Ken33xx

During the 2008 financial meltdown I found myself in a serious bind. Decisions needed to be made and I wasn't sure what to do.

Pray, make a "God box" turn it over, stop playing the director or simply remove the albatross from my neck and leave it all behind.

All were well meaning suggestions offered and some I tried.

But I know God tends to help those who help themselves.. so I put one foot in front of the other and started a climb out of my financial mess.

Today, I often have to think and re-think the solution to problems esp. when they involve other people.

davaidavai

We are all lucky to be alive and worthy whatever we believe. Everyone has permission to have a point of view, and what we do and need to do is to learn from each other.

davaidavai

Thus ends my foray into the online community for the time being. Just a few words more.

I think it's really interesting that of all the people who have commented on my posts, only Dri Guy once offered a like. This sort of accords with my view of AA. Welcoming on the surface, but really only welcoming if you are agreeing with everything. Completely understandable. It's tribalism. And for those of you who will dispute the significance of 'likes' in online communication, sorry, I don't buy that. Maybe I need to find my own tribe elsewhere.

A lot of the slogans seem like projecting criticism onto others which should be directed inward. Like the example of keeping it simple above. This is often, maybe even usually contempt prior to investigation. It often means, keeping something unexplored, which isn't really keeping it simple. It's being lazy and afraid.

AA often espouses open mindedness, when it is open mindedness to their point of view. Contempt in this context is debatable. I have attended probably about 1000 AA meetings and worked the steps with two sponsors, one all the way through. This one partial. I have done service, chaired a meeting, was the secretary of my home group. I've also experienced awakenings. Am I being contemptuous of your point of view, or are you contemptuous of mine? I'm not sure how going out and getting drunk is deemed an investigation, or research, it sounds more like confirming something you want to believe.

Disease that tells you that you don't have a disease=false evidence appearing real. This is nothing more than a dark fairy tale.

Constitutionally incapable of being honest = the sales speak of Bill Wilson isn't exactly honest. Expedient. There is darkness and light here and many shades of gray, just like any religion.

fini

there isn’t supposed to be a “like” for posts, as thanking for a useful post is different. i can dislike something while finding it useful.
but i agree with you that the thank you seems to equal “like”, though that is my assumption.
personally, i wish there were no “thank you...” on these boards. hence i never use them. nothing to do with whether i like a post or not, or if i am thankful for a post or not. i don’t participate and what seems like giving stars.

no, i am not contemptuous of your point of view. seems to me that you have more than one

Cosima11

I generally either "like" all the posts or none at all, for the same reason fini mentions. But if I may offer a "verbal like", I have enjoyed this thread and think you bring up some great points. Just been a bit all over the place lately in regards to posting and keeping up with reading.

sugarbear1

you're trying to reduce the meetings per week. it's clear you have not surrendered to this alcoholism (dis-ease); meaning you don't realize that it's a life and death matter and suddenly the world, now sober, looks better than sitting and meeting with another alcoholic.

When you surrender completely, you know you're beat, you will go to any lengths to keep that sobriety. Why listen to us? We've seen it happen time and time and time again (relapse).

Do you want to be sober and live a spiritual way of life or do you want to die and slow and painful alcoholic death?

It's a choice

and if AA isn't for you, try SOS, Life Ring, Women for Sobriety, Men for Sobriety, AVRT, SMART, or any other program available to recovering alcoholics!

Found

Is he a sportsman who looks down on non-sporty types? I never saw my recovery as a sport. I tackled it (or stalled tackling it) because I saw it as important.

I've seldom been told in AA that I risked being regarded as letting the side down. (Perhaps because I have a placid, subliminal way of signalling that I am underpromising and I always do what I do for myself, for myself.)

People have always told me I should talk quite a lot, to a number of people, to get more width and depth of viewpoints. (Obviously if I play one off against another, to give myself excuses, I'll only cheat myself.)

Found

Neither of you strike me as a person who is about to abandon recovery but we wouldn't have to know at distance through a keyboard anyway. Neither would anyone, about me.

Have only just discovered the "thank" button! Also I probably attribute to others roughly the same motives as myself, e.g if someone didn't happen to respond they didn't happen to respond. Sorry if anyone thinks I struck a bum note, I not infrequently do, just point it out!

It always distresses me to suspect that a newcomer is being deceived by a false picture of "surrender". I pointed out what my take on it is. It's like the war is over. I stop taking it out on myself. I work with my faculties in my own favour. That's just me.

davaidavai

All passionately held belief systems reflexively contain their own undermining because they are systems of passion.

I was watching this thing on youtube last night about how people learn in their first seven years to be poor, but the underlying point of the video was to make the man rich.

I think this is because semantics often mask how we really learn, which is through a complex pantomime of signs and gestures, and the act of teaching, of imparting knowledge, or merely communicating, is a deeply egoic act full of power dynamics. When two people connect, they bring all of their cultural baggage, and they must overcome a lot in order to connect. What alcohol is, is a means of connection. A means of overcoming the blockage.

AA is like a demilitarized zone where people may connect and comport without alcohol. But the blockages are still there encoded into the program. Perhaps more than the outside world. The people drank an unusual amount and are probably unusually blocked.

This is useful because this space becomes a kind of testing ground, an area for practicing boundaries and diplomacy in a situation where all the social cultural stuff, all the subordination and domination, the pantomime, the fear, is streamlined in.

So when you are saying, do this or die, what I am hearing across the DMZ of our own minds is your own cultural baggage trying to push me into a belief. I must practice diplomacy with this belief and seek common ground, although it will probably never be found. I believe addiction is produced out of such separations and a 'return to sanity' is recognizing them and moving on to other people where connection is possible.

davaidavai

I am sort of riffing off the cocaine rat study, where the rats put in with the other rats stopped using cocaine when offered.

But what is it for a human being to be 'put in' with the other human beings? We are more neurologically complex. Putting a human being with the others might be eliminating a host of assumptions and behaviors which block the connectivity a rat might experience merely by being plopped into the social area. I've found I have received some connection in AA merely by going. The juice, right? The medicine. In other words, a kind of taste.

But the blockages remain for me unless you surrender. EG 'once you start sponsoring and doing service, that's when it really clicks.' And this is when the program is said to really work. When you agree on the codex of belief and behavior, thereby being all in it together. Then maybe in theory we cease to dominate and subordinate, welcome some and shut others off. Utopia.

For this to be perfect, it would be like perfect authoritarianism. But this never works totally. There are the people trying to build this, keeping people in line with dogma and stories, and then there are the people who keep silent, perhaps because they are more type b, or atheistic, and the BB is largely written by a type A.

Or to use computer metaphor: when two people meet, there is through put. The said, the intonation of what is being said, the assumptions brought to the table, body language, eye contact, other cultural gestures, subtexts of domination and subordination are brought to the table. Getting drunk with someone temporarily sweeps all of this aside. A belief system also attempts to do this, but with the same cultural tools which are often inherently flawed and which lead people to drink: the fearfulness, the perceived need to dominate and control.

Another alternative is to be aware of these subtexts -- perhaps called 'mind' in Buddhism' -- and to seek others who are also more or less aware of what is going on. Or to observe details, like science.

The two methods aren't incompatible, but probably need each other more than they know. Science and belief are like candles we use to see just the few steps ahead we are capable of seeing in time.

Tetrax

I think there's definitely a space between AA and SMART that could use filling.

Ken33xx

As you say this is where the diplomacy comes in. A common ground may never be found which is why bring up the weather or the like as long as it's non-threatening.

In AA , at work or with your neighbor one generally has to learn ways of co-exiting in a difficult situations.

One can incorporated the tools found in AA or mix and match with other methods.

I can talk a good game in the rooms of AA and I supposed I look good on the outside.

But living life on life's terms has never been easy for me.

I tend to make less mistakes now than in the past but this might be attributed to being older (age 62) more than anything else.

Bottom line however... sobriety has been the foundation. Everything stems from this.

Before getting sober? Well, not much except the follies of youth and the people I hurt.

davaidavai

Life's terms are that there are no terms, nothing is written

davaidavai

Tetrax -- on a program between secular and AA.

A lot of psychoanalysis already straddles this line, right? Also, Adult Children of Alcoholics incorporates an approach that receives early childhood experience as important and is a less one size fits all solution geared toward the 'type A' personality who wasn't conditioned to apologize for everything.

SMART in my opinion could be tempered with an awareness of the fallibility of It's own science. CBT strikes me as sort of a fad, and saying, 'this is science' is its own sort of dogmatic rigidity. The problem is so many psychologists put alcohol on a pedestal as a 'drug of moderation'.

I think the originalist AA is useful. Conforming to a group for me has been useful in seeing how much I have actually conformed in my life and how this hasn't really been a sober dynamic. It's been rigid and fearful, rooted in early childhood experience. And then separating, defining my own recovery, is learning boundaries.

If I were doing my own meeting, the group traditions I'd start would be:

1) no dogma, slogans, distracting tautological koans hung on the walls.
2) shares are not limited to 'experience strength and hope' or guided along those paths of before and after story or viewed as 'qualifications'.
3) you don't have to introduce yourself as an alcoholic. No one will be like 'who are you!' I believe this started in the 1960s? I've always found it eerie, and then the whole, 'hello bob!' thing.
4) the AA preamble is seriously curtailed, stripped of the 'constitutionally incapable' sales element.
5) cross talk encouraged? To create an atmosphere of conversation and connection where people need to be on their best behavior and to learn how to connect rather than to speechify.
6) work the steps in groups? no autocratic sponsors pushing a lineage of belief system.
7) The readings are deconstructed from within the secular tradition of criticism and critical thinking.

fini

you might want to check out Lifering Secular Recovery: no dogma, no steps, no higher power, crosstalk encouraged, no “program”.
all these are assets, as well as downfalls

davaidavai

Looks interesting, I balk though at the 'sober self, addict self' thing. This is just another scary, self affirming story. I mean, what else is it? If that is the marquee idea, I'm not interested.

If we really want to go that rout, I think the 'inner child' is a healthier touchstone, that way it is left open the possibility of recovery through embracing yourself, not constantly rejecting or battling your dark half like a religious ascetic.

Or just listen to that John Lennon song about God. I don't believe in the disease, I don't believe in Bill Wilson, I don't believe in the beast, I just believe in me. Yoko and me. That's reality. Although I have a hard time getting into Yoko's artwork.

fini

"This is just another scary, self affirming story. I mean, what else is it? "
a way of conceptualizing the inner struggle so many of us experience.
similar to "I - Beast".
i found both those conceptualizations useful for a little while, but then not. there is just me.

davaidavai

What is I - Beast?

I attended a Life Ring meeting today. The people were nice, of course. It was odd though, you know the Rational Recovery stuff really makes sense UP until the point where he talks about family morality, swearing off groups entirely -- and of course the Beast. But how recovery groups are sort of like a protection of the addiction, which he of course calls the 'beast' and by the same measure, protects the addiction with mystical nomenclature of his own -- all the stuff before he reaches that point of excess, I can kind of agree with and see it in action in groups like life ring. I got the sense that the people were struggling to get time. A week, two weeks. Slip up last week. What are we doing people?

The thing about AA is that it consumes you and the months pass. I don't know if I would be at over a year and a half without it. I just feel as tetrax, there has to be a happy medium, some sort of useful set of proscriptions and protocols that don't need to be read as gospels.

Or maybe the point is to enter into these conversions and dialectics of spirit more easily, and also exit more easily, so we don't have to wrest ourselves free with anger and rush in with mad enthusiasm. Like a sort of framework of meta herd communication mapped onto the day to day. We can get lost in other people and also recover ourselves, having been somewhere strange. Until maybe we aren't so lost, no longer have to close our eyes, can see, can speak without fear of reprimand, find agency in the world.

Gottalife

I kinda like some of these ideas, though I would say they are more about format than tradition, bearing in mind tradition came from past mistakes and lessons learned.

Within the tradition, each group is autonomous and can run its meetings and set up its room however it likes.

On number 1) I could do without the slogans, most are not original AA and those that are are often taken out of context.

2) We can mostly do without the war stories, but practical stuff on how to live the program is indispensable. Helping the new person identify is important if the meeting is their only introduction to AA, but meetings are not the best method of doing this.

3) None of my meetings require any specific introduction other than name. In the old days the "sponsor" vouched for the newcomer's right to be in the room.

4) Each group can have its own preamble. You are talking about chapter five, which many groups have as a regular reading, but they don't have to. My group uses the foreword to the first edition.

5) My home group does that. We are discussing the program and when something particularly interesting comes up it can be discussed back and forth so we get all viewpoints/experience.

6) My group periodically puts on a four week beginners class based on a successful format from years gone by. In it, we take all the steps together, over a period of four weeks. I totally agree about the dangers of the lineage/my sponsor says approach. Some pretty strange and even dangerous stuff has been added over the years by individuals who feel able to modify the original program.

7) The main meeting of my group is a big book study. In it we closely study the text of the program part of the book. Our study includes reading, questioning, discussion, and each participant has the opportunity to filter it through their own experience and see if it makes sense. Another member or members can discuss a point raised, but we are courteous and don't tend to interrupt each other.

All good points Davaidavai)

davaidavai

Meth is arguably more addictive than alcohol. I think though if you'd look at the data you'd probably find that damage sustained by alcohol is just as bad -- the successful 'moderation' cases sort of wash out. Alcohol and homelessness? Check. Jails? Check. Worse in sheer quantity of harm. The damage done under the influence of booze probably dwarfs meth, pcp, crack, all of it.

I wonder if meth were society's drug of choice, if people would be able to casually have a toke in the evenings and on the weekends. I don't know. Probably. People do casually use meth. It's so socially unacceptable however, it's usually used by people who are already on the outskirts of polite society.

Here is the rub: the whole, you drink, you die narrative is useful in a way, sure, but are the same semantic defenses there against meth? Yes. But the ills of meth are already streamlined in. We already know. It's not debatable.

So is whole, you drink, you die, cunning, baffling, powerful thing, a defense emerged out of the debatability of alcohol? If we remove that defense mechanism and equate it pretty much with meth, an addictive drug, would addicts lose the sense of powerlessness wrought of confusion? Would meth addicts also be able to 'come in from the cold' to see their addiction in the addictions of proper middle class folks and their prized scotch and bourbon?

Alcohol, just as 'dirty' as meth. Meth, just as genteel as alcohol. Both of them, addictive substance plain and simple, the only baffling thing is a society that comports itself otherwise, as if booze is spirit, magic.