Originally Posted by
mbachman 
Hello Everyone,
I'm going to attempt to not come across as hostile, but I've got to get something off of my chest. As with anything that anyone says on here, it's just my two cents, nothing more.
I'm non-religious, and on the advice of two psychiatrists, I went into AA, only to be disgusted with the overt religiousness of the whole program. I felt like I was being actively indoctrinated (and in a way, I was). I was repeatedly told that without going to meetings and "seeking a higher power," that I would be doomed to go back to drinking (which is a gargantuan lie, I have to point out).
So I've cut back my AA meetings to maybe one or two a week now, and I've been sober for two weeks, five days...without the help of a "higher power," which is nothing more than a sly synonym for "God."
Cut to last week, when I began to supplement AA's program with some independent study of secular recovery programs. This is where it really got shocking to me, because the secular recovery programs were MORE repulsive than AA! At least in AA, there wasn't constant bickering between every single member about every single nuanced issue. Secular recovery groups seem dead-set on having a continual debate about anything they can scrap over. Additionally, so much of said secular group's focus centered around AA-bashing, the point of which was lost to me.
Why aren't these groups centered about sobriety, and not a) religion or b) debates?
So I've decided to split from both AA and RR, and I've created my own 12-step program. It's one-step, repeated 12 times. "Don't drink." Period. End of discussion.
Don't know, but it sounds like you're looking for negatives. I have been involved in secular recovery for many years and AA and have no clue what you could be talking about. Also, RR is not even a group, but now a "program" for individual sobriety. I would say in the short time you have been sober that there is no way that you could evaluate anything. I do think your twelve step program of "don't drink" twelve time is really the bottom line. You don't have to participate in any group or program as long as you have that down. I found that sometimes the harder I worked to just not drink, the quicker I drank. All of the awfulizing did no good. The bottom line is that I know that drinking does nothing at all for me and a lot to me so "what's the point?"