When AA doesn't work for you

Recovering from alcohol addiction away from the 12 Step Model

Hi, I’m Scout, and I’m an alcoholic. This is gonna be a main share, so let’s strap in.

I’ve lived in and out of addiction all of my life, it’s like a stubborn personality trait that wants to take the fore. Do I want to be a good writer? An engaging broadcaster? A kind friend, a nurturing mother? Yes, but above all, it seems I want to be an addict. And let me be clear on this: I don’t like it either.

I was recently at a meeting at my kids’ school, talking about attendance. My eldest has a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, my youngest has suspected ADHD, and sometimes there are days off because of meltdowns, or their anxieties, days where it would be traumatic to force them through heaving sobs to pop their school jumper on and spend all day with people. It’s not a huge problem; we are not addicted to giving the kids time off of school. But the school seem to forget quite easily that attendance and neurodivergence don’t always go hand in hand. The pastoral lead told me recently that new research has “proven” (immediately skeptical) that even half a day off of primary school can lead to consequences in high school. I asked her what she knew about the subjects of the study she referenced. I can safely assume they were neurotypical. I do not think that it’s cool to keep your kids off school for no reason, but I understand that people have different needs. Now, let me talk about AA.

If it works for you, I’m not here to yuck your yum. All recovery is valid and important, and I don’t care how you got there, I’m just glad you’re there and hope you stay there. But I think there’s a deep insidiousness in the recovery community, that if you don’t go to AA or NA, you’re not that serious about recovery, or you will inevitably fail, or you just don’t care enough about your loved ones to give this a college try. But what if you did go down the path of the fellowship, and it made you worse? What if you’re mentally ill? Autistic? What if sitting in an uncanny room where the social script is entirely flipped upside down, for an hour and a half, is excruciatingly painful for you? I find it very hard to code-switch at times. Work Me and Real Me, and then Mum Me and then Friend Me. I need the social situation very clearly spelling out, or I will inevitably make a fool of myself by not understanding the implied rule of the situation. Friendships I’ve misread, relationships I’ve screwed up — luckily my core friend group are patient with me, and have similar issues, and when I ask them, “What’s the rule of the situation here? What do I say or do?”, I am understood. But sitting in a room of people I don’t know, all sat in a circle, telling me their deepest secrets, and I am not able to respond or react, always knocked me sideways. It’s too surreal, to quote Danny Dyer: “It still freaks my nut out to this day”.

I wasn’t understood very well in my local AA groups. It was deeply implied that my schizoaffective disorder was in fact a symptom of my alcoholism, and once I put the bottle down, I’d be cured. I was told I couldn’t say I was clean, because I was taking prescription medications (Methadone is fine, but antipsychotics - donkeys - are a no no). I live in a small town, and maybe the AA group was the symptom of the small-town cause; I was different. I act weird. I don’t look right. I dress funny. I don’t fit in. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I am a Jew. The only Jew in the room. The one who doesn’t go to church with everyone else. The one who didn’t need to find Jesus. I was never invited to the dinners, I was never welcomed as a friend. The social rules were completely inverted: people swearing to their Higher Power that if you’re struggling, all you have to do is pick up the phone and call them. They never answered. I wonder if they identified that as a defect - an egoism, a saviour complex, to be seen as someone who is great in a crisis, but to never follow through. To want the praise, to not do the work. I found that a lot, and I wasn’t a fan of it.

I did admire a few people in my local groups. The ones who were quietly living, who were working to find their peace or had already found it, perhaps they were the ones who were really working the steps and I’d been misled to believe that AA is bullshit because of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. There were people who had broken through some really heavy shit and lived all kinds of lives, and had quietly found recovery, and humility. I wanted to be like them so much, and I still think of them.

I ended up in a recovery home after I came out of prison, and that was very AA centric. I wasn’t seen to be recovering and my place in the home was under threat because I did not attend AA. I mean, I had made a documentary about recovery and was talking about that in the media, and spent every week speaking to prisoners about the importance of recovery, I was remaining sober and praying to my own Higher Power, I was connecting to my faith community and spending every day seeing my children, I was repairing the relationships I had broken with my addiction - which was not a disease, it was a choice I made when I was overwhelmed and did not have the tools to cope - but none of this mattered. I wasn’t attending AA, and therefore I wasn’t recovering. I was living with people actively using, and I had been clean and sober for over a year at this point. But they were serious about their recovery and I was not.

I am writing this, because I hope somebody googles “is it okay to recover without AA” just like I have in the past. I want to say: absolutely. You don’t have to work a list written by an evangelical Christian, you don’t have to sit in a room and engage in a competition of competitive misery, you don’t have to go to the gym for five hours a day and relentlessly talk about how brilliant you are for not smoking crack any more. You can quietly live. Because when do you live? At what point do you just get on with it? I was told I would have to attend AA every week at least twice for the rest of my life. And here’s how I thought about it:

When you’re mentally ill and struggling, well-meaning and helpful people will caringly compare your mental illness to a physical one, with diabetes somehow being the favourite comparison. “Your antipsychotics are just like insulin, if you were diabetic you wouldn’t feel shame about needing your medicine”. I mean it sucks that we have to compare to physical illness to make it real, but the sentiment is caring and sincere and I appreciate it when it happens. So let me try something similar. Imagine you get the flu really bad, maybe it gets so bad it turns into pneumonia, let’s say. You end up in hospital and your lungs are fucked. You are desperately ill and you wonder if you’ll make it, but you do. You go on a long, slow process of recovery to get back to health. You attend appointments, as you should, you do physio if you need it, you take steroids, all of it, you do what you need to do to recover. Are you then always in recovery from the flu? Terrified it will strike again? Do people tell you, if you don’t prophylactically attend a support group every week for the rest of your life, you will get the flu again and this time it will kill you? When I word it like that, doesn’t that sound like kind of a horrific thing to say to someone? You get your flu jabs every year to stop it happening again. If your friend has the flu, you do not go to their home. You take better care of yourself than before, you exercise and stay hydrated and eat well and you look at your children and feel so grateful and blessed that you are still here, because you nearly weren’t. They don’t need to know you nearly died of the flu. You don’t need to talk about the flu for the rest of your life. It’s not who you are. You’re not the person who had the flu forever. You get sick, you go through recovery, and then you are recovered. You get out there and live. And hey, maybe you’ll get it again in the future and that would be awful, let’s hope you don’t. But it’s different now. Your immune system wasn’t strong before because you didn’t know how to take care of yourself, but after such a close brush with death, you have learned. And if you get a slight cough, the whole world doesn’t need to tell you that you’re probably going to die.

A huge part of recovery is learning who you are, and finding peace within that. A huge part of addiction is running away from that which we find unacceptable, there is shame at the core of every addict. But you cannot be encouraged to replace that void with a persona, it has to be the authentic you. When can the authentic you come out, if you’ve adopted a new personality, the personality of the inspiring recovering addict? And there’s a difference, you can be an inspiring recovering addict without setting out to do so. You don’t have to turn into the person sitting next to you who can only introduce themselves as an addict.

Hi I’m Scout and I’m an alcoholic. Hi I’m Scout and I’m an addict. Hi I’m Scout and I’m addicted to smack. Hi I’m Scout and honestly who gives a shit. Some things about me that are very important: I love my children, I love my friends, I love Elliott Smith, and I’m a pretty good cook. My addictions are the least interesting things about me, and me forgetting them is not complacency, it’s not a symptom of impending relapse. It’s safety. It’s the safety of not constantly being told that if I don’t join a group and dedicate myself to it, I face certain death.