AmandaOliver

I know he does go to the meetings. They are at a church right down the street and I see his car there. Also have seen his car at the restaurant they go to after which is a diner with no alcohol.

FlyerFan

That whole situation just sounds entirely creepy. AA does not push any cult like behavior on anyone. It sounds like someone may not be being truthful with you.

fuzzy1

Amanda, you said in an earlier post you don't want to date an alcoholic and then go on justifying doing that with "love". I've been a member of CoDA for years before I joined AA and I can't tell you how often I heard that and I have done it also in the past.
The feelings you experience regarding this man are not love. Maybe take a look at what makes a sick person who obviously is not able right now to have an intimate relationship attractive to you. I am pretty sure if you take a close look at your former relationships you can see a pattern there.

wynter

Amanda,
I'm jumping in here a little late, but for what it's worth I get what you are saying about AA. Similar stories with my RA -- at times seems almost consumed by them. I know he's in early recovery...still, yeah, feel like I'm not a priority, jealous at times, alone. He is closed with me, A LOT, but I do know he is very close to these people that he sees on a regular basis.

He also does the meeting/diner thing, and it lasts ALL evening on a saturday night. No getting around it. No veering off schedule. It's like they control his brain, kinda like he's their robot!

Still...I know he needs to stay focused on his recovery it's #1 (heck he reiterates that to me almost every time we get in an argument).

There is a social part of AA that I didn't understand initially, and quite honestly don't care for. I'm with you there. Mine has a meeting he attends that is predominantly women...ahem. That makes me squirm.

Whether you can be okay with all of this is the crux of the matter. IMO it takes a strong woman, and one who has to shift her focus from HIM back to HERSELF, where it has to be for this relationship to really work.

Take care of YOU!

m1k3

To be honest you can't support him in this. He has to do it alone, it's his journey.

Another thing is that I had a lot of trouble telling the difference between love and pity. I finally came to realize that what I felt for my wife was pity. Love shouldn't make me sad or make me cry or make me question who I am and wonder if I am ruining my life. Love is give and take and all I was doing was giving. Whatever it was that I had it wasn't love.

I have learned to love myself which is something I lost in my marriage with my AW. I am now content with the skin I'm in. I realized that I had a hole in me and I was trying to fill it with her. It didn't work. What is working is that I am filling that hole with me. I can honestly say that I love me, something I couldn't have said a year ago.

This is my life and life is good.

Your friend,

AmandaOliver

Pardon my ignorance but I guess I just don't see how replacing addiction to alcohol with addiction to AA is healthy? Yeah I get that not drinking is healthy but what about other healthy lifestyle choices and being able to live normally just without alcohol? We used to go running before work in the morning, take trips, golf, go to weddings and events. We actually have alot of common interests and a great relationship prior to AA. Now AA has taken over every aspect of his life and there is no time left. Of course I have my own life and things I do on my own - I volunteer at a hospital, serve on a nonprofit committee, do yoga, running club and have a lot of friends. It does help. I still miss our old life and I wonder is AA a means of getting to a normal healthy life without alcohol or is AA now going to be his life? If its the former, I can deal with that. But the lady he goes to AA with and some of the others seem to have made AA their life. I don't get that and again pardon my ignorance as this is all new to me.

Pigtails

Hi. For an alcoholic (like myself), we often cannot just turn to a healthy lifestyle because our way of thinking, living and being is fundamentally warped. Part of this is due to our personality/genetics, part to our repeated use of alcoholism to try to cope with daily life which in fact has screwed things up even more, and partly sometimes it is also due to mental health issues which have also been created or exacerbated by alcohol use. It's a chicken-and-egg cycle and we must have a drastic turn-around in our entire way of thinking and living. For me it is truly a personality change/ change in pscyhe, a new spiritual way of living (I'm an agnostic so I don't mean like church, I mean like figuring out my flaws and assets, my own morals and principles, and a way to live according to them so that I stop being so self-centered and living any which way I please, which only brings me misery).

I have had to find a new way of living in AA, and practice my recovery plan every single day. Spiritual push-ups if you will. So while going to the gym and doing healthy things are nice (and I'm incorporating those things in my recovery plan), it takes a lot more than that. It's spiritual growth and conditioning which are even more important than those things, and without which we cannot acheive those things, or we might but they won't work. For me it's a hole that was inside myself that I dind't know how to fill-- I turned to drinking/drugs, and men/relationships/sex, external excitement/adrenaline, education and my career, but I was always empty and miserable no matter where I turned or how I tried to fill it. Now I am learning how to fill myself up in the right way.

So no it's not an "addiction" to AA but for me, meetings and fellowship with other alcoholics, who can truly understand where I'm coming from and help me out of the pit of self-despair, is incredibly necessary. If my partner told me to choose AA or them I would choose AA because in the end I couldn't have a healthy, lvoing relationship with my partner or anyone else, including myself, if I don't work on myself and become healthy, which AA is helping me to do. (Now if there is funky stuff going on that has nothing to do with AA or recovery, and my partner expressed concerns, I would be honest with myself and my partner, look at my motivations, and get into a better recovery program... but your gripes here appear to be about AA in general, not just this weird little club he's involved with, so I'm mainly addressing that.)

I don't know about the Facebook page and pushiness but in terms of genuine AA or any recovery program he is truly working- I would encourage you to support him in that and to realize it is vital to him ever being able to be healthy and happy. I am not saying everyone needs AA, but if someone is at the point that I was, AA can help them tremendously, and should be encouraged rather than discouraged! If he is honestly trying to get help and work on himself, encourage it instead of being resentful about time spent away from the relationship. He has to do this for himself, not you or anyone else. Your relationship is going to be different now that he doesn't drink-- he is becoming a new person, and you have to have patience and also focus on yourself and your own perhaps co-dependent issues. I would say allow him to work on himself for his own sake, and you work on yourself for your own sake, and if you two are meant to be, you will be, but it will likely be in a very different way/dynamic than it was before, because when he was drinking he was not healthy or happy, and he likely needs to change a lot (not just not drinking-- that's just the beginning) to be able to get into and sustain a place of happiness. It may be that the relationship only worked while he was in active addiction, and now in recovery it won't work. But that would be for the best, the way things are supposed to be. Try to let go and give up control over him and his choices and focus on yourself and what you truly want out of life, separate and apart from him, because if you two are meant to be, it will only work out if you both are happy independently. (At least that is what I'm learning in my own relationship with my boyfriend who is not in recovery.)

I wish you peace and happiness!

shockozulu

I've been to industry specific underground meetings but they weren't held inside a house. However once it was clear there was only a few of us that day we went to a restaurant and held it there. One of the best meetings I ever attended right at Chili's. After the hour was up we continued to talk program and I gained so much ESH.

We do have one closed meeting here in our schedule that is held in a house and has been for a few years.

onlythetruth

Well, there is a difference of opinion within AA about whether AA is, or should be, one's entire life or simply "a bridge to life".

I think what you are seeing is a manifestation of those who think it should be the former. Not everyone in AA thinks this, in fact I believe this is a minority view, but there are absolutely pockets of it, in fact one fairly large contingent holding this view refers to itself as "Pockets of Enthusiasm". You also see it in the "Back to Basics" groups.

fuzzy1

So, your exbf had a healthy and normal lifestyle while drinking and since he is sober he turned into an AA sheep with no other interests than doing AA? Maybe you should run as fast as you can.

m1k3

We are supposed to be doing what we can to help the OP. Please keep that in mind with your posts.

Perhaps a mod should take a look as this as it is starting to drift off course.

Seren

Some posts have been removed from this thread, and more may be removed once I have time to read through the entire thread.

These posts were removed under Rule 2:
If you would like to share your personal story, your personal experience, strength, or hope, please do so. Hearsay is not appropriate here.