GUTTED: My surgical journey to hell and (mostly) back

 

I’ve been reluctant to write in any detail about the medical “issues” I have endured over the past 8 months or so (actually, it goes back to November – so it’s more like 10 months). I swear I didn’t realize something was seriously wrong until a week or so after Halloween, when I suddenly felt an agonizing pain in my lower abdomen on the right side. From everything I have ever heard about appendicitis, I assumed that was what it was, so I finally caved and went in to Emergency, knowing it would be an almost-worse ordeal.

And it was. THREE HOURS LATER, after sitting there twisting and writhing in agony (hey, I could have done that at home!), the hospital staff finally got around to me – took some blood, poked around, then suddenly wanted to do a CT scan. This surprised me, as you usually have to wait months for one. 

Then suddenly, things changed.

A nurse came up to me with a very serious look on her face, and in a very serious voice said, “Margaret, you have an infection.” Infection? Of what kind, and how? I’d never heard of an infection brewing in an otherwise healthy bowel.

But no, my bowel wasn’t healthy at all, or at least it didn’t look good on the scan. They let me have a copy of the report, and they shouldn’t have. It was mostly technical gobbledygook, but I did see one word that jumped out at me in 3D: MALIGNANCY.

What it said was, “underlying malignancy must be ruled out”. Ruled out?

They kept me overnight, another shock, and then I was fast-tracked for all sorts of things. Almost right away, I saw a gastroenterologist, then had  an “emergency colonoscopy”, which was messy, agonizing and frightening (nothing like the previous ones I'd had). I seemed to be bleeding from somewhere deep inside. Then, on Christmas Day (Christmas Day?), I got a phone call giving me a date for another CT scan. The scan took place on New Years’ Eve. Needless to say, the festive season wasn’t very festive, and I remember feeling rotten on Christmas Day and trying to act normal, so as not to bring the whole family down. 

Then came the surgery. Jesus God, the surgery! I can’t or won’t go into all the details, because half the time I didn’t even know what was going on or what was happening to me. This upset my kids, who seemed to think I was deliberately withholding information from them. But I was on so  many painkillers that I was barely coherent. They had apparently removed about a quarter of my colon and reconfigured my entire gut, but fortunately, since it was done laparoscopically, all I had were two little incisions held together with surgical glue. 

Quite  literally, I was glued together.

The surgeon initially told me I’d  be in the hospital 2 to 5 days. Instead it was nearly 2 weeks. I had no bowel control. The pain meds didn’t work. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I threw up constantly, even if I hadn't eaten anything at all. I had to use a walker just to get to the bathroom, and I usually didn't make it in time.

It was a hospital stay, in other words, but going home was worse in some ways. I had to camp downstairs on the pullout bed – couldn't do stairs, could not even get to the bathroom under my own steam. Having to use a walker made me believe I was now officially in Old Ladyhood. Or was it worse than that?

Since then it’s been one test, one specialist, one procedure after another. I thought I’d be out of the woods by now, but no. The surgeon revealed that had they not removed the diseased tissue, it almost certainly would have turned cancerous (that “underlying malignancy”) within  a year. I really didn’t feel much better, and had it not been for uplifting visits from my grandchildren (bearing flowers, handmade cards and even Purdy’s chocolates), I don’t know how I would have gotten through it. Like angels, they descended on the house with cheery messages, sitting on the pullout bed and gossiping and just being kids. I wanted to join them, as they were clearly in  the land of the living.

But much of the time I felt suicidal, I really did, and my poor 80-year-old husband had to wait on me hand and foot, which with his own mobility problems he could barely manage. I wasn’t cheerful. I kept saying unacceptable things like, “I think I’m going to DIE!” This went on for weeks and weeks. At a followup appointment, the surgeon told me that full recovery might take six months to a year.

Since then, this has actually come to be good news, giving me more time to feel rotten without worrying that I might never recover.

There were so many low points and bizarre happenings. “They” found a spot on my lung during a supposedly routine x-ray, which made me wonder if I had somehow become tubercular. They did more blood tests, and kept finding more and more things wrong.

The spot on my lung was just the beginning. My kidneys were out of whack, there was something wrong with my thyroid gland, and I had to see a hematologist (blood  doctor? Much as I love Dracula, this was not good news.) I had an ultrasound, both kidneys and thyroid, leaving me bruised and worried. I had to wonder: am I really that messed up, or is all this being done out of an abundance of caution (or because I’m 71)?

Bits of traumatic memory from the hospital keep repeating in my head, and in my dreams: being rushed down a dark hallway on a gurney; being told I needed an emergency blood transfusion (!); having a nurse lean over me and saying, “Let’s hope this is the turning point.” Having a disgusting nasal tube shoved down into my stomach for days on end, so my intestines could have a "nice rest".Then another medical person came in and talked to me about my lung, but it made no sense to me at all. My LUNG?

But the worst of the worst of the worst was when they showed me how to use a colostomy bag. Yes. It got that bad.

I have never had serious  surgery in my life, and am wondering, if I need to go through all this again, if it might be better if I just died. I have slowly gotten more  and more of myself back, but since I already had severe arthritis in my spine and hip (on the right side, of course, where the surgery took place), osteoporosis, and – worst of all – sciatica, I'm still not exactly comfortable in my own skin. And lying flat on my back for weeks on end put pressure on the worst possible place, thus activating these various sources of agony as never before.

So where am I now? I wasn’t going to “share” much of this, as nothing is more tiresome than an old person going on and on about their surgical nightmares. But for God’s sake, why do I have this ability to write (and hey, if I didn’t think I wrote well, why would I have devoted my life to it?) – is it just  for entertainment, or is it there to save my life in a while ‘nother way?

So this is a more detailed account, which I do not think anyone will be interested in reading anyway. Why do I bother? I”ve been carrying all this around for eight months, and trying to minimize the ordeal for the sake of my worried family. I’m no longer screaming at my poor  husband, and he’s no longer having to carry trays of food to me or help me out of bed so I can use the walker. I no longer need to wear Depends so I won’t crap all over myself. But how am I spiritually? Emotionally?

Changed, changed utterly, as Yeats used to say. I don’t know where I am, these days, as suddenly everything is "different". I lost ten pounds during this whole ordeal, and – realizing if I got sick again my weight might plummet dangerously – I set myself the task of gaining it back. THAT was another weird thing in itself. All my life I have fought my weight, thinking I was obese at 130 pounds (and brainwashed by a culture that was pre-body-positivity and horribly obsessed with being thin). I had to force myself to eat, because nausea was one of the most  debilitating things I was facing. And I had to flip everything over, and everything I had tried to do for my entire life had to be reversed so that I could GAIN weight. No, HAVE the candy! HAVE the chips! Whatever would make me fatter. (As my idol Weird Al would say: "Eat it! Just eat it!")

It was Bizarro-land, in so  many ways, a chronically-well person having to live in the Land of the Sick. Though I appear to have dodged the cancer bullet, there are no guarantees, given how my kidneys, thyroid and blood seem to still be out of whack. And if cancer WAS brewing in my colon, it could recur, and this  time I really WOULD need the colostomy bag. Why else would they have shown me how to use it?

I don’t want to edit this or add clever pictures or whatever I usually do. I probably shouldn’t post it at all, but I am beginning to see why old people talk about their medical ordeals. They’re lonely, and they’re scared, and they wonder what sort of macabre death scene they may be heading towards.

One of the worst things about getting old, for me, has been watching as my most cherished loved ones are taken from me, one by one. FOUR close friends died in the space of two years: cancer, stroke, suicide. My sister-in-law, always in the full bloom of health, died horribly of cancer and was down to 80 pounds at the end. I will never see these people again, and I can’t just run out and “make new friends”. It was hard enough feeding and nurturing these relationships over decades, but trying to start all over again seems impossible.

What keeps me going now is my spirituality, but it is nothing like what I experienced before. My "god" is the life force itself, manifested by nature in all its multifaceted glory, particularly in the form of birds. Not just the backyard variety, but in tiny ducklings peeping and cheeping, Canada geese hissing at me, and a glorious blue heron, its enormous wingspan owning the sky. All of which I saw just this afternoon. By the way, Sky Daddy, as he is sometimes called, is no longer my guiding force, and any thought of attending a church makes me shudder. I’ll be there soon enough at my memorial service.

And, by the way, as I lay flat on my back on the pullout bed, I planned my memorial down to the location (the dock at Burnaby Lake, where the birds are at their most sublime) and the songs I wanted (three of Bob Dylan's spirituals: Death is  Not the End, Every Grain of Sand, and I’ve Made up my Mind to Give Myself to You). At one point, half in a fever dream, I became convinced no one cared about me, nor had anyone ever cared about me in any meaningful way at all. This anguish just came up out of nowhere and overwhelmed me. And at  one point I wrote  a suicide note before tearing it up, not wanting to upset the family.

I wish I could  share better news, and today went OK, so if today goes OK, I have to be content with that.  And that’s about it, that’s the report to date. I can coast a bit  now, until I have more surgery (thyroid biopsy!) in October. Then the hemotologist, no doubt wrapped in a Dracula cape like Bela Lugosi.

Can I breathe now? I’d better keep  going, and not look  back – because something might be gaining on me.

Is AA a Cult? . . . . .Well, IS it?

I found this excellent article on AA recovery when googling the age-old question: is AA a cult? I obviously wouldn't have asked unless I had a lot of suspicions about it. I've been away from the "cult" for longer than I was in it, have stayed sober all that time, and never did go stomping off, but drifted away from meetings when I began to feel disaffected by what I saw as the rigid fundamentalism of the program.

As outlined in this article, there are many cultlike dynamics in 12-step groups. I remember hearing things like, "AA is all you need","never say no to an AA request", and "no mind-altering substances" (with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee in the other). Sexual predation, which is finally coming out of the closet, was never spoken of - it was just one of the many taboos you found out about the hard way. And, yes, I was a victim of it, and never told anyone, largely because I had been conditioned not to "tell" by being sexually assaulted as a child.

You learn to keep quiet to survive. But why weren't we allowed to talk about the root cause of so much addictive behaviour? Why is it therapeutic to tell victims of assault that they were responsible for what happened, and that they had to let go of their "resentment" of the people who had assaulted them?

I found no help for this dilemma at meetings, but I did find a competent therapist and spent years untangling the threads. It was painful but necessary, but I found no support for this process  at meetings, where if I even mentioned being in therapy, I'd get a sort of sideways glance, almost an eye-roll. Why wasn't AA all I needed?

It's thick and thorny stuff. The last time I seriously thought about going to a meeting was during the depths of the pandemic, when nobody could go anywhere or do anything. I wasn't too concerned that I would drink. I just wanted to sit in a room with like-minded people who were there to support each other. It didn't happen, because all meetings were now on-line, and I could not see myself doing AA on a Zoom call.

I was shocked but not surprised to learn that a lot of these Zoom meetings were invaded by "Zoombombers" (sounds like an awful wartime thing, but there it is). The meetings were basically hacked by people who obviously were able to listen in to every word, and even intruded with abusive or pornographic messages. Not exactly the way I first came in, just walking through the door, knees shaking or not. It's yet more proof that there really is no such thing as online safety: it's practically an oxymoron.

But just as you could have your boundaries breached with a suffocating hug (one guy would run his hands up and down my body while moaning about how good it felt), baring your soul online is just a very bad idea in general.

But one must ask: is anywhere safe? I realize now that I tolerated a lot of behaviour which at least bordered on abusive, and tried desperately to stay within rules that often did not make a lot of sense to me. A similar thing happened with the United Church, which for all its boasts of inclusivity is just about the most narrow and dogmatic organization I've ever been a part of. Outside of AA.

Deprogramming From AA—When a Fellowship Resembles a Cult

by April Wilson Smith   May 2, 2019

Katherine was on the subway home from a meeting with her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor when it hit. They had just gone over the worksheet she was supposed to complete for her Fourth Step: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

“What if I was too sexy? I knew men looked at me even back then when I was 12. Was I seductive? I liked the attention. I sat on his lap. I hugged him. I didn’t leave when he started talking about those things.”

Suddenly, Katherine* recalled, the pieces seemed to fall into place. The sexual abuse from her stepfather, of which she had been too ashamed to even tell her mother until years after her mother left the marriage. The long-term relationship with a sociopath who had alternated between worshipping her and berating her. The three rapes. It was all her fault.

She looked at the worksheets her sponsor had given her for her Fourth Step. Each one had three columns: for the “resentment;” for the person the resentment was against; and for “my part” in the resentment. It was a given that every resentment, every bad thing that had caused anger, was at some level caused by the “alcoholic”—by Katherine herself.

She felt a sense of peace coming over her, she recalled of that night five years ago, like a great mystery had been solved. She was an alcoholic. The rapes, all three, she had invited them. Like her counselors said, they never would have happened if she hadn’t been drinking. Even the childhood abuse. She must have wanted it, sought it out. That was alcoholic behavior: self-centered and seeking attention.

As she waited on the platform for the next subway to transfer home, she briefly thought about letting herself fall onto the tracks.

A Desire to Deprogram

Rachel Bernstein, MA, LMFT, is a therapist who specializes in helping people who have left cults of all kinds to recover from the damage. “In an organization for people who have dealt with shame and looking down on themselves, as well as having other people look down on them, that shame shouldn’t be recreated within the organization that is supposed to heal them,” she told Filter. “They should have a place to go where they feel only supported and empowered and safe. If people come feeling broken and then the finger is pointed at them, it just takes them farther into a spiral of poor self-esteem and shame.”

Without condemning AA itself, Bernstein acknowledges the dangers of this kind that AA’s program can pose for some people. “While I think that there is some merit to some of the Steps, there needs to be flexibility to take away the Steps that are getting in the way of some people’s recovery.”

Katherine met Bernstein through Monica Richardson, the founder of an international Facebook group called “Deprogramming From AA or Any 12 Step Group.” It has over 1,000 members, all of whom are at some point in the process of leaving a 12-step group.

Richardson has led a crusade to spotlight how unregulated 12-step groups can form a happy hunting ground for sexual predators.

Katherine found the group through a friend from an online AA support group who was also dissatisfied with the pat answers she said fellow members gave to everything: You got raped? “Go to a meeting, call your sponsor! Find your part in what happened!”

The members of “Deprogramming” were in 12-step groups for anywhere from a few months to 20-plus years. It is not only the content of the program that they found problematic: Some have been raped, sexually abused or assaulted through their associations with AA or Narcotics Anonymous.

Richardson, who joined AA at 18 and had spent 36 years abstinent from alcohol in the program by the time she left, has led a crusade to spotlight how unregulated 12-step groups can form a happy hunting ground for sexual predators. She is the creator of the award-winning 2015 film The 13th Step—an expose of sexual harassment and abuse within The Rooms (“13th stepping” is the practice of old-timers hitting on newcomers).

Her work on the film involved researching the tragic 2011 murder of Karla Brada Mendez, a young woman who was introduced to AA by the rehab she attended for problematic prescription drug use. She met a man at those meetings who had been in AA for years (often court-ordered). He never stopped drinking, but used the meetings as a way to meet vulnerable women. The man, Eric Allan Earle, was convicted in 2014 of beating and choking Karla Brada Mendez to death.

The members of “Deprogramming” have many other grievances. Some report having been coerced into going off their psychiatric medications, against their doctors’ advice. Others became frustrated with the lack of scientific evidence behind AA’s program. Others still are angry that any inquiry into other options is not only discouraged, but sometimes actively punished—by exclusion from social events, public humiliation at meetings, and constant reminders of the AA saying that to leave the program can only result in “jails, institutions and death.”

All found that AA’s promises did not come true: They may have stopped drinking or using drugs—often defined by 12-step groups and the treatment industry to include prescription psychiatric medications such as benzodiazepines or MAT drugs like buprenorphine—but they did not become “happy, joyous and free.”

Many feel that they replaced their addiction to a substance with an addiction to the program.

Why It Can Be Frightening to Leave a 12-Step Group

However, many members of “Deprogramming” report feeling afraid about leaving 12-step circles.

They fear not being able to stay “sober”—a fear instilled by 12-step teaching that as an “alcoholic” or “addict,” you can’t take so much as one sip of alcohol without complete reversion to dangerous patterns (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary).

Fear of social isolation is another important common factor. Twelve-step groups typically encourage members to build their lives around the program, to attend meetings every day for the first 90 days and many more ever after.

Many who leave the program therefore fear that they will no longer have friends once they do.

Many sponsors require their sponsees to call a certain number of people in the program every day, no matter what. Phone numbers are given out at meetings. Katherine’s sponsor made it mandatory that she call seven AA women daily.

“Service,” is also pushed, with new members strongly encouraged to commit to at least weekly duties—ranging from making coffee to chairing meetings, going to detox facilities to speak at patients’ mandatory AA meetings, and serving on committees.

If a member complains that daily meeting attendance and other demands are interfering with work or family life, the AA mantra, “Anything you put before your recovery, you will lose,” is typically repeated. So members often reduce their other social connections, actively encouraged to change the “people, places and things” in their lives. Many who leave the program therefore fear that they will no longer have friends once they do.

Another issue that departing 12-step members report as concerning is suddenly dealing with all the issues that drove them to substance use in the first place, but weren’t adequately addressed in the program. People with a history of trauma, in particular, can find that the onslaught of pain and memories—repressed while they were told in AA that “alcoholism,” was the root of all their problems—can be almost unbearable.

“I would venture to say three-quarters, if not more, of the people in AA are suffering from depression or anxiety or survivors of trauma, and were using alcohol to self-medicate,” said Rachel Bernstein. “So then you have people who are derailed from a more direct and relevant path to dealing with their particular issues, and instead they are told that alcohol is the only source of their problem.”

“Deprogramming from AA and Other 12 Step Groups” provides a community to share experiences, advice and validation for a perspective that the treatment industry and mainstream America deny: AA doesn’t work for most people. And for many, it does tremendous harm.

Cult-Like Characteristics

But do all of these program- and community-related problems within 12-step fellowships mean we can accurately describe them as cults?

I asked Bernstein about the extent to which AA and the rest resemble the bona fide cults in which many of her patients have been involved. Part of her answer depicted an environment in which unregulated autonomy—from group to group and from sponsor to sponsor—sees abuses go unchecked.

“People who came to see me got involved in 12-step programs wanting to turn their lives around, but then had a sponsor who became a controller, an abuser and a boundary violator, and there was nobody to talk to about it,” she said. “There are no safeguards within these groups. There’s no governing body to go to and say, ‘My sponsor followed me home and went into my apartment.’”

“That is cult behavior: Cults will give you an identity.”

“The other issue,” she added, “is that unlike a lot of the other anonymous groups, within AA, you have to call yourself an ‘alcoholic.’ That is cult behavior: Cults will give you an identity. Then you build not only your life but your self-esteem around that identity.”

Regarding the nature of “sharing” in meetings, Bernstein said, “Within 12-step groups, there are people who can defend against the social pressures, and others who can’t. They don’t want anyone to be unhappy with them so they’ll say what they need to say, they’ll make commitments, they’ll ‘admit’ things about themselves even if they aren’t true.”

“They’ll do that in a room full of people who are not mental health professionals and do not know how to hold onto that information in a safe way or help you heal,” she continued. “Other times people will feel the need to share information because they have someone else they know in the organization who brought them in, so they don’t want to disappoint that person.”

Katherine’s Path Out

Katherine, now in her 40s, didn’t throw herself onto the subway tracks that fateful night. Despite fear that her parents—who had sent her to a tremendously expensive 12-step rehab and were very invested in her AA participation—would be horrified, she called her sponsor the next day and said she was going to take a break from doing the Steps.

Before long, people at the meetings she attended daily began to shun her. They would talk about how, since she was pursuing a graduate degree, she thought she was too smart for the program. “We’ve buried a lot of smart people,” a familiar AA saying goes. “You have to get stupid to get the program.”

Gradually, Katherine cut back on her meeting attendance. She found other support in SMART Recovery and Refuge Recovery, and eventually left AA all together. But the pain didn’t stop.

She would find her days interrupted by intrusive thoughts of AA. She alternated between terror that she would drink again and lose everything she had gained since leaving rehab, and bursts of anger at the program that had told her that she was nothing but an “alcoholic.” That none of her accomplishments or good qualities mattered.

Katherine’s rehab counselor had recommended that instead of returning to graduate school, she spend $4,000 a month to live in a “sober living” home. In this facility, she would have been isolated from the general population and made to go to daily meetings and group therapy with non-professional counselors, while working a minimum-wage job. However, her family didn’t have the money to throw at this, so she returned to graduate school, where she could live on student loans, and attended AA in the community instead.

And it was then that Katherine’s fear of being raped again turned into full-blown agoraphobia. She would walk home from meetings at night terrified. But the strange thing, she recalled, was that she wasn’t so frightened of the physical violation and pain of rape itself. She was afraid that she would be blamed. Because she was an “alcoholic”—and now everyone knew it because she had been to rehab, even though she hadn’t had a drink in months.

Seeking help, Katherine reached out to Monica Richardson, who recommended Rachel Bernstein, the cult deprogramming therapist. Katherine worked with Bernstein for nine months to recover from her AA experience.

As the stories of “Deprogramming” members attest, many others have had comparable experiences. Alice,* for example, was raped at a graduate school party. Though she had no history of alcohol-related problems, her parents insisted she get an alcohol evaluation because she had been drinking at the time of the assault. It was a classic case of victim-blaming.

Alice was assessed as an “alcoholic,” as is almost anyone who is referred for an assessment to a treatment provider. She went to an Intensive outpatient program and then immersed herself in AA. Within AA, she experienced sexual abuse from her sponsor and men her sponsor insisted she date. She was told that the sexual abuse she endured as a child and the rape she experienced as an adult were her fault.

Even more frightening, Alice said, is that she looked and even believed she was happy during this time. “Upon hearing that I had a negative experience in AA, people that knew me during that 10-year period might be shocked. ‘But she seemed so happy,’ they might say… ‘How could she say that?’”

“My answer to this,” she continued, “is that yes, I was very happy–in fact, I was euphoric at times when I went to AA. This was because I was suppressing all of the emotions and things that AA told me would lead me to drink: anger, sadness, grief, critical thinking, negative thoughts, my intelligence. This led me to have a kind of false gratefulness, happiness and peace that only lasted for so long.”

Finally, Alice related, “at nine-and-a-half years of sobriety I could repress and suppress all of these things no longer” Dealing with all these feelings led to what she calls “the hardest period of my life.”

“I was hospitalized two times,” she said, “and was also suicidal for about two-and-a-half years. Over time, though, I have gotten more accustomed to having thoughts and feelings like I did before I went to AA, and have found that they pose no risk to my sobriety.”
Guidance on How to Deprogram

Both Rachel Bernstein and Monica Richardson give concrete advice on how a person thinking of leaving AA or any 12-step program, and wishing to deprogram, should proceed.

Bernstein advises:

1. Learn about methods of control and manipulative tactics. Bring a checklist to your next meeting and check off the techniques as you see them. You’ll be able to see for yourself if this group is treating you respectfully and being open about its intentions, or if it’s using manipulation to not only keep you there but make you feel like you have no choice but to stay. Here is a checklist of tactics to look out for:

* You are taught that the teachings and techniques are perfect. So if they are not working as intended, it’s because you are not following them the right way, or trying hard enough.

* The organization defines you, tells you what you are, who you are, and how to see yourself.

* Questioning or doubting the teachings is wrong and seen as an issue/problem of yours instead of your fundamental right.

* The organization is a closed system, and any issues you have with it have to stay in-house; there is no outside and/or objective governing body to bring your concerns to.

* Dependency is built into the system by making you feel that you cannot trust yourself on your own, and left to your own devices you would always make the wrong decision and your life would spiral downward.

* You never graduate. You are never done. Your participation and adherence to the teachings are expected to be lifelong.

* You are made to feel these are the only people you can trust in your life, and those outside the group are not able to support and ensure the path you should be on.

* The influence technique of “scarcity” is used by conveying the message that this group is the only group in the world that can give you what you need.

* It has its own social norms and lingo that are different from those in the outside community, so you feel more understood by those in the group and more a part of the world of the group, and this can separate you from those in the outside community.

* The group has one system it provides. No other systems or philosophies are integrated. So, whatever the system is designed to address is the only thing that’s addressed, and other potentially primary issues are ignored. Part of the “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” idea, this can cause people to be misdiagnosed and to be derailed from getting help they may need with their true underlying issues.

2. Address the things that 12-step groups have taught you about yourself, such as that you are powerless or can’t control your life. Write them down, show them to somebody not involved in the group and ask, “Is this how you see me?” Some people in 12-step groups feel that they are reduced to the kind of person who can not trust themself. So if you can find people in your life who see the good in you and see your strengths and can remind you of them, you start to rebuild your sense of self and then you won’t tolerate the messages about how, left to your own devices, your life would be awful.

3. Talk to people who were involved in 12-step groups, then left and are doing okay. The more you see that there are people who are okay without AA, the more you see that you don’t need to go to keep yourself alive.

Why I Quit AA

BLOGGER'S NOTE. As I celebrated 31 years of sobriety today, I remembered something I had written WAY back - in 2010, as it turned out. I was just beginning to blog on Salon.com, and was naive enough to publish the piece - after which I was bombarded with the most hateful comments I have ever received about anything. One small sample: "Where did you attend meetings - in a lunatic asylum?" I was called nuts, looney, a whack job, a head case, and every other hateful synonym for "mentally ill" that anyone could dredge up.

I think, to some extent, it proved my point.

AA saved my life, but that doesn't mean it's appropriate to cling to a life preserver forever. Re-reading this for the first time in more than 10 years, I'm kind of taken aback by the anger in it,  and in the way I didn't spare the horses but came right out with every objection to the program I'd ever felt, and was never allowed to express.

So I'm re-publishing it today, since I still agree with most of it. I did sift out some extremely valuable life skills from attending meetings, but most of that was gathered wisdom from the friendships I had formed. It was the people, not the program which saved me - and yet, AA constantly focuses on "principles before personalities".

At any rate, I stopped going to meetings in 2005, and am sober today, and surprisingly happy and well given all the current circumstances. But since I've been given the power and ability to express things, and enough guts to put it out there in full knowledge of the risks, I won't waste this piece by keeping it in a moldering file. 

I have no idea if AA is different now. I even flirted with going to a meeting during the most brutal phase of the pandemic, not so much for the program as for the people. I just wanted a little companionship, what they used to call "fellowship",  with people whom I knew would be struggling with the whole situation. But all the meetings had been shut down due to quarantine.

Why I Quit AA

A sober alcoholic’s journey back to individuality

The other day I was lurking around in the children’s section of my favorite bookstore, trying to figure out what a four-year-old grandgirl might want for her birthday. Flipping through the $30 board books and propaganda about toilet training and environmentalism, I heard someone call my name.

I looked up. Oh, hi, Jim. Oh, I’m doing OK. Yes, really. Just doing a little shopping here. No, really, I’m OK. How are you?

It’s hard to be looked at with a mixture of embarrassment and pity, but that’s what I was seeing in Jim’s eyes. Clearly he didn’t want to run into me, as he had been making certain assumptions: that I had either “gone back out” and was drinking again, or else was in such a state of “dry drunk” rampage that I was making myself and everyone around me miserable.

Welcome to the wonderful world of an ex-AA. As with an ex-con, the sense of ensnarement never ends, at least not without a Velcro ripping-away and endless guilt.

There was a time when I needed AA like I needed to breathe. Yes, I am a real alcoholic, and I didn’t fully realize it until I crawled into a meeting on my belly in 1990. Scared sober, I became enmeshed in an organization that quickly took over my life. Moreover, the more embroiled I became, the greater the praise heaped upon me. If I went to a meeting every day, I was a “good” AA member; more than once per day, and I was a spiritual giant.

It’s often said at meetings that you never graduate. This might be OK if I at least had a sense of moving on to another level, but this is discouraged. People with 20 years sober are supposed to say at meetings (whether they feel it or not) that they are at exactly the same level as the newcomers, and are only one drink away from disaster.

I agree with this part: I’ll never be safe to drink again, and I’d better not forget it. After years and years of having this fact jackhammered into my head, I think I’ve accepted it (for after all, “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”).

From the very beginning, I was disturbed by certain pervasive beliefs in the organization. Conformity is one. Don’t ever speak “outside” the AA rhetoric, or other people will assume you’re not doing it right, or you’re fighting the mighty truths of sobriety. There is such a thing as AA dogma, often promoted by the elder statesmen: one elderly man, a veteran of World War II, came to the same noon meeting every day (supplementing it with evening meetings nearly every night) and talked at length about the war. He talked about the war as it applied to AA, of course, about how he drank his way through the horrors of the battlefield (who wouldn’t?), came home to a wrecked life, and began to set himself straight on the Road of Happy Destiny.

I can’t begrudge an old man the comfort and safety of sobriety, but why do exactly the same dynamics have to apply to a 15-year-old kid? In AA, one size fits all, and if it doesn’t fit, YOU are made to fit yourself to it. If you ever hear a criticism, it’s always couched in terms of “well, I used to object to this and that” (I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see). But glory hallelujah, now I see the light.

The 12 steps, forged in the ‘30s by a failed stockbroker and an inebriated doctor, are all about breaking the will, surrender, and absolute reliance on God “as we understood him”. Though the founders were in some ways quite spiritually evolved, leaving the door open to diverse interpretations of the divine, the actual practice of the program involves the God of Sunday school and revival meetings and “that old-time religion”. As usual, the practice is light-years removed from the actual text.

We constantly hear things like “ninety meetings in ninety days”, “it works if you work it”, and reams of other cute sayings (my favorite of many acronyms: sober stands for “son-of-a-bitch, everything’s real!”). None of these are found in the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous, usually known as the Big Book. Though many members preface everything they say with “the Big Book says”, their interpretations are often pretty far off the actual content.

But that’s not what made me quit.

Though there was one defining crisis that caused the actual split, there had been a steady accumulation of episodes that disturbed me. No one seemed to be willing to talk to me about any of this, as they were too busy going on and on about humility, surrender and the “incredible journey”. (Many AA members I knew literally had no friends or even business associates outside the program, and had brought their spouses and children on-board. Those who didn’t usually ended up divorced: AA widows abound, and affairs rage in spite of the organization’s unnaturally pure motives.)

Item: I was a couple of years in, doing well, stable, sober, and going to five or six meetings a week. Anything that bothered me about AA and its principles was relegated to some sort of seething pit of doubt that was without question my fault, due to my arrogance, lack of surrender and refusal to absolutely rely on God.

For you see, “everything happens for a reason”, everything happens “the way it’s supposed to happen”. (When my son’s roommate was savagely kicked to death outside a bar, an AA member I knew said it was “all part of God’s plan.”) You hear this nearly every time. Though I didn’t voice my objection, because you don’t do that at meetings, this seemed like passivity to me. “Self-will run riot” was the ultimate evil, but it often seemed that having any individual will at all was somewhere between a sin and a crime.

My friend Louise told me this story: she had been horribly abused as a child, bullied by a sexual tyrant who was now beginning to abuse his grandchildren. As she sat around a campfire meeting, an exclusive club in which your deepest feelings were expected to be revealed, she finally shared the agonizing decision she had made: “I’m going to lay charges against my Dad.”

There was a brief, embarrassed silence, followed by this from the meeting’s ringleader: “Louise, I believe you have a resentment.”

There followed a long discussion (or rather, a series of uninterrupted soliloquys: AA doesn’t do “cross-talk”) about how Louise had to surrender, let go of her anger, forgive. This was what she “should” do. I met her several months later and asked her how she was doing. “Much better. I’ve left the program. I was tired of twisting myself into a pretzel.”

Another episode, even more harrowing, involved a young woman who had been systematically tortured by her father. Her sponsor told her she must pray for the person who abused her, and wish for him everything she would want for herself. If she forced herself to keep doing this for long enough, she would actually want these things for him and feel mercy for him. She was also told during her Step 5 (the confessional step) that she must always look for her part in everything that ever happened to her. She wrenched her brain around trying to figure out what her part was in being sodomized at five.

She stood up at the meeting, looking fragile as glass, with tears running down her face. “I just don’t know how to make amends to my Dad. My sponsor says I’ll feel so much better if I do. But I feel like killing myself. I guess I’m just a lousy AA member. This is supposed to work. I’m not supposed to feel this way. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

I would have talked to her after the meeting (God knows what I would have said) except that a phalanx of members swarmed her afterwards, eager to make her case fit the immutable model. I wonder what happened, if she ended up like Hannah whose background was similar. Unable to endure what had happened to her, she committed suicide. Members talked about “those with grave emotional and mental disorders”, and carried on.

If I am painting AA too darkly, if I am leaving out the tremendous compassion I found at those early meetings, then I apologize. But as time went on, I found I couldn’t keep the dogma fresh. Except for some of the stories in the back, the Big Book has not changed since its first printing 60-some years ago. What other self-help program wouldn’t update itself in so many decades? What about all the discoveries we’ve made about family dynamics, about heredity, about mental illness? What about issues of race, of sexual orientation? (There are a few “gay AA” meetings in which members are held in quarantine. But in the general assembly they have to keep their mouths shut. I once saw a man at an open meeting refer to coming out, prompting an old geezer to literally stomp out of the meeting saying, “I didn’t know this was a meeting for fags.”) No, it’s all swept into the great gulf: obviously the program “works if you work it” the way it is, so why change it?

But I have come to believe that if the program works, it is because people sublimate their individuality, their power to differ, discern and object. The fact that the 12 steps have been applied to every addiction and disorder in existence alarms me, as if the steps truly are the holy grail of recovery, unassailable, irreplaceable, and beyond question.

My irritability mounting as the years went on, I finally hit a real crisis in 2005. I had suffered from some kind of psychiatric disorder all my life, and in spite of years of good remission I feared a return, but was repeatedly told in AA that it would never bother me again if I stayed sober and constantly relied on God. It was obvious to them (though not to me) that it had all been caused by the demon alcohol. I secretly took two drugs to control my whatever-it-is (and in all that time I’d never had a correct diagnosis, because the psychiatric system is so incompetent, abusive and full of shit that it deserves to be torn down forever). Suddenly I learned over the ‘net that both these drugs had been recalled at the same time. My doctor had no idea this had happened. So I was left with a choice: try something new, as my doctor recommended, or go “drug free”, as all my AA friends had been urging me to do.

My first reaction was a huge flush of euphoria, of tremendous energy, and an eerie turning back of the clock. I had never had so many complements about my appearance: I looked ten years younger! Looking back on photos of that time, my eyes were like pinwheels and I was constantly beaming, but apparently no one thought this was wrong.

Oh, and the compliments on finally being “clean”! “Oh, thank God you’re finally off all that stuff.” “I knew you could do it!” “See, you don’t need to lean on pills because you have God in your life.”

My sleep was whittled down slowly, but by the time I was down to two hours, strange things were starting to happen. In deep hypnosis (by a friend who didn’t know what he was doing), I had an encounter with the Divine that was completely shattering. Almost at the cost of my life, I learned that “meeting God” isn’t at all peaceful or pleasant. The ancient belief that we will die if we see God face-to-face turned out to be true.

The sickening free-fall that followed, the dive into a depression that pushed me below ground, is beyond my powers to describe. It was three years before I began to feel like a human being again. I am now on five drugs and have finally found a decent, competent psychiatrist on the recommendation of a friend. I no longer take medical advice from people who aren’t doctors or try to “heal myself” on milk thistle or coffee grounds But when I think how close I came to giving up and committing suicide, it makes me shudder.

AA did not help me during the most harrowing time of my life. All I got was more unhelpful rhetoric. I wasn’t surrendering, I wasn’t practicing the principles, I wasn’t adhering to the tenet of “no mind-altering substances” (another thing that’s not in the Big Book, but often “quoted” by members with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other). In other words, it was my lack of commitment that had made this happen. Almost everyone assumed I had “slipped” and was drinking again (which I didn’t – I had a healthy terror of the stuff by then). At first it was subtle, but then I felt roped off, excluded, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone. I stood in the crowd after meetings looking at a lot of turned backs. Even my sponsor always seemed to be busy.

I had been a loyal, sober member of the program for 15 years.

It didn’t really occur to me, because I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that there were other, equally effective ways to be peacefully sober. So I ventured out. I rediscovered a close friend who had also dropped out, and we compared notes. I began to realize that in any other case, if a human being were relentlessly exposed to the same simplistic information over and over and over again, it would be reasonable to assume they “got it” and wouldn’t need any more exposure. Do we go to Sunday school until we’re 47? Do we need to have the Golden Rule blasted into our ears by loudspeaker every morning?

OK, I realize that if AA no longer means what it used to, I don’t have to go. But the guilt still sometimes jabs at me like pinpricks, even two years after I left. The pity in Jim’s eyes, the sense of “oh, she’s going to fly apart at any minute” was palpable. In his view, there is simply no way that an alcoholic can ever stay sober and be happy and productive (though the program is not very big on “productive” and discourages normal ambition) without relentless exposure to the principles of the program.

I hope I don’t drink again, but I know there is no guarantee I won’t. I am profoundly committed to the sober life. I do appreciate what I was able to learn from my many years in AA, but I don’t think I’ll attend meetings again unless my view changes or I find myself in a dangerously slippery place. And if I do, I will not expect “fellowship” or any kind of a welcome. I can imagine what they would think if they saw me again: some version of “I told you so”.

I no longer see AA recovery as real recovery: as with “that old-time religion”, no one questions the tenets, assuming they are infallible. Longtime members creep me out. They are broken records of recovery, parrots fed on the same bland diet, grateful to be huddling together in a place where everyone accepts them and nothing ever changes.

But that’s not life. Things don’t stand still except in old Jimmy Cagney movies, preserved in time. Life necessitates constant adaptation to change which is often unexpected, wrenching and unwelcome. But we are not taught that in AA. We are taught to rely absolutely on God “as we understood him”, to believe that everything happens for a reason. When adversity hits, we’re told it’s “all in God’s plan”.

If this is so, I think I’ll make a plan of my own.

Well-wishes from the horse's mouth

Was stunned to hear an old and dear friend had suffered a stroke. Since she was one of the people who introduced me to horses, I had to come up with something uniquely equine. This just brought it home to me, as I came home from my 64th birthday celebration: we aren't forever. Our loved ones are just as temporary. 

Why I quit AA

This is a piece I wrote some years ago while I had a blog on Open Salon. It drew an unexpectedly large response, almost all of it negative. The only comment that really sticks in my mind is, "Where did you go to meetings - in a mental institution?" I should have thanked them, for the surliness and blistering sarcasm in these responses neatly proved the point I was trying to make. You can't step outside the bounds of AA convention without severe and rather nasty consequences from the AA mafia. But now I wish I'd kept those responses, perhaps paid a little more attention to the emotion and loyalty behind them rather than reacting with so much anger and offense. I didn't change the piece much, because except for the dates - my granddaughter is now eleven! - I still stand behind everything I said.

My sobriety date, which I will never forget, is November 30, 1990. Today I celebrate twenty-four years of sobriety.

The other day I was lurking around in the children’s section of my favorite bookstore, trying to figure out what a four-year-old grandgirl might want for her birthday. Flipping through the $30 board books and propaganda about toilet training and environmentalism, I heard someone call my name.

I looked up. Oh, hi, Jim. Oh, I’m doing OK. Yes, really. Just doing a little shopping here. No, really, I’m OK. How are you?

It’s hard to be looked at with a mixture of embarrassment and pity, but that’s what I was seeing in Jim’s eyes. Clearly he didn’t want to run into me, as he had been making certain assumptions: that I had either “gone back out” and was drinking again, or else was in such a state of “dry drunk” rampage that I was making myself and everyone around me miserable.

Welcome to the wonderful world of an ex-AA. As with an ex-con, the sense of ensnarement never ends, at least not without a Velcro ripping-away and endless guilt.

There was a time when I needed AA like I needed to breathe. Yes, I am a real alcoholic, and I didn’t fully realize it until I crawled into a meeting on my belly in 1990. Scared sober, I became enmeshed in an organization that quickly took over my life. Moreover, the more embroiled I became, the greater the praise heaped upon me. If I went to a meeting every day, I was a “good” AA member; more than once per day, and I was a spiritual giant.

It’s often said at meetings that you never graduate. This might be OK if I at least had a sense of moving on to another level, but this is discouraged. People with 20 years sober are supposed to say at meetings (whether they feel it or not) that they are at exactly the same level as the newcomers, and are only one drink away from disaster.

I agree with this part: I’ll never be safe to drink again, and I’d better not forget it. After years and years of having this fact jackhammered into my head, I think I’ve accepted it (for after all, “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”).

From the very beginning, I was disturbed by certain pervasive beliefs in the organization. Conformity is one. Don’t ever speak outside the pre-set AA rhetoric, or other people will assume you’re not doing it right, fighting the mighty and immutable truths of sobriety. There is such a thing as AA dogma, often promoted by what is called the elder statesmen: one elderly man, a veteran of World War II, came to the same meeting at noon every day (supplementing it with evening meetings nearly every night) and talked at length about The War. He talked about The War as it applied to AA, of course, about how he drank his way through the horrors of the battlefield (who wouldn’t?), came home to a wrecked life, and began to set himself straight on the Road of Happy Destiny.

I can’t begrudge an old man the comfort and safety of sobriety, but why do exactly the same dynamics have to apply to a 15-year-old kid? In AA, one size fits all, and if it doesn’t fit, YOU are made to fit yourself to it. If you ever hear a criticism, it’s always couched in terms of “well, I used to object to this and that” (I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see). But glory hallelujah, now I see the light.

The 12 steps, forged in the ‘30s by a failed stockbroker and an inebriated doctor, are all about breaking the will, surrender, and absolute reliance on God “as we understood Him”. Though the founders were in some ways quite spiritually evolved, leaving the door open to diverse interpretations of the divine, the actual practice of the program involves the God of Sunday school and revival meetings and “that old-time religion”. As usual, the practice is light-years removed from the original text.

We constantly hear things like “ninety meetings in ninety days”, “it works if you work it”, and reams of other cute sayings (my favorite of many acronyms: sober stands for “son-of-a-bitch, everything’s real!”). None of these are found in the main text of Alcoholics Anonymous, usually known as the Big Book. Though many members preface everything with “the Big Book says”, their interpretations are often pretty far off the actual content.

But that’s not what made me quit.

Though there was one defining crisis that caused the actual split, there had been a steady accumulation of episodes that disturbed me. No one seemed to be willing to talk to me about any of this, as they were too busy going on and on about humility, surrender and the “incredible journey”. (Many AA members I knew literally had no friends or even business associates outside the program, and had brought their spouses and children on-board. Those who didn’t usually ended up divorced: AA widows abound, and affairs rage in spite of the organization’s unrealistically pure motives.)

Item: I was a couple of years in, doing well, stable, sober, and going to five or six meetings a week. Anything that bothered me about AA and its principles was relegated to some sort of seething pit of doubt that was without question my fault, due to my arrogance, lack of surrender and refusal to absolutely rely on God.

For you see, “everything happens for a reason”, everything happens “the way it’s supposed to happen”. (When my son’s roommate was savagely kicked to death outside a bar, an AA member I knew said it was “all part of God’s plan.”) You hear this at nearly every meeting. Though I didn’t voice my objection, because you don’t do that at meetings, this seemed like passivity to me. “Self-will run riot” was the ultimate evil, but it often seemed that having any individual will at all was somewhere between a sin and a crime.

My friend Louise told me this story: she had been horribly abused as a child, bullied by a sexual tyrant who was now beginning to abuse his grandchildren. As she sat around a campfire meeting, an exclusive club in which your deepest feelings were expected to be revealed, she finally shared the agonizing decision she had made: “I’m going to lay charges against my Dad.”

There was a brief, embarrassed silence, followed by this from the meeting’s ringleader: “Louise. . . I believe you have a resentment.”

There followed a long discussion (or rather, a series of uninterrupted soliloquys: AA doesn’t do “cross-talk”) about how Louise had to surrender, let go of her anger, forgive. This was what she “should” do. I met her several months later and asked her how she was doing. “Much better. I’ve left the program. I was tired of twisting myself into a pretzel.”

Another episode, even more harrowing, involved a young woman who had been systematically tortured by her father. Her sponsor told her she must pray for the person who abused her, and wish for him everything she would want for herself. If she forced herself to keep doing this for long enough, she would actually want these things for him and feel mercy and forgiveness towards him. She was also told during her Step 5 (the confessional step) that she must always look for her part in everything that ever happened to her. She wrenched her brain around trying to figure out what her part was in being sodomized at five.

She stood up at the meeting, looking fragile as glass, with tears running down her face. “I just don’t know how to make amends to my Dad. My sponsor says I’ll feel so much better if I do. But I feel like killing myself. I guess I’m just a lousy AA member. This is supposed to work! I’m not supposed to feel this way. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

I would have talked to her after the meeting (God knows what I would have said) except that a phalanx of members swarmed her afterwards, eager to make her case fit the unquestioned (and unquestionable) model. I wonder what happened, if she ended up like Hannah whose background was similar. Unable to endure what had happened to her, she committed suicide. Members talked about “people with grave emotional and mental disorders”, and carried on.

If I am painting AA too darkly, if I am leaving out the tremendous compassion I found at those early meetings, then I apologize. But as time went on, I found I couldn’t keep the dogma fresh. Except for some of the stories in the back, the Big Book has not changed since its first printing 70-some years ago. What other self-help program wouldn’t update itself in so many decades?

What about all the discoveries we’ve made about family dynamics, about heredity, about mental illness? What about issues of race, of gender, of sexual orientation? (There are a few “gay AA” meetings in which members are held in quarantine. But in the general assembly they have to keep their mouths shut. I once saw a man at an open meeting refer to coming out, prompting an old geezer to literally stomp out of the meeting saying, “I didn’t know this was a meeting for fags.”) No, it’s all swept into the great gulf: obviously the program “works if you work it”, so why make any changes?

But I have come to believe that if the program works, it is because people sublimate their individuality, their power to differ, discern and object. The fact that the 12 steps have been applied to every addiction and disorder in existence alarms me, as if the steps truly are the holy grail of recovery, unassailable, irreplaceable, and beyond question.

My irritability mounting as the years went on, I finally hit a real crisis in 2005. I had suffered from some kind of psychiatric disorder all my life, and in spite of years of good remission I feared a return, but was repeatedly told in AA that it would never bother me again if I stayed sober and constantly relied on God. It was obvious to them (though not to me) that it had all been caused by the demon alcohol.

I secretly took two drugs to control my whatever-it-is (and in all that time I’d never had a correct diagnosis, because the psychiatric system is so incompetent, abusive and full of shit that it deserves to be torn down forever). Suddenly I learned over the ‘net that both these drugs had been recalled at the same time. My doctor had no idea this had happened. So I was left with a choice: try something new, as my doctor recommended, or go “drug free”, as all my AA friends had been urging me to do.

My first reaction was a huge flush of euphoria, of tremendous energy, and an eerie turning back of the clock. I had never had so many compliments about my appearance: I looked ten years younger! Looking back on photos of that time, my eyes were like pinwheels and I was constantly beaming, but apparently no one thought there was anything wrong with this.

Oh, and the compliments on finally being “clean”! “Oh, thank God you’re finally off all that stuff.” “I knew you could do it!” “See, you don’t need to lean on pills because you have God in your life.”

My sleep was whittled down slowly, but by the time I was down to two hours, strange things were starting to happen. In deep hypnosis (by a friend who didn’t know what he was doing), I had an encounter with the Divine that was completely shattering. Almost at the cost of my life, I learned that “meeting God” isn’t at all peaceful or pleasant. The ancient belief that we will die if we see God face-to-face turned out to be true.

The sickening free-fall that followed, the dive into a depression that pushed me below ground, is beyond my powers to describe. It was three years before I began to feel like a human being again. I am now on five drugs and have finally found a decent, competent psychiatrist on the recommendation of a friend. I no longer take medical advice from people who aren’t doctors or try to “heal myself” on milk thistle or coffee grounds But when I think how close I came to giving up and committing suicide, it makes me shudder.

AA did not help me during the most harrowing time of my life. All I got was more unhelpful rhetoric. I wasn’t surrendering, I wasn’t practicing the principles, I wasn’t adhering to the tenet of “no mind-altering substances” (another thing that’s not in the Big Book, but often “quoted” by members with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other).

In other words, it was my lack of commitment that had made this happen. Almost everyone assumed I had “slipped” and was drinking again (which I wasn't – I had a healthy terror of the stuff by then). At first it was subtle, but then I felt roped off, excluded, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone. I stood in the crowd after meetings looking at a lot of turned backs. Even my sponsor always seemed to be busy.

I had been a loyal, sober member of the program for 15 years.

It didn’t really occur to me, because I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that there were other, equally effective ways to be peacefully sober. So I ventured out. I rediscovered a close friend who had also dropped out, and we compared notes. I began to realize that in any other case, if a human being were relentlessly exposed to the same simplistic information over and over and over again, it would be reasonable to assume they “got it” and wouldn’t need any more exposure. Do we go to Sunday school until we’re 47? Do we need to have the Golden Rule blasted into our ears by loudspeaker every morning?

OK, I realize that if AA no longer means what it used to, I don’t have to attend. But the guilt still sometimes jabs at me like pinpricks, even two years after I left. The pity in Jim’s eyes, the sense of “oh, she’s going to fly apart at any minute” was palpable. In his view, there is simply no way that an alcoholic can ever stay sober and be happy and productive (though the program is not very big on “productive” and even seems to discourage normal ambition) without relentless exposure to the principles of the program.

I hope I don’t drink again, but I know there is no guarantee I won’t. I am profoundly committed to the sober life. I do appreciate what I was able to learn from my many years in AA, but I don’t think I’ll attend meetings again unless my view changes or I find myself in a dangerously slippery place. And if I do, I will not expect “fellowship” or any kind of a welcome. I can imagine what they would think if they saw me again: some smug or even pitying version of “I told you so”.

I no longer see AA recovery as real recovery: as with “that old-time religion”, no one questions the tenets, assuming they are infallible. Longtime members creep me out. They are broken records of recovery, parrots fed on the same bland diet, grateful to be huddling together in a place where everyone accepts them and nothing ever changes.

But that’s not life. Things don’t stand still except in old Jimmy Cagney movies, forever frozen in time. Life necessitates constant adaptation to change which is often unexpected, wrenching and unwelcome. But we are not taught that in AA. We are taught to rely absolutely on God “as we understood Him”, to believe that everything happens for a reason. When adversity hits, we’re told it’s “all in God’s plan”.

If this is so, then I think I’ll make a plan of my own.

For more on the subject of AA, click the link below to watch a 48 Hours program (including complete transcript) dealing with AA and the threat of violence against women. This is a subject the program has refused to touch and will still not acknowledge, claiming it's an "outside issue".

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-sober-truth-investigating-the-death-of-karla-mendez-brada/

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA