Well, shit, this seems to be working
When I finally stayed stopped in Alcoholics Anonymous
No one was more disappointed than I to find myself in Alcoholics Anonymous, and then, even more mortified to find that it was working and helping me stay sober. In fact, I remember saying I’ll be damned if two white men from Akron Ohio is what gets me sober.
And yet.
What I had to do in AA was remove my 21st century feminist lens and evaluate the book of Alcoholics Anonymous as simply a text that was going to prevent me from dying of alcoholism.
I enter the conversation surrounding AA with the complete knowledge that a lot of people, who I generally like, hate AA.
Holly Whitaker (Quit Like a Woman), for instance, whose politics and ideologies I would historically say align with my own, essentially argues women in AA reinforces the patriarchy and the concept of surrender and the steps and the whole Big Book is anti-feminist. Which I suppose, is a worthwhile argument, and one that, again, I would typically agree with.
There is also the common misconception that AA is a religious program. It is not a religious program, but a spiritual program and a program that practices spiritual principles like honesty, taking accountability for one’s own actions, and practicing some humility (being right-sized, which is not to say small, which is what Holly Whitaker argues is the issue within AA).
To which I say, to each their own. The conception of God is “as you understand him,” which can be anything in the world. I often think of nature, the universe, etc. I am very noncommittal about this Higher Power business. How someone else perceives the Big Book and what someone else believes about me or about this program is frankly not my business.
Because of this program, I’m not going to die of alcoholism today, so, in the words of Louise Hay, all is well.
What made AA palatable to me, I believe, is where I encountered and re-encountered it on my sobriety journey and the open-minded online women’s group I found on zoom.
I had stumbled into the rooms of AA a few times, first in 2010, after a particularly embarrassing binge drinking episode in grad school. When I got to this church basement with laminated papers on each folding chair with the readings, I was very drunk. I could hardly stand. People talked to me. I exchanged numbers. I went to a few meetings.
But it wasn’t for me. You had to find a Higher Power, a power it seemed they were all calling God. And that, to me, seemed a bridge too far.
Not only could I not do the god stuff, but it was all written for men: “How a man may be of service to his fellows.” There was a chapter called, “To the wives.” Another whole chapter called “Women Suffer, Too.”
Then, sometime around 2015 on the advice of a therapist who seemed to think my problems were maybe exacerbated by my drinking, I stumbled back into an AA room, this time with my then-husband.
After that meeting, we went home and punctured a full bladder of wine and watched it go down the drain, hungover beyond belief, smelling that red boxed wine, almost throwing up in the sink.
But I found myself at the store probably two days later, certain that I was not an alcoholic, that that AA stuff wasn’t for me.
In late 2021, on the advice of yet another therapist, I attended a 6:30AM meeting for about two weeks. Just give it a try, she had said.
I stopped at the meeting on my way into work. This was in early Covid times, and we sat outside in the dark on folding chairs. The first time I attended, they gave me a white Poker chip, which had the letters AA on one side. I put this coin in my wallet. I texted a picture to my therapist.
There was a lot of hope.
“What a fool,” I said to a woman I had asked to be my sponsor, delighted, ebullient, laughing that morning drinking coffee with her, “to think I could manage my drinking.”
But then a few days passed, and my hangover faded, and it had been noon time and my coworker had invited me to a bar and that had sounded really good, and well, I sure did love a bar, and maybe if I went, I had reasoned, I wouldn’t even have to order a lunch beer.
So he and I sat at a high top table and drank while we discussed the crumbling of our respective marriages. It may have been a bit earlier than noon. We stepped outside to smoke cigarettes.
When we left, I called the woman who had met me for coffee one time while I excitedly detailed the entirety of my drinking career in the Step One work she had assigned to me.
“I drank a beer,” I confessed to her.
“I see,” she said.
“But just two!” I insisted. “What if,” I continued, “I could just have a beer every now and again?”
What if, I thought, I had cracked the code. It was so simple! I just wouldn’t over-do it. I would have rules surrounding the drinking, I thought, ignoring the fact that for roughly fifteen years my “Goals” listed had looked like this:
Read More. Write More. Drink Less. Smoke Less.
“Are you saying you aren’t an alcoholic?” She wanted to know.
To this I sputtered. “Well, I don’t know,” I said.
This poor woman. I still have the leather-bound copy of the 3rd edition of Alcoholics Anonymous that she gave me. The edition I have has different page numbers than the book that most people refer to now.
And this woman, she’s somewhere out in the world, not ever thinking about me.
I don’t even recall her name. Surely her number is saved somewhere in my phone.
That’s the funny thing about AA, she’ll probably never know that I got sober, or that the Big Book she gave me is dog-eared and underlined and highlighted and worn through. Or maybe I’ll run into her sometime. The recovery world is a fairly small one, after all.
But today: I have an obligation, I believe, as I am certain she believed, that if someone reaches out, the hand of AA will be there.
Finally, in 2022, in my 30s, in the midst of a divorce, with 3 little boys in tow who I loved more than anything in the world, I was finally truly and completely desperate.
I couldn’t do to them what I had done to my stepdaughter.
I would die, I thought, if they asked me why I acted funny late at night. I would die, I thought, if they asked me why I was so thirsty and why I drank so many of those (tall cans of PBR). I would die, I thought, if I woke to board games scattered everywhere, the “fun Kristen,” too drunk to finish a game of Chutes and Ladders.
I tried, and tried, and tried to moderate my drinking.
I have to find a way to only drink a bottle of wine, I thought.
I am so smart and so strong, I thought. I was so stubborn and hard working and when I couldn’t find a way, I just kept chipping away until I found a way.
There had to be a way, I thought, to moderate my drinking. There just had to be.
And so went the internal debate. AA literature writes the great obsession of all alcoholics is to find a way to drink moderately. In her book, Laura McKowen calls this searching for a third door. Surely there must be somewhere in between complete abstinence and complete binge drinking. It did not seem that there was.
I had been listening to The Luckiest Club’s meetings three times a day. The hosts there kept mentioning the twelve step program. It seemed they had all come up in “twelve step.”
What were they all talking about, I wanted to know. Twelve step.
These people, who are cool as hell, can’t possibly mean AA.
They couldn’t possibly mean that awful place I went and listed to people prattle on about God and the like.
These cool mantras they have, like “More will be revealed,” or “Easy does it,” or “Life on life’s terms” — this can’t be AA that they’re talking about.
They meant AA.
I thought, I want to hear it from the horses’ mouth.
I thought I would just pop into AA as a voyeur, witness this absurd and antiquated society. What I found was a group of incredibly open minded individuals.
I learned Laura McKowen’s meetings are lifted directly from Alcoholics Anonymous, to include “the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking,” which is quite literally the exact words of the third tradition in AA.
When I first started attending AA meetings, I thought, what the hell are these people talking about. Familiarize yourself with the literature, some cotton tops said.
If there was one thing I could do, that was read and analyze literature.
In the Big Book, when these authors from nearly a century years ago describe the phenomenon of craving, I was able to connect that to the neuroscience I had understood in Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind.
When they talked about a higher power, I was able to connect that to my guides that I had thought about in the medicine wheel, in the reiki, in the archangelic light and guided meditation and journeying and crystals and tarot cards and woo woo I had been looking to.
I couldn’t moderate. I had to, as they write in the Big Book, “concede to my innermost self that I was alcoholic and could not drink.”
I had to wave the white flag of surrender. I laid on my acupressure mat and listened to the meditation “Surrender” and cried. I was learning to live in my body again.
Everything was so bright. The birdsong was so loud. There were so many hours in a day. The evening stretched on, and on, and on.
I got through the nights with seltzer water, burritos, and cigarettes.
I learned to measure every action with this question: Is this moving toward a drink or away? If it was moving toward, I didn’t do it. I stopped going to the grocery store after 4pm. I didn’t walk past the beer aisle. I didn’t go to my parents’ house. I got in bed at 7:30pm. I was, as they say in the meetings, honest, open, and willing.
There was an incredible chasm between the first time I thought to myself, I’m not sure if I drink like other people in whatever that may have been, 2006, and when I was actually able to get and stay sober (I, in fact, was not able to stay stopped until 2022).
What I learned in AA was how to accept what is.
It didn’t matter that I loved to drink, it didn’t matter that a flight at a brewery was my all-time favorite thing, it didn’t matter I could, on occasion, not get too drunk, it didn’t matter that I tried and tried and tried and wanted and wished and hoped that I could moderate my drinking.
There were two other things I did in conjunction with AA: I worked through the Shamanic Medicine Wheel which entailed energy healing trades, connecting with my ancestors, seeking connections with my spirit guides (admittedly all very woo woo, of course, and for all I know, completely made up) and I took a course on boundaries from Molly Davis (an examination of living a “Boundaried” life and putting in place very practical tools to learn what is mine to carry and what isn’t — she has an amazing Instagram/Facebook with daily cartoons surrounding boundaries that I highly recommend).
All three of these things entailed significant self-examination, including looking at my current behavior and the ways in which I was complicit in my own suffering, my family of origin, and taking responsibility for what is mine to take responsibility for, and not take responsibility for what is not mine.
The Serenity Prayer, while also archaic, becomes more profound to me every day : accepting the things I cannot change, finding the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
In the rooms of AA, what I find is most commonly explored, is evaluating the wisdom to know the difference. Taking life on life’s terms. Living.
There are still many things in AA that I don’t fully understand. I don’t fully understand what has kept me sober. That is, in part, what I am trying to decipher in my writing about this journey. I don’t have a formula.
I have eternal gratitude that I no longer live the way I once lived, which, frankly, was never that bad.
A high bottom, they call it.
The surrender that I made, the waving of the white flag, to me, was not a spiritually profound moment. It was not an acceptance of anything crazy into my heart and soul. It was simply looking at what is and accepting.
I don’t always like my behavior when I drink. Period. Simple.
The easiest way to remedy this, it would seem, is to not drink.
I could have that in my head, but it took a long time, a lot of hours of listening to other alcoholics speak about the freedom they experienced in their alcohol-free life, for it to seep from my intellectual sphere into my heart and into my bones.
I cannot take a drink of alcohol, ever.
The Big Book still seemed antiquated. Seems, I should say. When I went to an in person meeting, the room echoed “Hi, Kristen” and I thought I just can’t do this.
At this one in person meeting, I was told of an online meeting. I still had to say I was an alcoholic (a word I have come to enjoy, but I didn’t like at the time).
“All you need is a desire to stop drinking,” the people in these meetings encouraged.
I guess I’ll give it a go, I thought.
And because of whatever miracle has transpired on those zoom calls between my brain and my heart that has allowed me the gift of understanding that today, just for today, I cannot take a drink, I have stayed.
“Because of this program, I’m not going to die of alcoholism today.”
And that is ALL that matters. It works.
Great read! So happy you keep sharing your story!