Alcoholics Anonymous and the like

[k2490]

What do you all think of Anonymous support groups? Like AA Narcotics Anonymous etc?

I'm trying to find help with my eating problems and I found Eating Disorders anonymous. I found the Higher Power aspect a little off puting

[Fruity]

Talking about it to people that understand may be helpful. Just the support. I held a group for substance abuse with my teen clients and I could see how they felt just by all the "me too!" going on. Very nice.

[Psykhronic]

You can also try to find a non-12-step program, which will more than likely not reference a higher power.

[Waratah]

I went to this 12 step thing, it was like a tutorial to help people do the 12 steps(outside of meetings). I think it was the step where you had to turn your will and life over to the care of god as you understood him. Near the end of the tutorial we had to stand up and either declare god is everything or god is nothing. So there I am, standing there with all this peer pressure, everyone individually singing out "god is everything" and people were smiling and enjoying themselves. I am saying to myself "fuck,fuck, what am I going to do, cave in or be honest." When it was my turn I screamed as loud as I could "god is nothing". Below is the types of looks I got.

hock: hock: hock: hock: hock:

Up until this point I pretty much ignored the god area of the program and it was never ever pushed. After my tutorial episode and seem that every meeting I went to there was people pushing god. My time in the 12 step program did not last long after that. Every now and then I go back to stick to some people who put crap on me and to tell others that you do not have to believe in god for you to succeed.

As Ivy said, I think talking, sharing and listening to your peers can do wonders. It certainly helped me and all without a god.

My advice is to avoid all talk of god as much as possible.

[Polaris]

If someone fucks up their life to the point they need something like AA, they should take all the help then can get.

[Sejanus]

If someone fucks up their life to the point they need something like AA, they should take all the help then can get.

Ok, come back to me when you take an imam's advice or help with an issue in your life.

[Faith No More]

12 step programs are bullshit.

[Polaris]

If someone fucks up their life to the point they need something like AA, they should take all the help then can get.

Ok, come back to me when you take an imam's advice or help with an issue in your life.

I learned quite a bit about living a spiritual life from a Moslem professor. Come back when you actually have something pertinent to say.

[Ksa]

Talking about it to people that understand may be helpful. Just the support. I held a group for substance abuse with my teen clients and I could see how they felt just by all the "me too!" going on. Very nice.

The concept of Substance Abuse is flawed. Substances trigger affects you experience in your everyday life, whether it is serotonergic, dopaminergic or adrenergic, the effects are in no way strange to us except for psychedelics. For example, methamphetamine triggers a dopaminergic response, which feels similar to the excitement someone experiences before imminent sex, upon an achievement or simply while doing a rewarding activity. The body is programmed to receive such stimulus and it's very hard to damage it by triggering such natural stimulus.

If you define abuse as something destructive, that lowers the amount of dopamine receptors for example, then eating ice-cream, having sex or playing a video-game is destructive in that sense too because it's known to lower dopamine receptors through the same mechanism as methamphetamine. When you bombard a receptor with dopamine, it wears off, plain, common sense.

If you argue that abuse is an excessive consumption of a substance, then, whoever consumes less than 40mg of Methamphetamine daily doesn't abuse it, according to the FDA, 40mg of Dexedrine or Desoxyn is the daily limit for the treatment of ADHD and narcolepsy. This amount can be taken daily without adverse effects for a lifetime.

But then you argue that it's still abuse, and that abuse is simply taking a controlled substance that was not prescribed to you by a doctor. Ahhhh! But then we get into politics right? We are no longer into the realm of medicine, health and science. We are no longer talking about what's good for the individual, we're talking about what's good for the government! So then you don't abuse the substance, you abuse the law!

[Tiberius]

Slightly related, but I once read an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit where an atheist Freemason said he got around the whole "must believe in a higher power" requirement by arguing that bears were a higher power because of their ability to kill him when weapons were taken out of the picture.