AA gets downgraded

I have a close relative who tried to lose weight every January. We know she's going to fail because she's not committed to it.

It's like that with a lot of alcohol or rehab places. I don't put much stock in the percentages. Plenty of people are going to fail, but that doesn't necessarily mean the program is to blame.

 

Used to be AAA?

 

Sorry, it took awhile to get registered under a new ID.

You'll never see AA respond to guys like this because one of its 12 Traditions is that it has no opinion on outside issues, including what other people think of AA.

It's worked for me for more than 22 years, but I know other people who stopped drinking through other means. The question remains: Are they really like me? AA's main text draws a distinction between people who are merely heavy drinkers and people who are alcoholics. And I can't get inside anyone else's skin to know if they are the latter, if one drink will compell them to drink well past the point of feeling good.

I spent 15 years as a phones volunteer at two AA hotlines. When people would call and ask who the fuck we think we are by thinking we have the only solution, I would tell the truth. Nowhere do we claim we have the only solution, but if you want to speak with me, this is the only solution I'm qualified to talk about because I never tried anything else and we don't treat people like lab rats and suggest anything we haven't personally experienced.

It's been a bumpy 22 years and eight months without one drink. I'm a newspaper journalist, so obviously I've suffered like almost all of you have, but I don't have the luxury of drinking over it. We don't get any more than human via AA and I struggle with my nature all the time in various ways, but I haven't often had the temptation to deal with my inner asshole by getting it drunk. And still I know very strongly that I cannot do this alone. I sponsor someone who has been sober for 39 years -- not that I'm some sort of guru, but he's run out of people who have been sober longer than him. And he knows very strongly that he cannot do it alone, either.

IDK how often I'll log in as Boozer, but I'll communicate via PM with anyone who wants to.

 

Oh, and I've been the giver and receiver of formal amends. Of course it's uncomfortable, but having done it, I know how to react when someone makes amends to me: generously.

 

In a matter of five days, I'll make 10 full years of sobriety. I did AA for about a year, then gave it up. My feelings were thus: You can go to a meeting every day for the rest of your life, you can have sponsors lined up halfway to Mars, but at the end of every single day, the decision to drink or not to drink rests with you and your conscience.

I could probably go out and drink one beer and be fine. Could probably be fine doing it the next five times. But if I do that, sooner or later, I'm going say, "fuck it," and suck down 12 in an hour. And I'll be right back where I was 10 years ago, and that's some place I don't want to be.

As others have said, AA works for those who are committed to it. I really wasn't committed to it, but it was useful as a way of showing me I wasn't alone in what I was trying to do, and it helped me establish a solid foundation for managing my sobriety.

 

That's the case with someone I know. She has gone through periods of sobriety for months at a time and that somehow helps her prove to herself that she's not an alcoholic. Then she says she just wants to be able to drink socially, so she'll have a glass or two of wine. That quickly devolves into her drinking a box - the equivalent of three bottles - of wine every day.

 

There are people called "periodics." They can stop for a while, but when they take another drink, it has the same effect on them that it has on me; they don't know how many will follow. I know someone very well who is like that -- former colleague who wandered into the same AA meeting I was in when I was sober two years. I was flattered she trusted me as much as she did, and I still think it's the best, cleanest AA work I ever did, because as much as I wanted to bang her, I never tried and deflected any hints she dropped. When I accepted a job in a different city, I introduced her to all the best women I knew in AA, but she left AA a couple years later. We're still in touch; she has struggled with substances on and off and I still don't understand why periodics don't want to get fucked up every day like I did.

But even getting wrecked only periodically, she made some very bad decisions. And she is a nice person, smart, pretty and, when sober, polite.

I don't know about you, but social drinking never was an appealing goal for me. If I wasn't going to get drunk, why bother? The problem in my late 20s and early 30s was losing the ability to stop at a good buzz.

A lot of people believe drugs and alcohol are the same, but that's not my experience with both. While I enjoyed various drugs, I did not have the same lack of control. AA says we alcoholics have a physical allergy to alcohol. While the Narcotics Anonyous main text is a lot like AA's, it skips that part. Once in a used-book store I found a copy of the AA Big Book second edition (we are now on the fourth edition -- the personal stories in the back change to better reflect modern society). Apparently the book had been owned by an overeater because he or she had crossed out alcohol or euphemisms for it and substituted the word "food." But that person could not do that in the portions that discussed the physical allergy. Obviously a food addict still needs to eat, but not compulsively. An alcoholic cannot moderate his drinking, most AA members believe. I don't believe my condition is entirely mental because I had plenty of willpower in other areas of my life.

 

The best thing for a heavy drinker to do is switch to cannabis. You'll fall asleep first and snooze awesomely and won't be hung over when you wake up. Just hungry.

An addictive personality may be trading one addiction for another, but pot is not physically addictive like alcohol. Your liver will do cartwheels.

 

That sounds like great advice.