If you like going to meetings, then great, go to meetings. Just trying to help meeting makers consider the possibility of doing some actual work on themselves… like perhaps take their very own AA’s Twelve Steps… and maybe not wait 10 years, 100 relapses, 10 cars, 50 jobs, and 20-30 more broken hearts before you decide to take them. So if your knucklehead sponsor told you to wait to take Steps or to only take a Step a year, you should probably remove their phone number from your rolodex and consider directing them to the links at your bottom left.
Meetings don’t actually get alcoholics better. Taking enough spiritual action to induce a psychic change gets alcoholics better. AA was nothing more than a suggested set of spiritual actions long, long ago before it got watered-down into group therapy and snack time. AA is the Big Book. That’s what AA is. Referring to your home group as a Group Of Drunks (G.O.D.) and relying on them to keep you sober isn’t AA. I don’t know what that is, actually. Groups of drunks aren’t God. And people can’t keep real alcoholics sober.
The slogan goes, ‘Meeting Makers Make It!’ Um, no, they don’t. Why? Because true alcoholics have lost the power of choice. Meeting makers only make it if they’re not really alcoholics, because true alcoholics cannot choose not to drink. They are in chronic relapse until the removal of the mental obsession. It’s just simple math.
So if for some reason you can simply stop drinking and stay sober just by attending meetings, then guess what? You’re not an alcoholic! Celebrate because you’re not completely fucked like I am. Achieving physical sobriety alone is the equivalent of starting a timer that will at some point go off. So the only thing that meetings makers make is, yup, you got it, meetings.
Just a few more questions and this will be my very last post on the subject of meetings. Promise. What’s the point of going to meetings if we regress into selfish pigs as soon as we drive away? What’s the point of going to meetings if we never drop our preoccupation with Self? What’s the point of going to meetings if we never “pick up this simple kit of spiritual tools laid at our feet?” What’s the point of going to meetings if we never take Steps and become well enough to take someone else through this life-saving process? What’s the point of going to meetings if we still can’t reach out to our spouses, children, families, friends or colleagues? What’s the point of going to meetings if we end up still holding on by a thread 20 years down the road?
Trust me when I say that the point of this program is actually not to get all of us merely sober. Nope. Sorry. The point of this program is to get work that should have been done before we ever started drinking to begin with out of the way so that we may serve others and live a useful, meaningful life. We do not have an alcohol or drug problem. We have a selfishness problem. We have a life problem. We have a spiritual problem. We have a developmental problem – a permanently narcissistic, teenage baby problem.
God, please help alcoholics and addicts who still suffer find their way to the Steps and to You…
Great post. Unless meetings help a person internalize the message of the big book – AA meetings are at best just a social club.
“We recover by the steps we take, not the meetings we make” is something I have seen recently that resonates with me – to continue to “don't drink and go to meetings” doesn't treat my alcoholism; It makes me sad that so many people rely on the “don't drink and go to meetings” meetings to try to stay sober – when the instructions for how to be recovered are clearly laid out in the book; simple but not easy – but when I apply these principles my life is not only easier – but I have peace and joy beyond anything I could have ever expected when I got here over ten years ago.
Well said!
There are times here recently in meetings I want to walk out of the room because what do I hear…”Go to meetings, read the Big Book, go to meetings, get a sponsor, go to meetings, work the steps, go to meetings, oh did I forget anything…go to meetings ha ha ha ha ha” as if they are sharing some kind of nonsensical revealed knowledge. My theory as that people who carry on like that need to remain sick. They need to help other people to help themselves as this is a selfish program. Much harder than actually becoming selfless and facing our fears-not only do I get healthy, the newcomer can get healthy so we both “win”. The more sick I am, the greater the god who chose me is which by proxy makes me better than you as I'm chosen and you're not. Or the groupie who hangs out with a rock star so they feel like somebody. It is sick, almost like munchausen syndrome, chosen person mentality, selfish, egotistical, very sick. I loved what you posted btw!
How encouraging and soul destroying all in one go. Having watched someone fall apart as their life long addiction, from early abandonment issues, who has never passed the teenage narcissist selfish baby stage, finally commit to AA, all I can see now, is the smokescreen he is using for the new blame of the illness, and meetings will make him better, How I will never understand, Im not one of the co fellows at meetings, and they all seem to have the same view, they also seem to be regularly lapsing- obviously because they didnt attend enough meetings- then coming back for more meetings. I wanted to have faith in the program, but Im worried its smoke and mirrors, its better than the life before, but its a long long way from a person that can ever be contented and real. Reassuring (as Im told that I know nothing) that Im not alone in seeing the holes in the system. Its fantastic that it works, and I dont want to distract from that, but if someone can only stay sober by constant security of a group others who also self flaggelate but never really change, then surely its a flawed system? But its THE recognised system, the system with years of data, the system that people believe in.Arrggghhh