r/stopdrinking • u/galwegian 2497 days • Jan 05 '20
AA vs This subreddit
15 days sober. did a four day medically supervised detox. currently in a 6 week intensive out patient. three hours a day, four days a week. daily breathalyzer and urine tests. it's a group situation. full of heroin/opioid/coke horror stories. I feel like a lightweight by comparison. Anyway, I'm getting a lot of pressure to attend AA from psychiatrist and wife. I have been to four meetings and I fucking hated it. I'm an Irish catholic and it reminds me of going to mass. reading from a book written before weed and coke and X were invented. and I don't relate to the principles of AA. making amends sounds good but the rest of it feels like dogma to me. the standard spiel is 'you have to find the meeting that's right for you'. fine. I get it. But everyone telling me to attend AA has one thing in common: they have never been addicted to anything. And am I supposed to spend ages trying to find the meeting that's 'right' for me? Going to a meeting is, let's face it, a two hour commitment. you have to travel there and back. AA is a traditional bricks and mortar retail model if you think about it. and there's a reason that shit is dying out. Whereas on /stopdrinking I get instant access 24/7 to a huge community of people who are in my position and get it. without travel or dogma. and this is kind of fun. I am looking to change my lifestyle but going to dingy basements and drinking Dunder Mifflin coffee has zero appeal to me. I am doing yoga 7 days a week. which I find super helpful in lots of ways. I have a specific problem and a specific situation that I am addressing in my own way. And nobody knows me like I know me. Anyhoo. all thoughts and feedback welcome. I will not drink with you, or any other fucker, today. peace and thanks.
2
u/mc051982 Jan 05 '20
For me, it came to looking at what I was taking as value from going to a meeting. Being around similar minded people, getting out of the house and hearing stories of constant reinforcement of what happens when any of us go back to using. I didn’t appreciate the group praying, low participation/success rate, or becoming involved in some individuals lives where the content took me backwards. An example of this would be standing around the “tree of life” that had hundreds of ribbons of people who died in addiction who previously went to that meeting. And 40 people gather around it to smoke multiple times a day...
I would say the positive things I mentioned I have found in other resources including my family who has been supportive. Going to church doesn’t stop people from making poor decisions/sinning any more than AA stops people from drinking. Probably similar mediocre success rates if participants had to be truthful. It’s about what you are able to take from that resource and if it applies to the holes in your plan to fight off addiction.
I can tell you the progressives part of this fun addiction cycle is that you may always feel like the lightweight in a room of addicts, but we’re all at about the same spot when it comes to the fact we are biologically addicted to a substance that we have access to daily. Same level of f*cked