Alcoholics Anonymous

love the noon meetings love the people the late midnight meetings are fun too sometimes

I am not an alcoholic or a member of AA, but I’ve been to a few open meetings. (Open means that anyone can go, closed means that you have to have a problem with alcohol to go. Not that anyone checks. Like all 12-​step things, it’s strictly self-​identified honor-​system stuff.)
When my former roommate started going to AA, he asked me to go to some meetings with him cause he was scared. I knew NOTHING about 12-​step stuff (I had only recently even learned that Al-​Anon is not also short for Alcoholics Anonymous) and expected a bunch of very sad people crying and moaning about how they couldn’t drink anymore.
Instead I found a ton of people who were joking and laughing and sharing incredibly wise things about life. I was like «I need this! How do I get this? Why am I not an alcoholic?!» Thank goodness there are tons of flavors of 12-​step programs :) I guess it’s less well-​known that there are groups like this for people with money issues, relationship issues, dysfunctional families, and pretty much any other problems in life, because I sure had no idea.
Not every meeting or every member of AA is solid-​gold-​perfection. Any meeting can have a bad night, and plenty of people go through phases where they are just hell-​bent on fixing everyone else, telling everyone else how to act or think, just trying to force AA to be their dysfunctional families for them. Like anyone anywhere. But that’s the people, not the program. I’m grateful to AA for doing all the footwork to figure out the 12 steps and 12 traditions that make so many things so much better. I wish workplaces and governments ran on 12-​step principles…
ETA: What makes AA work isn’t (a) «stupidity» (how would that make something work?!) or (b) sharing, caring, nurturing, birthing (was that supposed to be «rebirthing»?), handholding, crying, or «processing». OR «willpower».
(I like the bit I read somewhere from some AA who said that he definitely did not lack willpower — he was pretty sure he could have found alcohol in the middle of the night on a Sunday in the Midwest in a blizzard if he needed to. It’s just that that willpower wouldn’t get him anywhere as far as NOT drinking went, by itself. He lacked the willingNESS, for starters.)
The reason it works is the twelve steps. The meetings and the whole body of AA and all the rest of it are there so that people can work the twelve steps. The twelve steps are just a bunch of simple but deep actions that, when you take them, scrape away all the plaque that stands between you and whatever is destroying your life. That’s all. That’s why they work the same steps in every twelve-​step program, whether it’s around drinking or crystal meth or ritual abuse.
No amount of any of that other junk (rebirthing, handholding, whatever) will override your triggers. That’s why the steps are so great; when people do them, they defuse your triggers. Millions and millions of people have tested this by now and found it to work. It works for me around other destructive stuff.
For some people, trying it and seeing instead of kicking and fussing and arguing with the steps or ignoring them and just yapping in meetings or whatever is HARD. For me it was like that around money. I’d deal with all kinds of horrific childhood abuse, relationship crap, whatever, no problem, but NOT MONEY ISSUES!!! And yup: didn’t fucking work that way. Going to meetings and sitting in them and listening or yapping, using other tools of the program, let me just kind of scrape by and see things improve a tiny bit while everything continued to cyclically crash and burn in my bank account. It takes really working the program to change things.