[QUOTE=Gottalife;6029768]Hi C3,
Just to respond to your post above about other addictions and AA and SR etc. We are in the alcoholism forum. There will be some people here/in AA who know about other addictions but I am not one of them. When they get discussed in a meeting, you might as well be talking Chinese to me. I have had some addictions explained to me and I don't doubt their existence or how nasty they can be, but I have no experience of them.
Hi Mike, thanks for your post.
Thanks for pointing this out. I forget that on SR everyone's various addictions are segregated. My lineage has taught me that you can read the big book and replace the word "alcohol" or "drinking" with any and all addictions and it really does work (in like 99% of the reading because of substance addiction vs behavioral addiction).
In my open AA meeting, if someone is talking about an addiction I don't have, I think, "isn't that interesting, I acted the same way with alcohol, etc". I think it's helpful for me to see that, because the problem isn't the actual substance or behavior, but what we're using it for.
The other thing to think about is the newcomer alcoholic who is at his first meeting wondering if he is in the right place. For his sake we better be talking about our common problem.
I agree with you that it could be confusing for a newcomer. I'm going to mention that any time going forward if I share on something other than alcohol. If you think about it, though, couldn't we all go to open meetings in any fellowship and replace the addiction word with our own and our stories would be exactly the same?
I don't believe you need a sponsor to help you with this. Also I agree you may not need to go through the steps from scratch. I hear that a lot. Someone changes sponsor and they are made to start all over again. How many times can you make the same amends? It is a daft idea.
Thank you. This was very helpful. The part about repeating amends was exactly what confused me. Also, I wrote an extremely thorough inventory, and I wondered about having to repeat that.
The book does not tell us to do thet, even when someone relapses it tells us to continue to work with them and try and work out where they went wrong. Other than step one, such a problem may commonly be found in step 5 or 9. Read about Br Bob in A Vision For You.
This I didn't know. Thank you for pointing that out.
I think the idea in this (starting again) is using the steps as a psychological tool and giving your sponsor all the information they need to run your life for you. What the book says on this? I have to para phrase,
"The minute we put our work on a service plain the alcoholic commences to rely on is instead of God." We are doping him a disservice.
Yes this is so true, thank you for posting what it says in the book about this, I had forgotten. I am co-dependent and so I resisted at first that I'm in a fellowship where the sponsors are very hands off because they want us to rely on God and not them. But you are absolutely right.
I'd be thanking my sponsor and giving her credit for my sobriety, instead of God. And if something were to happen to my sponsor, then what? I was taught instead of relying solely on meeting, the fellowship, and a sponsor, to rely on God, because God is always there. I was also taught that we go to meetings to carry the message.