M A
friendthegirl
speedy0314Not A.A.
Not meetings.
Not sponsors.
Not steps.
Not Big Books.
Not drinking.
Or drinking in moderation.
Or pharmacological and/or psychotherapeutic regimens.
Or any of a million ways to approach life as a responsible, caring, concerned, involved person … that doesn’t involve Alcoholics Anonymous in any form whatsoever.
Not A.A. — It’s at least as effective (if not more so) as A.A.
Let the trolling begin … .
ADDENDUM: Oh yeah, crosstalk encouraged. Butt-loads of cross-talk. Lots of ego, too — whether it’s a delusion (Buddha) or an inescapable part of our psyche (Freud) or just the end product of neurons firing (neuroscience), the idea of “crushing it” is just antiquated goobledy-gook.
Get up with your bad self.
Filed under: Alternatives to AA
Actually, all that is common. It is a commonplace for people to drink, then stop. Sometmes, with difficulty; sometimes without diffuculty. Quite similar to quitting smoking, losing weight or some other bothersome habit.
The recovery game knows nothing of that; or, feigns ignorance. I suspect the latter.
It amuses me for aa follwers to use terms as ‘dry drunk’ or ‘heavy drinker’ or ‘not a real alcoholic’.
This ignorance, real or feigned, does not surprise me.
For AA has nothing to do with drinking. It has everything to do with something else. If you read what is called a ‘real alcoholic’, all will be revealed.
AA does expect a person to quit drinking on their own.
Nice to see you made it back Speedy.
First off let me say that anybody is capable of quitting drinking by capping the jug and running on sheer willpower alone. Regardless of what we want to call ourselves we can all simply quit drinking when we realize that drinking is not working out. Why do so many quit drinking? The answer is because so many have lost control. We “Alcoholics” simply cannot control our drinking with any sense of regularity. Every now and then we can, but it’s usually when we’re trying to prove a point to someone else, or ourselves.
Quitting is the easy solution.
Nobody ever said AA is the only way. The “only” way is to find a conviction and stand by it regardless of what others think. Some stand by the belief that God is in our corner. Is it the truth?? Maybe! Maybe not.
What we believe to be the truth will always trump the truth. Regardless. I personally believe the Government manipulates the weather, we never set foot on the moon and Eisenhower and Truman had Patton Killed. You will never convince me otherwise.
Can the integrity of my beliefs help keep me sober? They do!
Let’s ask this! “Do your convictions and dedication to your cause strengthen your sobriety”? Probably!
Are you right? Are you wrong? Both? Neither? Does it matter?
No. What does matter is that you have something to believe in.
Alcoholics are miserable failures in most cases and believing in something else when self reliance has failed so many times works better than anything else.
That’s the secret of AA. No magic, no miracles. Just simple faith.
Cuda,
“What we believe to be the truth will always trump the truth.” That makes no sense.
“I personally believe the Government manipulates the weather, we never set foot on the moon and Eisenhower and Truman had Patton Killed. You will never convince me otherwise.”
Ahhhhh, thanks for the insight….
“That’s the secret of AA. No magic, no miracles. Just simple faith.” So what you’re saying is that there is no magic, but believing there is works?
How about empowering the person to believe that that can change on their own rather than teaching them it is impossible, that people need AA in order to quit? You know…reality? Or is that too complicated for you?
Didn’t you read my second and third sentence that stated that anybody can quit. That’s with or without AA.
Who’s fault is it that mainstream society has come to regard AA as some kind of sobriety machine where people go and have their obsession removed by simply attending meetings? That’s your television doing that. That’s your Marriage Counselor, That’s your Doctor. That’s Dear Abby, it’s the therapist, it’s the employer, it’s your wife. That’s a cross section of where this AA promotion is coming from. Too bad none of them know a god damn thing about what they’re talking about.
Since they seem to spout off the way they insist on doing people are walking into AA with a misconception of what AA really is.
“Alcoholics Anonymous” is a book! It’s one mans guide to living life as he feels God intended. In it there is 12 steps to a spiritual awakening that will remove your obsession with alcohol. None of those steps say anything about those meetings we seem to think are the answer. Unfortunately Dr Laura will have you believe otherwise and will convince you that meetings are the answer while completley ignorant of the fact that the book is the last thing discussed in most meetings.
Also, if you have doubts to Patton being bumped off, you need to brush up.
This is a good place to start your reasearch.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3869117/General-George-S.-Patton-was-assassinated-to-silence-his-criticism-of-allied-war-leaders-claims-new-book.html
Weather Manipulation? They’ve been working on it since the early 1900s
cuda, really?
“Who’s fault is it that mainstream society has come to regard AA as some kind of sobriety machine where people go and have their obsession removed by simply attending meetings?”
I’d say it’s the fault of the AA members who have been making these claims for so long that the general public has begun to believe these lies.
Judges didn’t start sending people to AA until Bill W & Dr. Bob started asking them to release drunks into their custody. There’s the “Cooperation” pamphlet that explains how to petition the courts for new members. Of course to hear AA members talk of it, the mean ol’ judges force people on them and AA takes them in out of the goodness of their heart.
People like Dr. Laura, Dear Abby, Oprah, and a host of others have second hand experience, their Aunt Mabel or Uncle Charlie got sober and credits AA, like a good little stepper, and they believed it. Nobody decides to promote AA without a reason.
We are back in Alice in Wonderland territory here (or was it Through the Looking Glass?) where Humpty Dumpty opines that words can mean just what he wants them to mean.
I always found the abandonment of reason in aa to be an affront to common sense. People are bullied, under a none-too-subtle threat of death, into abandoning reason and common sense in favour of magical thinking. This is both wrong and dangerous, in my opinion.
I just had a post vanish, so if I seem to be repeating myself, that is why.
“That’s the secret of AA. No magic, no miracles. Just simple faith.”
One man’s secret is another one’s fraud. AA doesn’t have too many secrets anymore. Its horrendous retention rates have become widely known. Its self-denying religiosity is apparent to all but the most indoctrinated deniers. Its toxic quack psychology, practiced by its untrained sponsorship cadre and born-again novice nitwits, is obvious to any who care to examine it.
Faith? Check it out.
Sorry, Mike. WordPress has a random automatic spam filter that I can’t seem to control. I don’t know what it has against, your video post…
That’s an interesting video’ Mike. I have no interest in aggressive proselytising. I think it ends up being ill-mannered and wilfully obtuse. The biggest stumbling block about aa for me was that intrudes faith issues into discussion of what to me is a soluble or treatable mental health problem. There is simply no room in aa for people to keep their religious faith, or lack of it, a personal matter.
andy,
“There is simply no room in aa for people to keep their religious faith, or lack of it, a personal matter.”
what a great f**king point! for all the lip-service paid to the “suggested” nature of the program, there is just no friction-free way for a non-believer (or, i guess, even a devoutly denominationally-inclined believer) to get around the decidedly supernatural (if completely vague) underpinnings of the whole enterprise.
there’s no avoiding the window shades at every meeting, the more than occasional ‘do the steps or die’ blowhard, the constant jabbering about miracles & no coincidences, the baldly religious implications of the 2nd tradition.
worse, there’s no recourse. there’s no way (even at ‘agnostic meetings’) to say, “listen, i’m here for that ‘big-tent fellowship’ of the preamble & i’d really rather we kept our views on faith to ourselves. is that okay? can we respect that?”
now that i think about it, a ‘personal matter’ kind of flies in the face of AA to begin with. recovery comes first & foremost, & personal recovery depends on AA unity — ergo, there are no entirely ‘personal matters’ in AA.
what a head-f**k.
speedy
speedy, it is a personal matter. AA does not actually care. And, if it did care, it lacks the means. It does take strong boundaries. But, aa has no interest in what attendees think..
AA does not ‘like atheists’? Then, AA has a personal problem.
Using my own large family as an example, I’ve seen two that were unable to stop. Several have been psycholgically dependent at one time, stopped or moderated.
We’ve enagaged in serious or humorous open discussions. No one is chastised, or feels threatened. Only two family members have strong religious beliefs that are tabled when we speak of personal issues.
I have a copy of a research study somewhere, which has the latest studies from Portugal showing good success rates when the focus is on familial support on issues with drugs and or alcohol.
The topic of AA was in one of our family reunion discussions in May. We took a, “group conscience,” and decided it had zero value to any of us.
Cuda, we are all unique. None of what you posted has anything at all to do with whether or not I drink. I stopped because I decided to stop. I am that sort of person.
And, I am not unusual at all in thar regard.
So why are you on an interactive discussion board having to do with alcohol recovery if you simply stopped because you decided to stop?
Are you here to strengthen your beliefs or is it because the other countless millions of websites don’t interest you?
Snap, H. Me too. I stopped when I felt I had to, and stayed completely stopped for a very long time. I later gained an understanding of the reasons why I relied excessively on alcohol during various periods in the past. My excessive alcohol consumption was not just randomly intermittent. It was cyclical in nature, and the cycle coincided with the cycle of my mood fluctuations.
When I got a proper diagnosis of my bipolarity (something people commonly wait many years or even decades for) my past alcohol problem became very much easier to understand. It didn’t require any redefinition of truth or any invocation of a spiritual agency. It didn’t require suspension of common sense or reason. My past difficulties are now quite understandable as the result of self-medication of bipolar disorder through the only means available to me at the time. This sort of self-medication is not at all uncommon. Even the big book mentions the “manic-depressive type of alcoholic”, but from my own experience aa has little or no appropriate help to offer those with underlying mental health difficulties. In practice, at the level of meetings, I saw people who fell into this category quite often ridiculed or abused by other members and ultimately disowned as not being “real alcoholics”, when encouragement to get proper medical help would be a far more sane and helpful response to such people than telling them they had to immerse themselves in the practice of a self-contradictory pseudo-religion.
Disowning any responsibility for the mentally ill and deeming their experience inappropriate for discussion at meetings is not only lacking in compassion, it is lacking in understanding. I don’t think people with mental health issues are a tiny minority. Although the nature and extent of their problems varies, I think they actually make up the majority of the membership. I also believe that many more people can and do return to moderate drinking than is admitted by even the less closed-minded of aaers.
AA is a one trick pony. All it has to offer people with quite understandable (and treatable) problems is a “program” which ignores any investigation of the real roots of mental distress in favour of imposing a second-hand, poorly thought and dishonestly presented pseudo-religious “solution”, which they are strongly pressured into affording a more central and important place in their lives than any religious or philosophical beliefs they already have.
I’ve always thought it highly presumptious and dishonest of aa to present itself publicly as a no-strings-attached support group whilst gradually and deceptively infiltrating the issue of religious or “spiritual” belief into what is supposed to be support and treatment for a medical tradition. I don’t say this as an atheist or agnostic. I just never saw any compelling reason to have to discuss my personal beliefs in the context of my problem with alcohol, especially when accompanied by pressure to change those beliefs to fall into line with the new dispensation of Bill W’s revealed new age religion.
Sorry, that was meant to read “medical condition”. It was a bit of an aside to go on about mental health issues on this thread, but I do think they are of more relevance than religious belief or lack of it.
The rigid and dogmatic insistence on people having to embrace very specific and peculiar pseudo-religious beliefs and practices was something which greatly detracted from any benefit I may have got from using meetings as a source of social and moral support.
Closely related to the above were the simplistic black and white thinking applied to any issue and the tendency towards superstition and childish magical thinking.
Black and white thinking allows for no subtleties or gradations, hence aa can only envisage an “alcoholic” being completely powerless over alcohol and suffering from a compulsion to drink, rather than various levels of craving for drink. Craving and compulsion are very different things. I had strong cravings at various times, but I could never honestly say that I was compelled to drink. I heard people in the rooms claiming that the compulsion to drink was removed. This sounds very dramatic, but if there was never any actual compulsion in the first place, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that an admittedly powerful craving abated over time when people stopped drinking? There is nothing inherently miraculous about this, and no amount of black and white hyperbole will make it so.
The supposed inability of any “alcoholic” to ever regain control is a necessary corollary of the dogmatic black and white creed of absolute powerlessness. There is no admission here that there may be many shades of grey where alcohol dependence is concerned, that some people may be very much better advised to totally abstain, whereas many others may have a realistic prospect of eventually controlling their consumption, perhaps after a recuperative period of abstinence.
There were also many examples of magical and superstitious thinking I remember from meetings, some of them quite absurd, involving members thinking that the normal laws of the universe were suspended just so that they could catch the number nine bus before the timetable said it was due or ( more creepily) that a fellow alcoholic’s death was a special divine message or warning for them. One really has to not only have abandoned rational thought to think this way. One has to have achieved a state of complete egomania.
In the end the cognitive dissonance and futile circular arguments that these sort of things engendered became too exhausting, and I had to walk away, but you don’t walk away from the experience unscathed, so I don’t think any of us who are disillusioned after exposure to aa have to apologise to anyone for expressing our views on this organisation which denies being an organisation.
Yes and the AA grapevine has even admitted that 3 out 5 alcoholics do it themselves.
http://www.divisiononaddictions.org/html/reprints/vaillant.htm
Bottom line is this(IMHO) different strokes for different folks.
cuda, that is none of your business.
joedrywall. you are correct.
Andy, as you say, the mentally ill are not a tiny minority. Again, as you say, the mentally ill may be a majority. There may be a fruitful line of inquiry here.
In 1984 the NIMH estimated that half of all alcoholics and up to 75% of all addicts had underlying mental illnesses.
Because of the anti-medication, anti-therapy crowd in AA, there are many people in the rooms who experience untreated mental illness who believe they are fine because they do not drink.
Certainly explains oldtimers.
That accounts for quite a bit in AA. It can account for the failure to quit and stay quit; it can account for quitting not being enough to live well; it can account for some the bad behavior issues in AA.
I believe professionals should advise clients who want a support system of AA alternatives,not just AA.It is time for professional who shove AA down their clients throats to be held accountable.Especially since the courts are dumping all types of criminals into the 12 step programs.
A lot of the people who work in mental health are not AA boosters.
ACT programs
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assertive_community_treatment )
are supposed to be based on Motivational Interviewing, but most substance abuse counselors that are trained and have experience have a 12step background.
I co-facilitate a substance abuse group with such a person, but even she is aware of the dangers that the mentally ill find in the rooms.
Mnetally ill people do face serious risks in AA.
Witness the gormless remarks posted here.
I think AA is right up there with leeches and shock therapy, the only difference being it is nearly free of charge.
Pull yourself together and stop drinking. Your life will probably get better.
ken,
you are a curiosity.
how’s that adsl line working out for you? most of the sbc-global engineers i worked with out on the left coast were a little fuzzy when it came to asynchronous protocols — but they muddled through.
you looking to do the same thing here?
there’s no anonymity on the web,
speedy
this reply came out of buckingham, uk (212.32.116.129 — an ftech customer). this isn’t youtube, i’m not a fan, & an average of 400 hits a day suggest otherwise.
if ‘anonymous’ wants to remain just an IP address then i’d suggest ‘anonymous’ enjoy the self-satisfied giggle & move on.
thanks,
speedy
I totally agree. AA is a cult.
mikeblamedenial what happened to your website? I tried to go there because I was interested in seeing your response to Agent Green….
My partner decided to close it some time ago for a variety of reasons. As for Agent Green’s blog, what is for us to respond to? Orange handled it nicely, as he usually does, without any need for back-up.
Oh ok thanks.