Tag Archives: Meetings vs Steps

Meeting Makers Make Meetings

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     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…

AA Has Lost Its Way

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     I don’t go to meetings anymore.

     One of the reasons is the guy who came up to me in the gym today and told me that I definitely need to go to more meetings, that I’m not gonna make it, and that I must not be an addict if I don’t need meetings to be okay. If he had done some work on himself, like say, taken Steps, he might have refrained from taking my inventory. To state the obvious, going to meetings doesn’t get people better. Right action does. Spiritual action does. And sorry, but I got better to take care of the people I love and to live the life I was supposed to live, not to go to meetings all day long.

     Most people in and out of AA think that the program of AA is going to meetings, though nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, when people ask me if I’m in AA, they ask me if I go to meetings and how many I go to, to which I reply, “None.” Then they freak out and tell me I’m going to relapse soon. I have been a recovered alcoholic and drug addict for almost 8 years and I am completely okay. They say, “Well then, what do you do?” to which I reply, “I take Steps.” I should also mention (in an effort to dispel all of the dual-diagnosis nonsense, or perhaps hoax is a better word) that I’m totally unmedicated… and I’ve never been more balanced and successful in my entire life. Right action and GOD made me better and fixed my broken mind, not some insane cocktail of brain-damaging and soul-crushing psychotropics.

     Searching other blogs one day, I came across stories of people who have left AA… and I must say that I don’t blame them. They described and summarized meetings much the way I do, but worse. Several of these stories were from women who attended ‘Young Persons’ meetings and saw nothing but disgusting, 50+ year-old losers who were in there to stalk and stare at young, vulnerable women. I have seen this myself in ‘YP’ AA meetings in the Boston area. I have also seen dogma, status, anger, insanity, sickness, rampant untreated alcoholism, and Holier Than Thou nonsense. Yes, AA has most certainly lost its way.

     But we must distinguish between this sick, watered-down AA and the original Twelve Step program, which was nothing more than a spiritual set of actions. The original Twelve Steps teach us to become better people. They teach us to become more honest, loving, selfless and courageous. AA was never intended to devolve into a slew of sick meetings, where the trash and filth of the earth prey on young people, or where some speaker preaches the Steps but is completely nuts.

     I’m sure Bill Wilson and Bob Smith are rolling in their graves. When did it become okay for dry drunks to run groups, repeatedly give advice that contradicts fundamental principles of AA, abuse false power, hand out sobriety chips and incessantly tell their self-aggrandizing war stories, or worse yet, their sob stories? Countless numbers spit out AA slogans and yet, you wouldn’t follow some of these folks around if there was a gun to your head, let alone cop a ride home with them all alone. 

     So does AA need to reassess? Absolutely. AA is getting a bad rap for being a cultish group of nutjobs and moral degenerates who don’t do any real work on themselves and 13 Step young girls. I will, for now, do what I can by teaching others what AA actually is/was (see links on blog), what the Twelve Steps actually are, and how this once mystical and miraculous spiritual program has gone astray.

God, please guide AA back to its original, spiritual, moral, action-oriented self…

Meetings vs Steps

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     One of the central tenets of AA is that no human power can give us choice back. But today you have slogans and cliches which profess that all you need is a Group Of Drunks (G.O.D.) to keep you sober. Sorry, but if you’re a chronic alcoholic or addict, no meeting or group of people can keep you sober. Nobody in the world can. If that were true, no one in AA would be relapsing. The truth is that nothing human or man-made can keep us sober.

     Meetings never really helped me because even though I may identify with whatever loser was speaking at the podium, I never heard a real solution. Nobody ever told me what to actually do to get better, feel better, and become recovered so I don’t have to struggle 24/7 and end up going to 3 meetings a day for the rest of my life. Just keep comin’ [to meetings] isn’t gonna cut it. How about becoming free to go anywhere in the world and not worry about relapsing?
     If I’m borderline suicidal and still white knuckling it everyday after 20 years, then somebody please shoot me in the fucking head. You might as well just drink if the alternative is a life of constant struggle and utter misery.
     Now, if I had somehow found a meeting where I heard a recovered person speaking and I thought, ‘Yes, that person is all better. They are calm and centered and strong… I want what they have’, then I could ask them what they did to get better. And if they weren’t totally full of shit, they would meet up with me individually and take me line by line through the first 164 pages of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, breaking down the specific instructions on how to take Steps.
     The Steps are not just that numbered list you see on a poster hanging on the wall during an AA meeting. The Steps are a specific set of actions that, if done thoroughly and fearlessly, will elicit an entire psychic change within. In the beginning of AA meetings, a preamble is read and everybody thinks they are taking Steps or that they are doing the program. Actually, the ‘program’ doesn’t have much to do with war stories and sob stories, coffee and cookies, preambles and sobriety chips, being a treasurer and planning the bi-annual sober dance.
     So why wait to get better? Why go to your local meetings and take advice that might kill you – to just ‘sit down, shut up, keep comin’, and wait for the miracle to happen’?
     We don’t wait to recover.
     We get up off our asses and go get better. It’s never too early to start taking Steps and turn our will over to God, to write inventory and read it, to make amends and go help others. It’s never to early to grow up and find a purpose. It’s never too early to commit to a lifetime of spiritual growth. Waiting is the exact problem with alcoholics and drug addicts. Waiting might put you in the ground. If someone in AA tells you to wait to do something (like the guy who told me to wait to make amends because it was too early in my sobriety), run the other way as fast as you can. If I had listened to that guy, I’d probably be dead right now.
God, teach me the difference between white-knuckling it and doing some actual work…