident.  They put words AND actions in the place of what should be a very difficult to understand deity.   In truth, they have not one damn idea where God was during that accident.  None.  A better assessment would be, “I sure wish I knew what God was thinking when he allowed this to happen.”

But do you know what somebody would say to that?  They would say, “What makes you think he ALLOWS bad things to happen?”  Now me and that person?  We could chat.  That’s a person that actually tries to find their own beliefs.  They work at it.  They are NOT a puppet.

Mostly, though, I struggle with how “Christians” cherry-pick the stuff they want to believe in?  I’ve always been angered by the hypocrisy of some Christians and the “biblically based” morals that do nothing more than show how these steadfast “Christians” live only by the teachings that are easy to fit into their daily schedules (or their political beliefs.)  Ever read Leviticus?  That stuff is insane.  Every time a woman has her period, the day it’s over she MUST (that’s what it says, MUST) take two doves to a priest for him to sacrifice so she can be clean again.  That is freaking insane.  What in the hell did the doves do to deserve this?  Leviticus is just insanity.  But it IS in the bible, so we MUST do this, right? 

Ever been in a Baptist church where the preacher is a gay hater?  There’s a better than average chance that he will officiate the marriage of previously divorced people sometime within the same year.  I’m assuming there must be an appendix in his bible that lists all the sins in categories like “Hell bound,” “Look the Other Way,” and “You Can Do This One; Just Don’t Tell People.” 

And he should definitely go read Leviticus 20 and start killing not only the previously divorced couple but a good number of the people in his congregation, too.   I bet half of every Christian in America couldn’t survive Leviticus 20 if it was actually obeyed.  We’d be killing people with such regularity that the average age of the world’s population would be a toddler.  I mean, it’s fine with me.  Survival of the fittest, right? 

What should they do instead?  Every preacher in America should stand in front of their congregation and be like a teacher.  “Okay, class, I need you guys to mark through Leviticus 21.  It appears to have been written by a discriminatory serial killer.  I think we should just pretend it never existed.”  Christians excuse all of this craziness away so they can believe in the stuff that fits into what makes life and church easiest.  That kind of stuff just pisses me off.  It’s blatant hypocrisy.  It’s either ALL black and white and we start killing adulterers, sluts, and anybody who curses their parents, or it’s ALL gray and open to leniency and acceptance and interpretation.  And if it’s ALL black and white, the damn doves are going extinct.

This is the one to which I am going to give a “to be continued,” however.  This is something I have vowed to myself to work on. I would love to have a relationship with my creator, to understand Him (or Her or It,) to lean on Him, to “hand my will and my life over.”  I’m not there yet.  And I’m guessing it might take a while.  I’m not going to half-ass it like I’ve done with religion my entire life, but I damn sure don’t want to get involved in something where they’re going to sacrifice all the doves.  I’m guessing there is a very good chance that the God I end up believing in is markedly different from the one being marketed by every denomination in America.  And that’s my right.

Steps 2 and 3 are impossible for me right now.  Those fabulous people at AA always say that your “god” doesn’t have to be the Christian God or the Muslim God or even some God that lives down in the Keys.  It can literally start out being a Group Of Drunks (G.O.D) and move into Good Orderly Direction (G.O.D.)  But I don’t have a clue how to turn my will and my life over to a bunch of drunks or the intangible “good orderly direction.”  I truly have no ideas on how I can honestly (and that’s the key word) complete steps 2 and 3 at this point in my relationship with God, G.O.D., or G.O.D.

So do I think an alcoholic can stay sober without AA?  Absolutely, I do.  And I’ll probably end up proving it.  I believe the strength that comes with admitting defeat is actually empowering enough to sustain a sober lifestyle.  The difficult part in that scenario is this:  Can you stay sober alone and without the support group that AA offers?  Who are you accountable to in that scenario?  Yourself?  That won’t work.  If you’re an alcoholic, you are a liar and a manipulator.  And who would you lie to first to start drinking again?  Yourself.  Won’t work.  There HAS to be some accountability other than yourself.  We cannot be trusted otherwise. 

So do I think you should go to AA if you think you may be an alcoholic?  Well, for starters, I worded that question that way on purpose.  If you THINK you may be an alcoholic, chances are that you absolutely are.  Don’t play with it. It’s progressive.  It will get worse.  You will lose everything you love.  But to truly answer the question, just because it’s not for me right now doesn’t mean AA is not for you.   You should ABSOLUTELY go.  Get a sponsor.  Meet people.  Get some phone numbers. Actually CALL those numbers when you’re struggling.  I’ll repeat what I said earlier.  It is a fabulous organization with fabulous people and they make a fabulous support group.

So go.  Now.  And ignore everything I just said.  I wouldn’t want to repeat it anyway.  And I need to pray for the doves.