12SR: 12 Step Recovery Process

12SR: Meetings Are NOT The Program! Why Just Attending Meetings Isn't Enough

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Ever wondered why attending 12-step meetings might not be enough for  recovery? In today's episode, we highlight the crucial difference between just showing up to meetings and fully engaging in the transformative 12-step program. 

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody. So yesterday I was down at the detox center. I was asked to go down there and do some service and tell my story and any time that I do that service I always get a lot from it, being so close to sort of the last days of alcoholism and, you know, if people are lucky, the early days of recovery. You know it's always a very powerful experience and I've done that service quite a bit recently in different countries because I've been traveling and I'm sort of connected with recovery in different countries. And you know it's so interesting because usually when you do service in a detox center there's Q&A at the end and the questions and the concerns are always the same. You know it doesn't matter where in the world you are, they're always the same concerns, that the obstacles to recovery seem to to always kind of be the same, and a big one that that I just have touched on in in previous of these. But I really just want to make a specific recording to really go into it, and it's this distinction between the meetings and the program.

Speaker 1:

There was a guy in the detox last night, a young guy. He couldn't have been older than 25. And you know he heard my pitch for AA and 12 Steps in general and he was engaged. But he said at the end I tried AA. I must have gone to hundreds of meetings and it just didn't work for me. And he was very genuine in what he was saying. You know, just that sort of it's great that it worked for you, but it just didn't work for me. And I pushed him a little bit on it and I said, well, when you say that you tried AA, like what exactly did you do? And he said, well, I went to a bunch of meetings. He said he was drunk when he went to most of them, but he said he went to a bunch sober as well. And he just said that he didn't, he didn't stay sober. And you know, I asked him, I said did you, did you get a sponsor? Did you work the steps? And he kind of said, well, no, not really. Um, and so I just sort of talked to him about it and I said you know AA and 12-step program, in that case it's a 12-step program and going to meetings is the meetings of the 12-step program. And his face just sort of was a little bit like what do you mean? You know the, the public perception of of 12 step these days is that it's all about meetings and that it's the going to the meetings and the fellowship of the program that keeps you sober and just keep coming back, just keep coming back to the meetings and, um, you know, meetings can be great. I absolutely adore meetings, I love going to meetings but they can also be not great and they're absolutely not the program. It's not like a subjective opinion, Like it's.

Speaker 1:

All you have to do is read the literature of 12-step programs, of Alcoholics Anonymous and sort of the pioneering program, to see that really the whole purpose of of the meetings is for newcomers to find the fellowship they seek and to discover this program which is going to help them recover from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. And so we went into that for a little bit and just I wanted to sort of leave them with this, knowing that I just think so many people I mean to think of the amount of people that are sat at home in the throes of any addiction, you know thinking to themselves well, I tried the 12-step program, or I tried NA or AA or SLA or GA or whatever it was, and it didn't work and really all that they did was try the meetings. And I want to give an analogy here that I hope really explains this. I'm going to use a drinking analogy, but you can make this analogy with any addiction. I want you to imagine that you go to a bar and in the bar there's people sat around the table and they're talking about drinking and they're talking about having 12 shots of vodka. Now, you can go and sit in that bar, you can watch other people drink, you can watch other people talk about drinking, but unless you actually drink those 12 shots of vodka, you are not going to have the experience that all those people are talking about.

Speaker 1:

Now, the steps for me are actually very, very similar to 12 shots of vodka. What I mean by that is, if I have one shot, I don't really feel anything. If I have two shots I still. Maybe I start to feel a little bit of something.

Speaker 1:

But it's not really until the fourth and the fifth and the sixth that the psychic change that alcohol gave me starts to really kick in. And it was exactly the same experience I had with the steps. You know, the first and the second step. I'm kind of just doing it and talking to my sponsor, and you know, I'm not sure, I wasn't sure that anything was really happening, but by the fifth and the sixth step I had started to have this experience that was described in the book. And by the eighth and the ninth step I was going. You know, I was going in the way that I'd be going if I'd had nine shots of vodka. So I just, you know, if you're new, if you're kind of new, even if you're not new and you've just forgotten, you know, it's easy to either not know and it is easy to forget that the meetings are not the program, you know, and it is the program that delivers the psychic change, us a lot of stuff. They deliver us fellowship and connection and laughter and and and community and and knowledge and wisdom and all of these amazing things, but they don't really deliver the deep and and sort of weighted psychic change that we get through going through the literature and going through the steps and going through the program and going through the program, and so I hope this is helpful.

Speaker 1:

As always, open to questions, comments and remarks. I am obviously on Spotify. There's no way for people to leave questions, so I am going to make an email where people can send questions or comments or anything. But for now, if you want to leave a comment or a question or anything really, you can head over to the YouTube of this channel and find the tape of this recording and you can post a question or comment there, because it'd be great to engage with people about this stuff. Yeah, I would really enjoy that. So all the best, we'll make another one of these soon, and have a happy and sober day.