RE: Alternatives to AA
March 29, 2014 at 8:01 pm
(This post was last modified: March 29, 2014 at 8:02 pm by SteelCurtain.)
That's not been my experience with facilitating meetings.... I am most likely an idiot, but I was extremely well trained, and while I can't speak for all AA meetings I've been to a ton of them, and I've never experienced a cult mentality. You can shop around until you connect with someone, and connecting with people increases your odds of success.
The whole point of the "higher power" thing is to get you to acknowledge that there are things beyond your control in the world, and that the only thing you can control is your actions. There are certainly some groups that are more religious than others, but in many of the groups I've sat in, there were plenty of non-religious people that didn't want to call their higher power "god." Which was fine. They worked their steps calling their higher power the ocean (the Navy...), the cosmos, even the group. You don't pray to your higher power (you can if you want to), you trust that getting help from an outside source is important. The whole point is that people who struggle with alcoholism and addiction for the most part keep everything inside, they don't like to talk about it, they cope with it by themselves. The thought is that success is MUCH more reachable if you allow others in on your thinking. Addiction does funny things to your thought processes, and having others show you that is vital.
The whole point of the "higher power" thing is to get you to acknowledge that there are things beyond your control in the world, and that the only thing you can control is your actions. There are certainly some groups that are more religious than others, but in many of the groups I've sat in, there were plenty of non-religious people that didn't want to call their higher power "god." Which was fine. They worked their steps calling their higher power the ocean (the Navy...), the cosmos, even the group. You don't pray to your higher power (you can if you want to), you trust that getting help from an outside source is important. The whole point is that people who struggle with alcoholism and addiction for the most part keep everything inside, they don't like to talk about it, they cope with it by themselves. The thought is that success is MUCH more reachable if you allow others in on your thinking. Addiction does funny things to your thought processes, and having others show you that is vital.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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