sugarbear1

I'd make sure to spend time getting through those steps and commit to a smaller number of meetings each week

Scruffanie

Thank you everyone! Very wise and comforting words. Your support is very gratefully appreciated.

Off to my home group meeting this morning and looking forward to it.

I had been feeling a little frazzled this week and I realized I just needed some time at home to catch up on things. My house was a mess and really getting to me. But I was worrying about not going to a meeting.

I caught up on everything yesterday and spent some quality time with my partner and my pet parrot and I now feel much more centred and ready to be of service to others.

Fly N Buy

Well done on staying sober - Keep coming back!

Gottalife

Very good points Mentium. I agree completely. My own experience was something close to 90 in 90' which I took to mean total immersion in AA, steps, sponsor, prayer, the whole nine yards. By the end of ninety days I had had a spiritual awakening and my life had changed for ever. The key thing was I didn't just sit in the meetings, I listened to and took action on the suggestions about the program.

Then there was the man I mentioned earlier. Less meetings, same result. Then there was the founder of AA in New Zealand, who would have been my great grand sponsor if you go in for that sort of thing. His story was more like Bills. He got sober with the steps from the book, and stayed that way for two years before he found another alcoholic to join him and they could hold the first AA meeting in NZ. He never drank again.

The common theme in these stories is the steps, rather than meetings. Bill wrote about this in a pamphlet called emotional sobriety in which he states that all kind s of dependence on things human, including AA, had to be broken.

Over dependence on things human can lead to a condition I think of as saw tooth sobriety. If you listen carefully at meetings, you will sometimes hear notes of desperation and fear from folks who have been sober a long time, based on meetings alone. They say things like "God I needed a meeting tonight" and then talk about how whenever they miss a meeting or two their life begins to unravel. Scary.

How saw tooth sobriety works is like a graph. We start at the bottom, feeling a bit down, need a meeting, get to the meeting which takes us up to the peak again. The best we are going to feel is about the time we leave the meeting, then the downhill slide commences as we totter our way through the next 22 hours hitting the bottom of the trough, and again needing a meeting to make ourselves feel better and take us back to that peak.

This is a very tiring way to live. I found it a bit off putting because it paints an untrue picture, that we are going to have to be at a meeting every day for the rest of our lives or we will drink.

Eventually folks get tired of the discipline. It doesn't feel like freedom from alcohol. So they miss meetings. The peaks are less frequent, the troughs are much deeper and last longer, the spiritual malady returns and......

heartcore

Do what feels right.

If you don't stay sober, do more.

If you aren't getting to know people & consider then friends outside meetings, look to your own privacy behaviors...

If it feels overwhelming, do less.

You are the captain of your own ship!