by Lance Dodes
I just wanted to be a good father. I wanted to be healthy. I thought, maybe I have to quit smoking in order to be a better person. [But] I was able to accept moderation.
Over the last couple of years I allowed myself to be a moderate drinker, a moderate smoker, without feeling any guilt or compunction about it. I’m a nail-biter. And I realized, every time I’m putting my nails in my mouth it’s an emotional reaction. It’s not a physical thing. I’m, like, “Your nails are in your face because you feel stressed.” I thought, “What’s bugging you?” And pretty soon I stopped chewing my nails, and then I stopped wanting to drink, and then the last thing—I guess, in the end—is the marijuana smoking. And I’m, like, “If every time you’re putting a drug to your face, you have to stuff your emotions, then why don’t you just deal with your emotions and not have to keep stuffing pot in your face?”
I’ll have to learn to deal with myself without anything to support me emotionally. . . . I’ve heard casually from a few psychologists, I guess, but as soon as I hear them espousing 12-step philosophy to me, I’m like, “That’s not going to work for me.” So I don’t even bother.
DIANE (WRITTEN ACCOUNT)
In my personal experience, I was put off immediately by self-demeaning statements that people in AA almost worshipped, statements such as “keep it simple, stupid.” Also the vague conflicted religious insinuations.
I was coming out of a difficult relationship, and because he joined AA, I did too. I just wanted to still fit into his life.
My first experience with AA was about ten years ago. A close friend of mine at the time asked me to go to a meeting with her shortly after her mother’s death. I went with her. The group consisted mostly of men in their sixties, I think, all of them very disheveled and lost. I don’t know if she went back to that particular meeting but she continued with her AA “training.”
Another woman I met later, when I was attending meetings myself, has been in the program for twenty-eight years now, I gave her her twenty-five-year chip. Toward the end of my presence in AA, she was feeling unworthy because she could not get out of bed for three weeks and did not attend meetings. The answer that everyone gave her at the meeting, including her sponsor, was that she did not do enough commitments. Commitments in AA mean showing up early and making a pot of coffee or something similar to that. I told her that she [needed] to see a psychiatrist, and she did.
I visited her about two months ago, and she was very different from the severely clinically depressed woman I knew before. She had clinical depression and was guilt-tripped by AA that she was not participating enough. For twenty-five years.
JAMES (WRITTEN ACCOUNT)
I was a homeless addict and drunk for many years, and I got off the streets to go to a community college. I tried AA for five years, and I feel it did more harm than good. AA convinced me that I couldn’t drink one drink, and that if I did, that my alcoholic disease would take control of me so that I couldn’t stop drinking and that I would die that way. I was scared into staying with AA for a long time. I eventually sought my own answers by majoring in psychology as an undergrad. I came to the conclusion that AA was doing more harm to me, so I left AA and I became ten times more fulfilled than I ever felt in AA. I gained longer sober time, and I eventually came to oppose the disease theory and AA in my life. I am now a very satisfied participant in moderate drinking.
I knew next to nothing when I began attending AA. After attending AA for over a year, I began to believe many of the things that were stated repeatedly at meetings. I came to believe that I had no willpower over a powerful disease and that the only thing that could save me was lifelong AA attendance along with extreme commitment and service to the AA program. At this point, I felt trapped by a cult that held a mysterious solution to alcohol addiction. I believed what AA told me and that was that I would die from alcoholism without AA or that I would be a bitter miserable dry drunk the rest of my life. I believed the idea, pushed by AA and the powers that be that push AA, that even one drink meant that I was not recovered or in a relapse. In retrospect, I realize that these beliefs pushed by AA were harmful to me because it caused me to seriously believe I had no willpower to stop drinking, which led to numerous drinking binges that lasted up to five days at a time every couple of weeks or so. The fear of harming others during a binge and terrible legal and financial consequences related to drinking were other factors that kept me fearful and dependent on the AA program.
After sixteen months of not being in AA, I now believe I have the internal locus of control to moderate my drinking. Since leaving AA, I have found numerous websites and stories of the things I felt [were] wrong in AA but that I had no words for at the time. . . . I continue to find people sympathetic to alternatives to the traditional 12-step disease model fixated on abstinence.
Going to AA for five years was not all for nothing . . . because those actions (cleaning up before and after meetings, making coffee, etc.) were my personal actions showing my personal commitment, energy, and discipline to living a healthier life. [But] AA socialization also prevented me from growing as much as I should have otherwise. Everything I did revolved around AA principles, so many important issues had been neglected and not discussed in my life during those five years.
While in AA, there was only room for complete bias in favor of AA. In fact, I had hoped that confessing about how great AA was and about how AA saved me would somehow help “the miracle” happen and that I was “faking it till I made it”—which are AA slogans. Well, the miracle never happened in AA, and I no longer depend on whatever mystery people claim exists in AA. I felt AA was veiled by mystery, which also kept me going for five years. The closest person to me, my mother, said that I have improved tremendously since leaving AA. My mother said that while in AA I seemed to be in a severe state of agitation. She says that now I am much more the person she has always known from even before I ever used drugs or alcohol. I even feel that I am more me rather than an alcoholic so and so from AA.
I had a negative experience with AA, but professionally I believe I will have to be more objective and balanced in giving the pros and cons of AA with others and how it might work for them. I believe I lay out so many cons to AA because the treatment industry seems to blindly promote all the pros of AA.
SHARON (WRITTEN ACCOUNT)
Twenty-two years ago, my high school sweetheart died. He struggled with addiction but he had more than ninety days clean when he died. He had a good job and his life was finally on track for a bright future. He went to meetings. We talked of marriage and children. He was working “the steps” and had recently found a “sponsor.” Everything was going well.
He started to pay people back money he had borrowed under false pretenses, which he had used to buy drugs. He bought his sister tickets to a concert because at some point in the past she had missed one and he felt it had been his fault. He donated time and money to charities. His family was thrilled to see this.
I worried. I couldn’t exactly say why. Something just seemed off. When I brought up how changed he seemed, how he seemed almost frantic about doing these things, I was told not to worry. He seemed really down, I was told that was related to his recovery, that it was a good thing. He was making “amends.” He was “working the steps.” His family and a few of his new friends from AA all suggested that I look into Al-Anon.
It was a Friday. We were having dinner with his mom and sister. I thought he was picking me up after he got off work. When he didn’t call and didn’t show up, I just thought I misunderstood the plan so I went over to his Mom’s. He never showed up. They figured he had relapsed. The next morning I called a few of his friends. No one had heard from him.
My heart stopped when I heard the knock on my door. Something about the quick loud rap alarmed me. Two uniformed officers were at my door. I don’t remember what they asked me or anything they said. Except that my sweetheart was dead. He was clean when he died. He hung himself.
How has AA impacted my life?
AA prevented my sweetheart’s family from recognizing the warning signs for suicide for what they were. When I expressed concern about what he was doing, it was dismissed. [I was told] my problem was I didn’t know enough about how AA works—I didn’t go to Al-Anon meetings or read the literature.
It is true. I didn’t understand how AA worked, I had not read the literature. When I did, I found it very troubling. It is easy to see how the warning signs for suicide were missed or dismissed. Admit you are powerless, take a moral inventory, make amends. Steps. A sense of powerlessness, attempts to settle debts . . . isolating from family and friends. Suicide warning signs.
JEN (WRITTEN ACCOUNT)
I asked to go to rehab after a stint in the hospital. One night I had gotten pulled over for driving on the wrong side of the highway. . . . They sent me to the hospital instead of taking me to jail. I don’t know how that happened, but I got really lucky and, you know, my luck was running out. So my dad came and picked me up from the hospital the next morning. I hadn’t known what happened and I asked to go to rehab. So I went to rehab for about five weeks. I learned a lot there, it was great. Then they recommended that I go to a step-down care house, kind of like a halfway house. So I did that.
I stuck with the 12-step meetings, and whatnot, for about my first year of sobriety. I became really close with the woman that wound up becoming my sponsor. But she started treating me like her daughter, because I reminded her of her daughter. And after about a year, every time I went to a meeting, it didn’t work for me. I mean, I’m still sober. I don’t even like saying that I’m sober. It’s just, it’s my life; I just made a decision to not drink. And I think it’s kind of a cult and they kind of set you up to relapse. It’s not fair that they put all these thoughts into your head where if you leave the community they make you believe that that sets you up for a relapse, because you no longer have that community and that support network available to you. They say, we’ll always welcome you back. Then when people come back they say they relapsed because they stopped going to meetings. It’s not that they stopped going to meetings. They started isolating themselves and they let problems get to their head.
You’ll ask kids that go in and out of the rooms why they went out and relapsed and they just say, “I stopped going to meetings.” I don’t think that that’s the case whatsoever. I actually feel a lot better now that I stopped going, because I feel like I’m putting my ego down, saying I’m an alcoholic or an addict. I’ve chosen not to drink, I saw where it took me in life, and I’ve been, quote-unquote, “sober” for about two and a half years now, and I’m only twenty-four. So the way I see it, all you really need is a support network and a drive to want to continue making yourself a better person.
They say, “One day at a time,” and when you start feeling really crummy come to a meeting and complain about it and you’ll get support from other people. And I just think it’s silly. . . . I mean, I can’t even really remember a lot of the things that they say in the 12-step meetings, because I just don’t apply those to my life anymore, because I’ve kind of learned things on my own. I mean the only step I really, really did was, I made a fearless moral inventory of myself. That’s really the only one I got anything out of, to be honest. Because I sat down, I talked to the woman that had gotten really close with me, my sponsor. But anytime they brought up the word God, I just got up and walked away. Because religion is like politics to me, I just don’t believe in it. AA is more kind of old-school in the sense where they talk about God a lot more. And you have to say the Lord’s Prayer, and whatnot. At the rehab, they didn’t talk to you about AA so much, they just talked to you about what you said, about meditating and getting to be at one with yourself.
I understood what they said about the spiritual stuff. But it’s just like there’s only certain beliefs you can stick to when you’re in that program. Like the fact that you have to still admit you’re an alcoholic or a drug addict. You have to have a Higher Power. I’m kind of looking at the steps right now to kind of remember. This stuff was literally like my form of religion when I used to go to it. But it frustrates me now. I just find it annoying. But I still, you know, if I talk to people that are still in recovery or “newcomers,” quote-unquote, I say, “Stick with it, it does a lot for you at first, because you have that network and you see that you’re not alone.” But you get to a certain point where you don’t want to be around those people anymore. I mean, if you stick in the rooms long enough, you see people go in and out of there at least once a week.
PAUL (INTERVIEW)
In my mind, I didn’t really get sober in AA. I think to get sober in AA would be really difficult because often, but not always, I’ve seen newcomers just be completely ignored at the end of meetings. So, I always try to make it a point to go up and give my phone number. But most of them will rarely call me, because there’s no structure around working with newcomers; it’s very easy to fall through the cracks, and I think that’s what happens with the majority of people that come into AA.
Obviously, AA has its benefits. It gives you a place to go. I met a lot of close friends. I went to meetings every day for years, and I liked it. At first, I felt like it was a cult, but then I decided it was my cult, you know, and I could kind of do what I’d want, and sort of ran a meeting. I liked doing that. I was pretty happy with AA until the bottom dropped out, emotionally, and I fell into a very severe depression, and then nobody wanted to hear my story, because the narrative is: you drink, your life falls apart, you go to AA, you stop drinking, your life gets better. And that wasn’t my narrative.
I received a lot of negativity, a lot of criticism from people, even from people with much less sober time than me. They told me that I wasn’t doing the steps correctly because I was discussing how I felt. People would actually get up and walk out when I started talking, since I was saying things about how I felt. It makes some intellectual sense to me that they try to keep conversation on the solution, rather than the problem, but . . . my problem was the dark mood that I was experiencing.
I’ve been sober over twenty years. I’ve tried various times to go back to AA, just to have some friends, but I just found it difficult. I lived in southern California, then after maybe six, seven years of sobriety, I lived in New York City, and I found the AA meetings there to be especially militant. People would immediately ask you who your sponsor was, and what’s your home group, and they wanted to run your program. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “taking somebody’s inventory.” That’s done as a matter of course, and I found it to be offensive. So I didn’t really like meetings there very much. I would go, and I would feel worse. Eventually, I realized that going to AA was, like, the worst: the meetings made me feel bad, and I felt that the conversation was a little superficial. People were expected to solve their [problems], make their life better, and it didn’t fit reality.
My other pet peeve with AA is the whole sponsorship thing. . . . I sensed a dynamic very often where you get into a hierarchical relationship, because they kind of see themselves as guiding you. It’s not a peer relationship. And many of these people, while they mean well, they’re just not qualified to be giving advice to the degree that they are. And I’ve heard a lot of sponsors try to hide the truth of their life from their sponsees, because they don’t want to be seen as flawed and human. The whole thing is kind of silly to me, and I know that there are ways to work with people without getting into that relationship. But I should say, the first sponsor relationship I had was very helpful to me; I had somebody who I could call, and he would understand me. But I found a therapist that said, “You need to be on Prozac” . . . [and] that ended my relationship with my sponsor, and his lineage: his sponsor, [who was] like a grand sponsor . . . and some old guy, who had thirty years sobriety or something. They all decided that I was basically taking drugs.
After I came out of treatment . . . AA helped me not drink because I really had, at that point, very little social structure in place, and it . . . gave me a support
network. I can only remember one or two times where I really, really wanted to drink . . . and, you know, it’s hard to say what I would’ve done had I not had that support network, but I certainly think it made things easier emotionally to have that, especially in early sobriety. The thing about AA that’s good is people are very honest about their experience, and that’s an honesty that is not common in our society. So, that sharing I think can really strengthen your own sort of emotional self.
[As for] the steps, I got something out of doing the confessional step. That felt very cathartic to me, and I know that a lot of spiritual traditions [have] a similar mechanism in place. So I definitely got something out of that, and the meditative practice step [step 11] is good. [But] the God part was a big turnoff. In fact, I had been on hard drugs previously, and . . . I went to an NA meeting, and . . . I might have gotten sober or clean at that point, except at the end of the meeting, they all stood around and said the Lord’s Prayer, and it’s Catholic, and I’m not interested in that charade. So I didn’t go back. In fact, I’ve traveled across the country and been to meetings where everyone in the meeting was a born-again Christian and felt like you needed to get Jesus before you get sober. So I certainly wouldn’t have been able to hang in meetings in those localities.
CHERYL (INTERVIEW)
For many reasons I drank quite heavily for about seventeen years. Circumstances in my life brought me to a point where I went into therapy, a psychoanalytical therapy. I’d been in therapy for about two and a half years, and my therapist was telling me that my therapy wasn’t progressing very well because whenever I had an insight I’d drink it away. [Then] I had kind of a psychological breakthrough—I had a memory that surfaced, that I couldn’t drink away. I realized that I needed to stop drinking.