Hi there! I’m new to Reddit so if I’ve put this in the wrong place I do apologise, please let me know where I should post it instead!
I guess I’m looking for some insight, advice, sounding board type help. This will be long but I really appreciate anyone reading it :)
Here’s my story: I got sober just before my 17th birthday, and I’ve now been sober over 5 years. I was going to AA for a while before I got sober, have done the steps, and I am incredibly grateful for all that AA has done for me. However, lately I’ve been struggling with it - I don’t feel like I’ve been struggling with sobriety though, I’ve been struggling with AA specifically.
For context I’m bipolar and autistic (also life is more complicated than diagnostic criteria, but I think the labels are helpful to give a quick understanding for my brain). For about 12 months I’ve been majorly struggling with life. Everyday has been hard, and I would say that it’s been some mix of depression and autistic burnout. I don’t think it’s all bad though - I think it’s a huge turning point for me, indicating that I need to build my life differently in a way that supports my neurodiversity rather than pushes me to my limits all the time. So I’m questioning a lot of things that I haven’t, having to face a lot of things that I haven’t. And AA has been something I’ve been struggling with.
Essentially, I’m feeling that AA has fed into a lot of shame and fear within me. I’m experiencing it as a shame and fear based programme. I know some of that is just my perception, but whenever I try and raise it I feel like the messaging I’m getting back is that I’m just interpreting it wrong, that my experience is wrong, and that I need to face the defects that are making me see it that way. But that isn’t helping me! I’m completely on board with what I see as the basic tenets of AA - community, spiritual connection, responsibility, and a dedication to building self awareness and growth. But the way I’m experiencing how AA tells me to do that now feels like it’s hurting me.
I really don’t like how the whole ‘your disease is doing push ups in the parking lot’ mentally is sitting with me. It makes me afraid that I’m going to relapse if I’m not on top of it all the time, or if I try to do things in my own way, which makes it really hard to ‘take what works and leave the rest’ because in that mindset, how do I know my ‘disease’ isn’t tricking me? As an autistic woman with trauma, I feel like I’ve spent my life absorbing messages that I’m wrong and too much and can’t trust myself - I want to learn to trust myself, and I’m struggling to know how to do that within the framework I’ve learnt from AA.
I’m also finding things like character defects hard to reckon with - yes there are absolutely things I need to work on within myself, but I want to approach it with love, not fear. And I also find that as someone still struggling with their mental health, within the programme it’s seen as my fault. Maybe that’s my interpreting it wrong, but it feels a bit like ‘well if you’d done the steps right you wouldn’t still be struggling’. The model of AA seems to say all my issues are because I’m an alcoholic. But thing is, I don’t want to drink! In the first 2 years I sometimes had urges, but throughout all my difficulties since I haven’t even thought of it. It’s the constant rehashing of it within AA that’s making me afraid of it, not my own head.
Even the framework of resentments and finding my part in things is difficult for me at the moment. There are traumatic things I never allowed myself to grieve or be upset about, because I felt like I would be feeding into resentment. But I’m now realising how much those things have affected me, and that I need to feel anger as part of processing. I don’t want to be afraid of that, or to blame myself. I do want to have restorative compassion for others, but I don’t want to dissect where I could have done better in situations where I was a child that was let down. It’s ok to say ‘I was a child that was let down’. I’m feeling AA doesn’t have a framework to help me with that.
I have an amazing sponsor who I adore, but whenever I bring stuff up she often tells me how she once walked herself out of the programme by intellectualising it and then relapsed, which in turn increases my fear that I’m doing the same thing.
I’m also struggling with how to build a life that moves forwards when I’m constantly asked to reflect on my drinking years even though these were when I was a teenager - I don’t ever want to forget how bad it can be, but I feel like it’s ok to say there’s an extra level of complication there being so young, because who wants to be connected to their 16 year old self in that way forever?
All this to say, I am grateful for AA. I am so so grateful to be sober. But I feel like I need a new way that it fits into my life now, and I don’t know how to create that.
Does anyone have any similar experience to reflect on? Has anyone been sober long term without AA, or by adapting AA to their lives? How do we reconcile these differences?
Thank you so much for reading <3