eddie73

I go to AA meetings, but dont agree with everything that is endorsed there. What I get out of AA is the solidarity and support and understanding of the group. Nothing else. My sponsor recently told me to quit my anti depressants after which I did, I felt really awful. I finally went back on them yesterday after a month from hell. I dont think we should make this thing harder than it has to be, we get no reward for 'extra suffering', in my book anyway. The main thing is that you get your self sober and find people in AA that you can connect with.

NYCDoglvr

Bill Wilson, founder of AA, discovered that two (or more) alcoholics talking to each other can stay sober. We talk about things (relationships, work, family, health, etc) than can lead to a drink. I suggest getting a sponsor and talking about anything you like.

Get a new sponsor!! AA's own literature says "no one should play doctor". When it comes to health and medication only consult a doctor and if anyone in AA suggests changing that walk quickly away. I've been taking anti-depressants for most of my sobriety (20 years) as are most of the recovering alcoholics I know. I don't talk about it in meetings in order to avoid unsolicited advice. I knew someone well who, with six years, stop taking his meds and committed suicide.

Remember, your sponsor and every other alcoholic is just a person. The only thing we're experts about is our own recovery.

Charon

Don't know who is giving you that advice. Everything I've ever heard is pick up the phone if you have any craving at all. That's what the fellowship is about. You ain't going to tempt a long-timer with youor craving. Also, if you have a craving you are SUPPOSED to bring it up at a meeting. Most meetings I go to before they ask for topics they ask "Does anyone want to drink?" Someone is giving you way bad information - unless AA is vastly different in Florida.

Charon

WOW!!! You sure go to some STRANGE AA meetings. I have never seen this.

miamifella

I attended AA, NA, CMA meetings for over 7 years, so it is not about someone giving me bad information. When I admitted to cravings I would always get spoken to about it--that my cravings were my own fault because I did not have a good program and that it was not fair to discuss them in meetings because we were supposed to share experience, strength and hope--not negative things. It was rare to hear anyone share anything negative.

I do not know if there really is any "supposed to" in 12-step groups. There is the ideal laid out in the literature, but then a bunch of people the majority of whom do not have enough distance from their own active addiction have to figure out how to make it work. Maybe some come up with better ways to do it than others.

sugarbear1

I read your previous posts. It seems you've been having cravings for the last 2 years. Are you sober now? How long? Do you have a sponsor-someone to help you with the steps, Not a doctor, counselor, accountant, etc., but someone who works the steps (all 12) and who has had a change in self afterwards?

The steps are an action, not to be understood, necessarily, but to be experienced. I worked through all 12
in my first 2 weeks of early recovery (this time) and had a profound change, no cravings.

Have you stopped all forms of cocaine?

Confuzd

I can only speak from my own experience. I attend SMART meetings now and I have learned that cravings and urges are just feelings, that just like other unpleasant feelings they come and go, and that just because you experience a craving doesn't mean you have to act on it. Having urges doesn't mean you're doing something wrong, it doesn't mean you're weak, and it doesn't necessarily endanger your recovery unless you act on your urge. Honestly what works for me is distracting myself with something until the urge passes. Sometimes when I'm at work I get the weirdest feelings, like all of a sudden I'll feel like I'm smelling/tasting a beer. That freaks me out but I realize the urge itself is out of my control, what is in my control is what I do about it. Listening to music is one of my favorite ways to deal with urges and being upset/in a bad mood.

miamifella

I have been clean for over two years. I have not used any drugs in that time. I never was a drinker.

I am no longer involved in any 12-step program, but I did have sponsors over the years. At this point, I do not really see any reason to go back since I have much better recovery now than I did when I was active in the program and continually relapsing.

Someone on a board sent me a message that I need to remember that the one sure thing about cravings is that they eventually abate. That was a terrific piece of advice and it helped me a lot yesterday.

WakeUp

miamifella,
Sorry I am so late to this thread, but you want a practical excercise for cravings, I'll give you one. Sit for five minutes and watch your breath. A simple thing right? Try it and I'll bet the craving goes away in short order.

I won't badger you into working the 12 Steps if you don't want to, but after reading about the meetings you been to over the years, damn! Sometimes I wish there was the AA police who could set some of these groups straight. :still shaking head:

keithj

So, you're not involved in 12 Step programs, you don't have a drinking problem, but you start a thread about something you disagree with or don't understand in AA? Whatever works for ya.

miamifella

This is weird keithj--but until you said I started this thread I did not know I did! I was responding to someone named "seared," but must have accidentally started a new thread. I would never have started a thread centered on AA.

Seared's thread is called "Asking for help" if anyone wants to see it. That is what my first post is in answer to.

miamifella

Thank you, Wakeup. That is the kind of thing that really helps me.

I really did try to do the steps when it was first suggested on the board. I sat down and said out loud the first step with as much personal investment as I could. I tried to do the same with the next, but I just felt like a hypocrite without hope. I was on the phone with a dealer very quickly after that. I think that what I needed most was hope that I could be whole and that I could live without drug use. 12-step programs seem to give that to most people, but meetings and even the literature made me feel pretty hopeless and alone. Trying to sit down and go through the steps when I was already craving made me think that I was not capable of recovery.

miamifella

This is weird keithj--but until you said I started this thread I did not realize that I did! I was responding to someone named "seared," but Dee moved my response to the beginning of a new thread.

Seared's thread is called "Asking for help" if anyone wants to see it. That is what my first post is in answer to.

I am not sure why it was moved. Dee says that Seared said he was not interested in AA. I did not find that anywhere in the thread. Also, I would never have started a thread speaking of AA specifically, since when I attended AA I considered myself a guest more than a member, since I did not have any problem not drinking. My remarks were all about 12-step programs in general rather than any one in particular.

keithj

Maybe not, but you routinely post some of your negative opinions about AA. It's just curious coming from a non-alcoholic.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't offer any 12 Step suggestions to someone who has made it clear that they don't wish to pursue the 12 Steps. However, it would be a great disservice to you not to try an clear up some of the confusion about the Steps.

Anybody that tries to take the 12 Steps on their own is playing a fool's game. We need some help with this stuff.

Step 1 is not taken by reciting it aloud. On the AA side of things, the formal directions for Step 1 are on page 30, 'We had to concede to our innermost selves that we were alcoholic.' It helps greatly to know what the book means when it says alcoholic. So, the first 44 pages +8 pages of the Dr.'s Opinion are spent explaining the physical allergy (I get a physical craving to drink more once I start drinking), and the mental obsession (I can not recall with any sufficient force that I have that physical allergy. All I can recall is that feeling of ease and comfort. I am without defense against the first drink. Despite my most sincere efforts to never pick up, I keep picking up).

52 pages spent on that requires a little more than just reciting it aloud. I have to look at my own experience with what happens when I drink. Do I always stop at 2-3 like I said I would, or oftentimes do I end up stumbling crazy drunk? Then I have to look at my efforts with NOT drinking. Have I been successful? Have I had good reason to quit and still kept drinking? Have I drank in spite of the certain consequences that I faced, saying, 'this time will be different?'

Step 1 requires that I fully understand that I am in a hopeless condition. I have to know in my heart that there is no way out of this for me. I have to know I'm powerless over alcohol. Then, and only then, does Step 1 force me into Step 2.

Step 2 doesn't require me to believe. Step 2 requires only that I be willing to believe that there is a power greater than myself. Lots of hard-core atheist (myself included) approached Step 2 without any belief. But Step 1 forced us to be willing to believe.

A good sponsor, sharing their own experience with these concepts is crucial to the process.

Tosh

I've probably missed something, but if you don't have any problem not drinking, why were you at A.A.?

Were you court ordered there or something?

Strange?

miamifella

I think you missed the point of my recounting the attempt to do the steps one night when it was suggested to me. I absolutely agree with you, keithj, and was trying to show how ridiculous it is to suggest to someone that spending the evening working the steps would help ward off the urge to use. If the steps are to work at all they must be done in a more measured way.

I am very familiar with the chapter of the BB you refer me to, so I assumed most readers here would see that spending a night working on the steps is not even really possible according to the program. (Yet, that advice is still offered in this very forum.)

I never found a sponsor who would work on Steps 1 to 3. I know from this forum that this may be unusual, but that is what I experienced. All I can share is my own experience. Enough people with other experience share theirs.

I do not mean to bash 12-step programs. However, I do think it is important to say that they are not a magical program that works for each and every person any more than any kind of treatment of any illness. Chemo may help most cancer patients....but not all. The same with 12-step programs.

When I was trying to find my way, I felt so completely without hope in part because I believed that the steps worked for everyone and if they did not work for me, then I must be the unrecoverable. So I think it is important to say that it is possible to recover other ways. It may be harder, but it is possible. I still think that 12-step programs are the best place to start a program of recovery. And for most people they will be the last program needed. But for others, there are other ways.

Also, there seems to be a great range of how 12-step programs are practiced. Perhaps if I had started recovery in a different place, my experience might have been different. The harsh talk and arbitrary tests of "willingness" probably are more common here because there are so many rehabs (where a tough-love version of recovery is practiced). But for people in an area like mine, I think it is important to say that this is just ego run riot and not good recovery--even if it is presented as part of a 12-step program.

I really believed that I would have to give up my integrity and support things I knew were not right if I wanted to be in recovery. The memory of that despair may make me a bit overinsistant--but I am doing it in an effort to let others going through something similar know that there is hope.

miamifella

Tosh--

I related more to the people in AA more than other fellowships. I went to hear something I could connect with more than in other fellowships.

I used to wish I were a drinker so that I could take part in AA. About 75 percent of the room would always be people I recognized from other fellowships, but that 25 percent who were strictly alcoholics were always more on my wavelength than the people in other groups.

miamifella

I think I know why this topic is hitting such a chord with me.

Someone I know through work told me that he was in recovery and we talked for awhile. He gave me his number and said I could text him if I needed to. I was floored. I gave out my number so many times in 12-step meetings, hoping to get a number back in exchange. (I had been told that you are supposed to get phone numbers from people.( Maybe it happened once or twice that I got one in exchange.

I have not taken him up on this--mostly because I do not know what is "okay" to say. I have spoken by phone to some people from sites like this one. Mostly, people just have tried to convince me that they were smart about recovery--giving me checklists and making me tell them my daily schedule or going on about how without Jesus there is no recovery. So I really did not have to say much of anything. I just listened. (I think 12-step literature is so right when it says that we do best just to share our own experience--to tell our story. Tell me what you have been through--the good and the bad--and it will give more guidance than all the preaching in the world.)

But this guy is not a preacher or a ranter. But he is in a 12-step program and I do not want to alienate him. What is the "help" that people ask for when they call others. I sort of asked this before--but I think I should have asked more insistently.

In meetings there is a pretty strong code about what can and cannot be discussed. I guess I am just ignorant about whether this applies outside as well.

RobbyRobot

Its not just about asking for help, its really about sharing back and forth, from one alcoholic to another, our common solution.

When I share f2f, I give of me, a sober alcoholic, and I expect to receive in return the same as I gave ie they give back of themselves. Sometimes all that can be given back to me is a sharing of the misery of alcoholism. The loneliness. The despairs. How impossible it is to move forward. The horrible reality is that alcoholism is a fatal illness and sobriety is the only and best answer we have, and for those who drink, sobriety seems very very far away.

AA is what it is today because back in the 1930's alcoholics banded together and shared how they stayed sober that day even though they had no cure in hand against alcoholism. They shared their solutions they discovered. They had no AA book in the early beginnings, they didn't even yet have published the 12 steps. In the beginning they only had each other as drunks who stayed sober.

They had sobriety because they shared amongst their own how sobriety was working for them, how it was keeping them away from drinking, and without suffering, without worry, without the torture of being again finding themselves drunk.

Its not difficult really. The help we ask for is really we just share our sober selves with each other. The 12 steps and the Big Book explain the most direct and effective ways to do that sharing from one drunk to another to ensure success.

My years of sobriety afford me to no longer be required to share my struggles with alcoholism simply because those struggles have been removed. I'm no longer the same man who began his sobriety. I'm a changed man. Now I'm a sober alcoholic living a spiritual life. So that is what I share.

You are having struggles that require you to share the darker experiences of being lonely and from what I can gather from your posts, cravings and the rest of that misery found within the addictive mind-set.

If after sharing you don't see a better way forward, you're either sharing the wrong stuff and in the wrong way, or you're sharing with the wrong person, or even both. The point is is that sharing works, because if it didn't, the most any of us could ever hope to have would be just some wasted time between drinks, you know?

So now you know, share what you got to give, and share that with others who have something to give back to you. If you're in earnest about changing, your struggles will eventually be behind you and your future will be as bright as you can imagine. The 12 steps, in alot of ways, are simply a proven, clearly explained way to experience that sharing is all, and then how to live with the results daily.

Cheers

miamifella

Thank you RobbyRobot. I think I have just gotten so cowed by people in meetings that the idea of a normal conversation with addicts seems impossible. I got so afraid of getting jumped on for saying something "bad" that I feel like I lost any ability to talk about my addiction. (Except on the internet.)

But I probably should.