We Can More Freely Tell
by Ben B.
This is an important idea that I couldn't talk about in AA, that we don't all have the same experiences.
When I was six months sober my AA sponsor was talking about blackouts. When I said I rarely had blackouts, he said in a patronizing way "keep coming back." The idea in AA is that because we're all "alcoholics," we all have all the "symptoms" of "alcoholism," so my sponsor thought I must have had many blackouts, and I was just in denial about it. The truth is that our (not just the people on this list, or in SOS, but all people who have drinking problems) drinking patterns were often very different. Many people regularly had blackouts caused by drinking, but certainly not all. Some people got drunk from the first time they drank, and always got drunk when they drank. Others had years of drinking in which they only had one or two drinks at a time. Some got DUIs, some didn't. Some never drove drunk. And on and on...
I like this about the SOS list: that we can more freely tell what we were really like, without having to have done any one thing or combination of things ('symptoms') while drinking to 'qualify' us to be here. I still see (dare I say it...) a little group-think here, but it's a vast improvement over where I spent my early sobriety...