Old 08-26-2011, 06:03 AM
  # 140 (permalink)  
onlythetruth
Member of SMART Recovery
 
onlythetruth's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2010
Posts: 1,722
Originally Posted by soberlicious View Post
So fairly early on I just decided cut all the white noise and do what I needed to do that made me happy and able to function. Trimpey can't tell me what is right for me, Wilson can't tell me what is right for me, the church can't tell me what is right me me, and the aethists of america can't either. But I can glean much useful information from all of them and use all available resources to get what I need.
Soberlicious, you are SO far ahead of where I was when I made the decision to quit drinking!!! You are absolutely right, of course. Perhaps my own viewpoints are colored because of my extreme naivety when I got sober. I never tried to quit before I actually quit, so I hadn't been through the recovery and relapse ringer or had a reason to think critically about different recovery pathways. I just showed up at a local rehab (picked out of the yellow pages!) and trusted the counselor they assigned to me, who was a long term AA member and who definitely tried to steer me away from RR. So in addition to thinking that Trimpey was a bit off the beam (and he was less so back in 1998 than he seems to be now), AA definitely had a leg up and was presented as definitely being the "best" way. It didn't hurt that at this rehab, the 12 steps were on the wall, the Father Martin Chalk Talks were played, AA meetings and sponsorship were a required part of all treatment plans, etc.

It is so absolutely true that there is no perfect path to recovery and that in the end the only thing people who "make it" have in common is a commitment to sobriety.
onlythetruth is offline