If you are an addict or an alcoholic in recovery, should you force yourself to go to meetings?
My wildly unpopular opinion is that you do not have to.
This entire website is essentially the alternative solution to daily AA/NA meetings, a way out of the eternal grind.
But let’s take a look at why this phenomenon even exists.
Survivorship bias
The people at an AA meeting are falling victim to a logical fallacy known as survivorship bias.
The idea is simple: occasionally someone will drift away from their meeting, and later come back and admit to having relapsed while they were gone.
So AA members say to themselves: “See? AA works if you stay in the meetings, and if you quit attending regularly then you are bound to relapse.”
But what they don’t see are people like me, who leave the meetings and actually succeed, but never return to tell them about my success. So they are biased because they only see the successes that surround them, while not believing anyone who left could ever be successful.
And it is only reinforced further when someone comes back to the meeting after a relapse and says “the only thing that works is these meetings.” They never see the people who leave, and find an alternative, and succeed with it.
So I do not say this to belittle AA or 12 step programs, because there is certainly value in them for a lot of people. Instead, this is said to dispel the notion that there are no alternative paths that could ever be successful for people.
The fact is that addicts and alcoholics can and do recover without daily meetings.
It just does not appear that way if you are attending AA and NA meetings and you are locked into the mentality of “this is the solution, and everyone here is saying that this is the only thing that ever worked for them.”
Deciding to make the leap
When I first got clean and sober I was introduced to 12 step meetings and it was basically assumed that this was the only solution, the one thing that had a chance of saving me. Take it or leave it.
I resisted the meetings due to my introversion and my anxiety about speaking in front of a large group, and I wanted to step away from them immediately.
But of course I was afraid that I would relapse if I did so. Terrified, actually. The message that was ingrained into me, from both rehab and the first couple of 12 step meetings that I did attend, was “If you leave AA you, will drink and you will die.” Seriously, that was the message I was getting! Usually not in quite that harsh of terms, but at least in a few instances, the message came across that strong.
But I decided I had to leave the meetings anyway, in spite of my fear. I just could not see myself grinding out a lifetime of daily meetings that I resented going to. It wasn’t the right fit for me. The solution did not fit my personality. There had to be a different way.
So I left the meetings, before I had really started, and I did so very, very carefully.
Finding a new path
There is a lot of detail on this website about how I found a workable program of recovery for myself.
But getting to that point took a lot of experimenting. And it took a lot of, let’s say, scrambling for a solution.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew that I did not want the grind of daily meetings. And that I wanted to maintain my new found sobriety.
So I started scrambling for solutions, looking everywhere I could, gloming onto various techniques, looking for commonalities among other recovery programs, and so on.
It’s not like I was some brilliant visionary who came up with some original and divine vision completely from scratch.
What I did was to take the ideas and concepts that were working for other people, in all sorts of other disciplines, programs, cultures, and so on–and started mashing them together into something that might work for me.
And then I started hustling like my life depended on it. Because of course, it did.
And at the same time I was discovering this process, I realized something else about my peers in AA and NA:
Not all of them were necessarily doing so well.
Outperforming the baseline
Again, I’m not trying to knock the 12 step programs. But remember, when I initially walked away from the meetings, I was terrified, and some of my peers even told me I was bound to relapse.
And here I was, figuring out things such as holistic health, personal growth, creating new habits, hustling to take positive action every single day with a checklist, and constantly moving myself forward in my recovery.
Meanwhile, some of my peers in AA and NA had since relapsed, and they had been mostly….just sitting in 12 step meetings every day, and not really doing much other than that.
They may have read through the literature once, and then pretty much been done with reading.
They may have worked through the steps, though many had only talked about doing so, or they stopped after doing the first few steps.
At the very least, people who relapse–regardless of any program they are in–are not hustling every day to take positive action. If they were doing so, they probably would not have relapsed.
AA or not–massive action, applied in the proper direction–is going to get you good results.
My belief is that sitting in meetings every day, for the rest of your life, is not actually part of the success formula. It’s just a shortcut to barely maintaining sobriety via complaining about your life in meetings every day.
If you want to experience real next-level recovery, the kind that gets you fired up and grateful to be alive and pushing forward towards real growth on a regular basis, then you are going to have to hustle.
You are going to have to push yourself, just like I was doing when I walked away from AA.
And if you want to stay in meetings, you can unlock next level recovery there, too. You just have to hustle. There are plenty of people who relapse, or just “coast miserably,” while in 12 step programs.
So basically, don’t feel obligated to go to meetings.
But don’t feel obligated to work the Introverted Recovery program either.
What you should feel obligated to do, however, is to hustle.
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