Originally Posted by
twinkletoesnyc 
I love the idea of not needing meetings to stay sober.
That is what I like about reading in the secular forum.
For a while it felt like I was almost addicted to meetings and I would go to them instead of feeling what I needed to feel or doing what I needed to do.
It almost seems too easy now............
Has anyone ever detoxed off meetings?
Well since you say you've been attending SMART meetings for two years, Lifering, etc., I presume you don't mean 12-step meetings, but it actually doesn't matter since meetings are meetings, though this sub-forum doesn't get much traffic and winds up being a kind of dumping ground for secular threads where someone mentions AA at the Bridge of Death.
There was a period, the first 3-4 years of sobriety, where I was attending a bunch of meetings in-person and online. Looking back, I really do think it had become a kind of crutch. It kept my head in a place where I thought of myself as broken, or maybe diseased, re-living increasingly remote events and feelings that were becoming increasingly irrelevant in my sober life. I gradually backed out of all that. I still facilitate one in-person meeting every couple weeks but it no longer revolves around drinking so much, it's more of a s**t-shooting session between friends. I hang out in a chat room, but that too normally doesn't revolve around addiction, it's s**t-shooting. I post here occasionally, and a few times a year I check in at my old outpatient program walk-in group just to say hi and kinda re-ground myself.
I don't want to ever forget where I came from, and I keep my toes in recovery world partly so I always have places to go and people to get help from if I need it in the future, but it did feel good ultimately to detox from meetings and feel like I got on with my life.