someo

Hi everyone,

I became sober around a year ago with the help of NA (my problem was alcohol mostly but my friend was in NA so I ended up there) and cognitive behavioral therapy. I think NA was really useful in a lot of ways in the beginning, but now I'm having serious doubts about whether it is any longer useful for me. The things is, as far as I am aware of, there are no non-12-step support groups in Finland, so this is why I ended up here, as this forum seems very active and is not just 12-step.

So yeah... I have really had doubts about the effectiveness of the NA-program in my case (I emphasise I am only talking about myself here) for a very long time, some of these thoughts have been there from the beginning. However, I have always brushed off these thoughts, which I find was a really good thing because they would have made it difficult for me to be active in NA, and I really needed the strong peer support for a long time. But now all of these thoughts that I had been in denial about hit me like a brick wall two days ago.

I don't think the NA-program itself ever really worked for me that well. With lots of effort, I have managed to apply some of the things from it (though only few), but now realise I have been using CBT-approaches mostly, and they are really effective for me, unlike the NA-approaches. The peer support element did help a lot in the beginning, but now I have started to feel like the NA-meetings are triggering me and keeping me stuck in the past. I feel like I'm starting to be ready to move on in my life, and being reminded about my past all the time is not beneficial. I am not planning on forgetting my past and starting to use again, but I don't feel like revisiting the trauma of the past regularly helps anything.

I have started to think that I need to focus on combatting my addiction by further improving my CBT-skills, instead of going to meetings all the time when the meetings don't really help anymore. During the past four months, my meeting attendance has been once a week max, and at the moment I haven't been in a meeting or seen any of the fellows for over two weeks, and have had no problems at all (except for my ptsd, but I don't think NA helps with that ), and I feel like the meetings haven't had a positive effect on me for the past four months.

The thing is, four months ago, we started addressing in therapy the childhood sexual abuse I that happened to me between the ages of 6-10, and after that I have had zero urges or anything like that. I feel like my addiction was more like a maladaptive coping mechanism and a way to escape the absolutely horrific feelings of guilt, shame and hopelessness related to the sexual abuse and being denied proper help to deal with it.

In no way am I implying that it would ever be safe for me to use alcohol or drugs again (and I don't really want to either, the thought of even moderate drinking makes me want to puke), but I feel like especially the guilt and shame were the driving factors in my urges and other issues. Looking back, every time the urges came I was usually feeling so guilty and shame-ridden that I didn't think that I deserved to live etc.

I just don't feel like its my selfishness that made me use and is behind my problems, sure it was selfish to endanger myself with substance abuse, but that was more about me being suicidal (I was chronically suicidal for years) than about some deep "flaws of character". I never really harmed anyone but myself (if you exclude that fact that my parents were worried about me at times), never stole or cheated money or anything. In fact I was the one who got my money cheated etc.

So yeah I feel like my biggest problem was and still is the feelings of guilt, and I feel like NA is only making them worse. My therapist keeps saying that I need to find a healthy degree of selfishness and to establish boundaries, and to live life not only to serve others but also for myself, and I feel like NA is encouraging me to do the opposite.

So I have thought about this a lot during the past few days and I don't think I will keep going to NA. I know the third tradition says the only requirement of membership is the desire to stop using, but the only thing we do is talk about the program and about our past or present issues, and I feel like the present issues other people talk about are stuff that I have already overcome (or stuff that I've never even had), and revisiting my past all the time is really exhausting and triggering, and prevents me from moving on with my life in a healthy way. I just don't feel like being reminded about my past all the time does any good, I really don't find how on earth I could "forget" my past and go using again, when even that part of my past is giving me ptsd-symptoms.

And don't get me wrong, I do think that some day I will have urges, but nowadays I know how to observe the trigger, prevent the reaction, and defuse the trigger, like its done in CBT.