Thread: 9 Days Sober
View Single Post
Old 11-06-2017, 03:42 PM
  # 6 (permalink)  
August252015
Guest
 
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: Atlanta
Posts: 8,674
Doing it alone didn't work for me. AA has saved my life and I went into it kicking and screaming. As my Dad used to say to me (it was clear I had an increasingly dangerous and devastating problem for years) "AA may not be the be all end all, it might be total crap but I sure know a lot of people it works for."

And - IMO and IME (especially since I now lead a non-NA/AA based recovery group for the restaurant industry, where we provide a bridge to as many programs of recovery as possible, including AA and NA)- it doesn't matter so much WHAT you do but that you actually DO use a program and support- something besides yourself. I haven't met anyone in 20+ mo that did it completely solo - or if they had tried that, they soon learned that life was still rough and "white knuckling" - just being sober but NOT living a recovered life- was all they were doing. That's not good enough for me.

Last thing- it struck me that you cited the reasons you drank - those are just as good as any, just as common, and reasons people DO succeed in AA. "There are as many kinds of alcoholics as there are alcoholism" is something that someone said to me early on that I think of often- looking for similarities not differences has been very useful to me.

I ultimately could not rule anything - and it finally was AA or nothing- out if I wanted to live.
August252015 is offline