Why I Could Not Stand AA and Got Sober Anyway

Eleven meetings. I know it was eleven because I was counting, and the fact that I was counting probably tells you how it went.

I remember standing at the back of the second one with a paper cup of coffee, listening to a man talk honestly about the worst year of his life, feeling nothing but a strong physical desire to be outside. I wasn’t above him. I’d done everything he’d done. I just could not make my body sit in that chair.

Before I go on, the medical part

If you drink every day and heavily, don’t decide tonight that you’re stopping in the morning without a doctor involved. If you shake in the morning, sweat through the sheets, feel sick until the first drink, or you’ve ever had a fit when you cut down, talk to a doctor before you stop. Alcohol withdrawal can cause seizures and it kills people, and it’s very treatable when somebody medical is looking at it. AA won’t handle that part and neither will I. I’m a coach, not a doctor.

What exactly could I not do?

Not the honesty. That wasn’t it. The honesty in those rooms is real and it’s rarer than almost anything else you’ll encounter.

Three specific things stopped me.

The introduction. Standing up and attaching a permanent label to my own name, in a room, out loud. Some people describe that as a weight coming off. For me it felt like signing something. I could say what I’d done. I could not agree to be a category.

The permanence. What I heard, over and over, was that this was for the rest of my life and I’d be doing this at seventy. I was 28. I needed a next Tuesday. Being handed a forty year membership when I couldn’t get through one evening didn’t steady me, it flattened me.

The God-shaped part. I’m Dutch, functionally an atheist, and the steps kept arriving at a place I couldn’t follow. People told me the group could be the thing bigger than me, and I understood the argument. I just never once felt it in the room.

That’s it. Those three. Nothing about the people, who were kind to me, and one of whom drove me home.

Is that just my ego?

I got told this a few times, in a friendly way, and I want to deal with it properly because you’ll get told it too.

“Your objection to AA is a symptom of the thing AA treats” is unfalsifiable. Any resistance becomes proof. No other area of your life would accept an argument built like that, and it shouldn’t get a pass here just because the topic is serious.

That said, I did check, and you should. Here’s the test I used on myself. If it were private, one to one, with no introductions and no God in it, would I go? My answer was an immediate yes, which told me I had a format problem, not a willingness problem. If your answer to that question is still no, then the objection isn’t really about AA and it’s worth knowing that before you spend another year on it.

What is genuinely good about AA, and I mean this

I’m not going to be clever about the thing that keeps thousands of people alive.

It’s free. There’s no assessment, no waiting list, no insurance, no intake form. There’s a meeting near you tonight, and another one at seven in the morning, which matters more than almost anything else on this list, because bad hours are when this gets decided. It puts you in a room with people who cannot be lied to about drinking, because they’ve made every excuse you’re about to make. And it’s the only thing in this entire field that has never once tried to sell me anything.

If it works for you, use it, and don’t let a man with a website talk you out of the free thing that’s already in your town. Go tonight. Genuinely.

What did I use instead?

Nothing exotic. Four things, and they map almost exactly onto what AA was doing for the men in that room.

A doctor, first. I went before I stopped, said the real amount out loud to a professional, and did what he told me for the first stretch. This is the part people skip and it’s the only part that can actually hurt you.

One person I couldn’t lie to. A man I’d known for years who had stopped drinking two years ahead of me. Not a coach, not a professional. He answered his phone, he’d heard every excuse because he’d used them, and he could tell from four words whether I was fine. That single relationship did more than the other three combined.

A plan for the specific hour. Not for my life. For six until eight in the evening, written down, for fourteen days. What I ate, where I was, who I called, what I did with my hands. My problem was never a philosophical relationship with alcohol. It was two hours of a Tuesday.

Telling four people out loud. Not a public statement. Four individuals, told directly, which meant that going back to it would have to be done in front of an audience.

If you want your own version of the file those four things were built from, there’s the honest check on this site. Twelve questions, three minutes, private, no email. It won’t tell you what you are and it isn’t a diagnosis. It’ll tell you which of the four you’re missing.

Isn’t quitting without AA just quitting alone?

That’s the actual risk, and it’s the one honest criticism of what I’m describing.

The men I talk to who tried without AA and got nowhere didn’t fail because they weren’t in a meeting. They failed because they replaced the meetings with an intention. They decided to stop and then went home to the same sofa at the same time with the same phone. Nothing else changed.

The meetings are load-bearing. They’re doing four jobs at once: saying it out loud, putting you near people who know, filling the exact hours, and making somebody notice if you vanish. Refuse the meetings and you own those four jobs. Which is fine. Just don’t pretend they’ve disappeared because you’ve decided not to attend.

What about the rest of the options?

There’s more than AA and there’s more than me. SMART Recovery runs on a different model with none of the language you’re objecting to. There are online groups, therapists who work on what’s underneath, and a conversation with a doctor about whether medication has any place in your case, which is a matter for the doctor and not for me.

There’s a plainer breakdown of all of them, including who genuinely does need a facility, in the articles here.

Ten years on

I’m 38, I live in Bali, I’m married, there’s a baby, and I run a business that requires me to be awake and competent at seven in the morning. I don’t attend anything. I’m not in a program. I have two people I can call and I haven’t needed to call either of them in a very long time.

I’m not offering that as proof of a method. It’s one man’s outcome and one man’s outcome is not evidence. What I am telling you is that the door you walked out of isn’t the only door, and walking out of it doesn’t mean you’ve decided to keep drinking.

You went to a meeting and it wasn’t for you. That’s a fit problem. Go and find the fit.