Category: From AA Agnostica

Chapter 11:
Do Tell! Stories by Atheists and Agnostics in AA

Gabe S.

I showed signs of what I think of as “spiritual malady” from as far back as I can remember.

As a child, I was absorbed in fantasy. I was the God of my own fantasies, creating worlds at will. In those worlds I was whatever I fancied: a great warrior, or footballer, or rock guitarist. Often I was a superhero. I fantasized because I was not happy to be who I really was in the world as it really was.

The ambient world was actually very good to me. My family was well off and we lived in a leafy, desirable part of London. My parents were loving and kind and very liberal. But they did not let just anything go and taught me right from wrong. I have two much older brothers. One was nice enough, though a bit distant. The other was loving. They were (and still are) extremely successful at pretty much whatever they do: top of the class, head of school, best at sports and so on. The loving brother often played games with me. He always won. My mother from time to time voiced the view that, in this way or that, I would never be as good as them. I felt very inadequate. For some reason, when I was six, I was sent to a psychoanalyst who told me that I wanted to kill my brothers and my parents. I think that as a result of this, I felt that I was horrible inside. I was the worst of possible beings. I carried a terrible secret.

Growing up (or rather failing to do so) in the 1960s, the hippy-drug culture was all around. At about seven, the idea of taking drugs took root. Drugs represented an escape from reality, and an alternative lifestyle that appealed greatly. I went into denial even then. There was plenty of publicity that I saw and heard, saying: “Drugs are dangerous. They can ruin your life or kill you. You could become an “addict”. “Don’t do them!” This had no effect on my thinking. I had no fear. I began inhaling solvents at about ten. Then, aged fourteen, I started smoking marijuana. I quickly became a daily user and a true addict, with craving and obsession. I took whatever drugs I could find and afford.

I left home at sixteen, went to live in a squat and pursue the hippy lifestyle. I remember one time I took some LSD and went to a park. I tried hard to be at one with the beautiful flowers.

I got bored with drugs and with the hippy life and lucked my way into a good university. I received scholarships for a Master’s and then a PhD. I excelled. My confidence grew along with my self-esteem. But however much I received, it was not enough. Inside I was always inadequate.

I coped with some of my inner violence by training hard at Kung Fu. I enjoyed the aesthetic qualities, the endorphin high, the fighting and smashing things. I became skilled, tough and physically confident. Inside I remained inadequate.

I had always liked drinking and, as soon as I stopped the drugs, I began to drink more. I drank nearly every day for about thirty years. A lot. I liked drinking. I am sociable and always found heavy drinkers or alcoholics to drink with. I also had a great fondness for fine wines, gins and whisky.

When I was thirty three, I met a great woman. She was intellectual, cultured, charismatic and a good pool player. She was also very beautiful. We fell in love, more or less at first sight. After two years, we married. The passion wore off and after seven years we divorced. My part in the failure of the marriage was not, I think, the drinking in itself. It was the fact that alcohol was much more important to me than she was. Alcohol was my true lover. I did not have much emotional space for any mere human.

It became clear to those close to me that I was an alcoholic. They told me this and provided excellent evidence. It meant nothing to me. Eventually, my doctor sent me to a counsellor who tried to teach me controlled drinking. After six months of therapy, I learned to control my drinking. Every waking hour that I spent not drinking, I spent planning those fifty units a week. The control didn’t last long!

I began to drink in the mornings and throughout the day. I did not seek out sordid places. Instead I turned my nice apartment into one, as a more-or-less open house for the local street drunks and druggies. I enjoyed the company and liked the people. But it was chaos. The police were constantly called. I ceased to be popular with my neighbours.

Of my fellow bohemians from that period, three are now dead (two ODs and one liver failure), and one, having landed on his head one time while drunk, has lost the ability to speak and lives in a care home.

While I was still clinging to a job, my psychiatrist sent me to rehab. There I was introduced to AA. Brought up as a devout atheist, and knowing science and philosophy, I knew I was never going to believe in any God. It was not a question of willingness to believe. My mind works in terms of evidence and argument. It doesn’t do faith. The “God” talk in AA put me off. But I could see a lot of drunks getting sober. I found meetings difficult, boring, formulaic, and full of religion. I tried to listen to the similarities, not the differences, but I failed. I was too self-absorbed to listen to anything much, or to feel the emotional support in the rooms. And I did not relish the prospect of sobriety. I thought life would be dull and joyless at best.

After I left rehab I relapsed immediately. I went back in, came out, and relapsed immediately again. I lost my job. I ended up living a nightmare, terrified for my physical and mental health and my future, hardly able to feed myself, unable to do anything but drink. If I drank enough, I could experience brief periods of escape: a sort of serenity through anaesthesia. But also, when drunk enough, I would do dangerous things. Once I collapsed and my head collided with the corner of a large TV. I knew nothing of this until I woke up with a bloodied dent in my head and a TV on the floor. Another time, in a fury, I deliberately put my fist through a stained-glass window. I left a stream of blood on the floor as I staggered to my sofa and passed out.

I knew drink was destroying me. I was its slave. Without realising it, I took Steps One, Two and Three. That meant going back to rehab and for once doing everything that I was told (other than pray) without question or argument. My therapist gave me an atheist version of the Steps. I found an atheist sponsor. For Step Three, I elected a sort of advisory board: my sponsor, some people in AA, some outside. I turned all important decision-making over to them: I sought their advice and took it. This was a great experience for me: finally to stop running on self-will, to let go and go with the flow. I also learned to open my mind and my ears and listen at meetings. I have learned far more about myself from listening to other alcoholics than I did from many years of therapy. I like meetings now and I hear the similarities, not the differences. I know I am among people like me.

I did the Steps quickly and ended up in a decent psychological (“spiritual”) place. But I had not listened or read well enough and I did not keep up the Step work, only going to two meetings a week and doing nothing else.

I declined very quickly. I feared financial insecurity. I would need a drink. I would deserve one. For three days I planned that drink. Not once did it cross my mind that there was any risk. It was as if half my mind had gone on holiday. I looked at my bank accounts, had the drink, then drank pure spirits non-stop for eleven days. A neighbour came and rescued me and got me a home detox. Two days into the detox, and feeling good, I lost the use of my legs for twelve hours. That scared me. A lot.

Then I had an idea! Work on the Steps every day. That worked like a miracle. I’ve had no troubling desire to drink since that moment. These have been the happiest three years of my life. I am mostly retired now, though I still pursue my research. I have returned to some activities of my youth: writing poetry, working with clay, going to concerts (mostly rock, mostly heavy metal, punk and hippy music). With my ears open and my attention directed outward, I enjoy music more than I ever did before.

And I work for AA in various administrative and public information roles. I enjoy that too, genuinely glad to be of service. I feel it is an honour and a privilege.

I am free of the discontent from which I suffered for fifty-odd years. I try to live in the real world now, rather than fantasy worlds of my own creation. The world is my higher power and I am content being who I really am, in it as it really is. Through meditation I can be at one with the flowers and I can find serenity without anaesthesia.

Since I don’t believe in miracles, I turned my mind to studying how the Steps work. From my academic point of view, the answer is simple, evident on a psychological reading of the Big Book and the Twelve and Twelve (in my view, some of the finest psychological writing in existence), and largely vindicated by contemporary neuroscience. What causes relapse is emotional turbulence, which is caused by anger, resentment, fear, guilt, wounded pride, low self-esteem, envy, unsatisfied wants, existential angst and the like or by excessive elation. These cause a release of a specific hormone (corticotropin-releasing factor) that sends the dopamine system into overdrive, causing a strong desire to drink and at the same time impairing thought and memory. (That’s my theory, anyway!).

Through inventory, sharing, making amends, meditation, helping others and trying to do the right thing, let go and leave the rest up to nature, I have learned how to calm my emotions, to accept others and feel accepted by them, to feel connected to the world and the sentient, feeling beings in it, to feel worthy of my place in the universe.

Emotional turbulence (the cause of stress and relapse) is caused by unmanaged, misdirected, over-active instincts. And what keeps instincts at bay are humility and spirituality, as I understand it: the opposite of self-will, self-seeking and self-absorption. As the result of the Steps, I have had a spiritual awakening.

---

This is a chapter from the book: Do Tell! Stories by Atheists and Agnostics in AA.

The paperback version of Do Tell! is available at Amazon. It is also available via Amazon in Canada and the United Kingdom.

It can be purchased online in all eBook formats, including Kindle, Kobo and Nook and as an iBook for Macs and iPads.

---

The post Spirituality as I Understand It first appeared on AA Agnostica.

Chapter 11:
Do Tell! Stories by Atheists and Agnostics in AA

Gabe S.

I showed signs of what I think of as “spiritual malady” from as far back as I can remember.

As a child, I was absorbed in fantasy. I was the God of my own fantasies, creating worlds at will. In those worlds I was whatever I fancied: a great warrior, or footballer, or rock guitarist. Often I was a superhero. I fantasized because I was not happy to be who I really was in the world as it really was.

The ambient world was actually very good to me. My family was well off and we lived in a leafy, desirable part of London. My parents were loving and kind and very liberal. But they did not let just anything go and taught me right from wrong. I have two much older brothers. One was nice enough, though a bit distant. The other was loving. They were (and still are) extremely successful at pretty much whatever they do: top of the class, head of school, best at sports and so on. The loving brother often played games with me. He always won. My mother from time to time voiced the view that, in this way or that, I would never be as good as them. I felt very inadequate. For some reason, when I was six, I was sent to a psychoanalyst who told me that I wanted to kill my brothers and my parents. I think that as a result of this, I felt that I was horrible inside. I was the worst of possible beings. I carried a terrible secret.

Growing up (or rather failing to do so) in the 1960s, the hippy-drug culture was all around. At about seven, the idea of taking drugs took root. Drugs represented an escape from reality, and an alternative lifestyle that appealed greatly. I went into denial even then. There was plenty of publicity that I saw and heard, saying: “Drugs are dangerous. They can ruin your life or kill you. You could become an “addict”. “Don’t do them!” This had no effect on my thinking. I had no fear. I began inhaling solvents at about ten. Then, aged fourteen, I started smoking marijuana. I quickly became a daily user and a true addict, with craving and obsession. I took whatever drugs I could find and afford.

I left home at sixteen, went to live in a squat and pursue the hippy lifestyle. I remember one time I took some LSD and went to a park. I tried hard to be at one with the beautiful flowers.

I got bored with drugs and with the hippy life and lucked my way into a good university. I received scholarships for a Master’s and then a PhD. I excelled. My confidence grew along with my self-esteem. But however much I received, it was not enough. Inside I was always inadequate.

I coped with some of my inner violence by training hard at Kung Fu. I enjoyed the aesthetic qualities, the endorphin high, the fighting and smashing things. I became skilled, tough and physically confident. Inside I remained inadequate.

I had always liked drinking and, as soon as I stopped the drugs, I began to drink more. I drank nearly every day for about thirty years. A lot. I liked drinking. I am sociable and always found heavy drinkers or alcoholics to drink with. I also had a great fondness for fine wines, gins and whisky.

When I was thirty three, I met a great woman. She was intellectual, cultured, charismatic and a good pool player. She was also very beautiful. We fell in love, more or less at first sight. After two years, we married. The passion wore off and after seven years we divorced. My part in the failure of the marriage was not, I think, the drinking in itself. It was the fact that alcohol was much more important to me than she was. Alcohol was my true lover. I did not have much emotional space for any mere human.

It became clear to those close to me that I was an alcoholic. They told me this and provided excellent evidence. It meant nothing to me. Eventually, my doctor sent me to a counsellor who tried to teach me controlled drinking. After six months of therapy, I learned to control my drinking. Every waking hour that I spent not drinking, I spent planning those fifty units a week. The control didn’t last long!

I began to drink in the mornings and throughout the day. I did not seek out sordid places. Instead I turned my nice apartment into one, as a more-or-less open house for the local street drunks and druggies. I enjoyed the company and liked the people. But it was chaos. The police were constantly called. I ceased to be popular with my neighbours.

Of my fellow bohemians from that period, three are now dead (two ODs and one liver failure), and one, having landed on his head one time while drunk, has lost the ability to speak and lives in a care home.

While I was still clinging to a job, my psychiatrist sent me to rehab. There I was introduced to AA. Brought up as a devout atheist, and knowing science and philosophy, I knew I was never going to believe in any God. It was not a question of willingness to believe. My mind works in terms of evidence and argument. It doesn’t do faith. The “God” talk in AA put me off. But I could see a lot of drunks getting sober. I found meetings difficult, boring, formulaic, and full of religion. I tried to listen to the similarities, not the differences, but I failed. I was too self-absorbed to listen to anything much, or to feel the emotional support in the rooms. And I did not relish the prospect of sobriety. I thought life would be dull and joyless at best.

After I left rehab I relapsed immediately. I went back in, came out, and relapsed immediately again. I lost my job. I ended up living a nightmare, terrified for my physical and mental health and my future, hardly able to feed myself, unable to do anything but drink. If I drank enough, I could experience brief periods of escape: a sort of serenity through anaesthesia. But also, when drunk enough, I would do dangerous things. Once I collapsed and my head collided with the corner of a large TV. I knew nothing of this until I woke up with a bloodied dent in my head and a TV on the floor. Another time, in a fury, I deliberately put my fist through a stained-glass window. I left a stream of blood on the floor as I staggered to my sofa and passed out.

I knew drink was destroying me. I was its slave. Without realising it, I took Steps One, Two and Three. That meant going back to rehab and for once doing everything that I was told (other than pray) without question or argument. My therapist gave me an atheist version of the Steps. I found an atheist sponsor. For Step Three, I elected a sort of advisory board: my sponsor, some people in AA, some outside. I turned all important decision-making over to them: I sought their advice and took it. This was a great experience for me: finally to stop running on self-will, to let go and go with the flow. I also learned to open my mind and my ears and listen at meetings. I have learned far more about myself from listening to other alcoholics than I did from many years of therapy. I like meetings now and I hear the similarities, not the differences. I know I am among people like me.

I did the Steps quickly and ended up in a decent psychological (“spiritual”) place. But I had not listened or read well enough and I did not keep up the Step work, only going to two meetings a week and doing nothing else.

I declined very quickly. I feared financial insecurity. I would need a drink. I would deserve one. For three days I planned that drink. Not once did it cross my mind that there was any risk. It was as if half my mind had gone on holiday. I looked at my bank accounts, had the drink, then drank pure spirits non-stop for eleven days. A neighbour came and rescued me and got me a home detox. Two days into the detox, and feeling good, I lost the use of my legs for twelve hours. That scared me. A lot.

Then I had an idea! Work on the Steps every day. That worked like a miracle. I’ve had no troubling desire to drink since that moment. These have been the happiest three years of my life. I am mostly retired now, though I still pursue my research. I have returned to some activities of my youth: writing poetry, working with clay, going to concerts (mostly rock, mostly heavy metal, punk and hippy music). With my ears open and my attention directed outward, I enjoy music more than I ever did before.

And I work for AA in various administrative and public information roles. I enjoy that too, genuinely glad to be of service. I feel it is an honour and a privilege.

I am free of the discontent from which I suffered for fifty-odd years. I try to live in the real world now, rather than fantasy worlds of my own creation. The world is my higher power and I am content being who I really am, in it as it really is. Through meditation I can be at one with the flowers and I can find serenity without anaesthesia.

Since I don’t believe in miracles, I turned my mind to studying how the Steps work. From my academic point of view, the answer is simple, evident on a psychological reading of the Big Book and the Twelve and Twelve (in my view, some of the finest psychological writing in existence), and largely vindicated by contemporary neuroscience. What causes relapse is emotional turbulence, which is caused by anger, resentment, fear, guilt, wounded pride, low self-esteem, envy, unsatisfied wants, existential angst and the like or by excessive elation. These cause a release of a specific hormone (corticotropin-releasing factor) that sends the dopamine system into overdrive, causing a strong desire to drink and at the same time impairing thought and memory. (That’s my theory, anyway!).

Through inventory, sharing, making amends, meditation, helping others and trying to do the right thing, let go and leave the rest up to nature, I have learned how to calm my emotions, to accept others and feel accepted by them, to feel connected to the world and the sentient, feeling beings in it, to feel worthy of my place in the universe.

Emotional turbulence (the cause of stress and relapse) is caused by unmanaged, misdirected, over-active instincts. And what keeps instincts at bay are humility and spirituality, as I understand it: the opposite of self-will, self-seeking and self-absorption. As the result of the Steps, I have had a spiritual awakening.

---

This is a chapter from the book: Do Tell! Stories by Atheists and Agnostics in AA.

The paperback version of Do Tell! is available at Amazon. It is also available via Amazon in Canada and the United Kingdom.

It can be purchased online in all eBook formats, including Kindle, Kobo and Nook and as an iBook for Macs and iPads.

---

The post Spirituality as I Understand It first appeared on AA Agnostica.

Chapter 10:
Do Tell! Stories by Atheists and Agnostics in AA

Joan C.

My name is Joan and I am an alcoholic. I am an agnostic and my home group is “We Agnostics” on the island of Maui. I recently celebrated 46 years of sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous.

I was born 81 years ago in St. Louis, Missouri. I like to say that I was born and raised a freethinker but that only applies to the first ten years of my life. My father was a very intelligent man – and an atheist. I once asked him about churches and he explained that there were many different churches with many different ideas and that if I ever found one whose beliefs I agreed with I should join – otherwise I probably wouldn’t want to belong to something I didn’t believe in.

Everything changed when I was 10 years old. My father died of spinal meningitis. My mother’s mother came swooping in from California and convinced my mother that that was god’s punishment for not raising us as Catholics. We moved to California and I was sent to St Mary’s Academy, a private girl’s school, where I was a fish out of water. I tried to fit in – I tried to believe. I even erected an altar in my bedroom and said the Rosary over and over but I had many doubts.

Looking back I realize that I was a very disturbed child. I hated California and wanted my father to come back.

I acted out by refusing to do homework, breaking every rule that I could and spent a lot of time in Sister Josephine’s office.

In the 10th grade I was expelled. And I gave up any idea of being a Catholic. My doubts won.

I discovered alcohol when I was 13 or 14. I was introduced to Tom Collins by a woman for whom I babysat. I liked the feeling it gave me from the start – I was kind of out of myself. I remember the first glass or two and then my next memory is of my head in the toilet – very, very sick.

For the next few teenage years I attended public school – when I felt like attending – and did a lot of drinking. My poor mother had no control over me.

I quit school in the eleventh grade and I managed to get a job as a telephone operator. I worked and partied and lived at home for a year or two until I became pregnant and married my first husband. He had been drafted into the army and eventually was sent to Korea for a short stint and I went back to Los Angeles to stay with his parents. I was pregnant with our second child – the daughters were one year and three days apart. I was to go on to have four children – the fourth was born a few days before my 24th birthday. I decided I would like to have 12 children.

While staying with my in-laws I was introduced to the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. My father in law was an alcoholic – died of alcoholism – and at one point had called AA. He said that two men called on him and left the book. Being a compulsive reader I read it and even as a teenager there were parts I could relate to.

I realize now that I never was a social drinker. I never wanted one drink. Even as a teenage I would turn down drinks if there wasn’t going to be enough to get drunk.

My husband returned from Korea. As time went on our marriage, not too sound to begin with, really began to fall apart. He started staying out all night – “drinking with the boys” – and denied having other women. I was becoming more and more distressed and depressed. And then I found I was pregnant again.

I knew that mentally there was no way that I could go through another pregnancy with the marriage being the way it was. I called a mutual friend and begged him to tell me the truth and he said that yes, there definitely was another woman. When I confronted my husband with this fact, he informed me that he didn’t want a divorce but was going to continue seeing her. What he said to me was, “you’re pregnant and you have four children – there’s nothing you can do about it”. I knew then that it was over. I was thirty years old with four children and even if I had to take the children and go sleep in the park it was over.

I forged his name on a check made out to him and cashed it and started making phone calls. Abortions were illegal then but I finally found a woman from East Los Angeles who was willing to perform it. She came to the house with a coat hanger and a catheter and tried to abort me. It was not successful and she had to return a second time. She didn’t even wash her hands – nothing was sterilized – and I developed a terrible infection. Several months later – I hadn’t aborted the fetus – I started to hemorrhage and was taken to the hospital. Eventually they took me to the operating room and did a D&C. A year later I had my uterus removed.

I was now a single woman in my thirties. I drank a lot. I also had a pill problem. Amphetamines were readily available in the 50s and 60s. All you had to do was call the doctor, tell him you wanted to lose a few pounds and he would call in the prescription to the local pharmacy.

I didn’t drink much at home – I was a bar drinker. As my drinking increased I would be away from home several days at a time. I had a friend who would stop in with groceries and to check on the children. It was just a matter of time before child welfare would appear on the scene and put the children in foster homes.

I woke up one morning terribly sick – bed wet – hands shaking – looked in the mirror and saw what a mess I was. I was so very depressed. I knew that I was an alcoholic and had to stop drinking but I didn’t know how I could live without alcohol. My life seemed a hopeless, unbearable mess and I wanted to die. I knew that if I committed suicide that the children would end up in foster homes. I rationalized in my sick mind that if I could live another five years they would be older and better able to get along on their own. I was 35 years old and planned to wait until I was 40 – and I would do it then.

I went to my first AA meeting on October 5, 1968 and my whole world changed.

I knew that AA helped alcoholics stop drinking but I was very concerned when I attended my first meeting. There was something about turning your life over to god and a lot of other god words in “How it works”. If this was some kind of a religion I knew it wasn’t going to work for me. When the meeting was over a couple of people came over to me and I expressed my concerns about the god thing. I was told that I should just ignore that. The old “take what you can use and leave the rest”.

I didn’t want to find God – I wanted to find out how to live in this miserable world without drinking. I knew I was an alcoholic and I knew I had to quit drinking. I was uncomfortable with the praying and the hand holding – it was something that made me feel apart from the other members. It was the same feeling I had in St. Mary’s Academy. I was told the old “fake it til you make it” but for me it just didn’t take.

However, time went by and indeed things did get better. I got my high school diploma by passing a GED test and that was enough to get me into the nursing program and to become a Licensed Vocational Nurse.

I attended many meetings in the beginning years – the first year I went every day. I was very active in Twelfth Step work, answered phones in Central Office, took my turn as Secretary of different meetings and – yes – washed ash trays and coffee cups. When I came in, where I came in, there wasn’t all that much talk of god and miracles. Most people credited a god with their sobriety but in the discussions the talk was more of sober living.

Gradually over the years there were changes in the meetings. More and more the talk was of miracles from above and less of one’s own efforts to cope with life’s problems.

The only problem I had was that I was still an agnostic.

I met my second husband toward the end of my first year of sobriety. We dated for a few years and finally married. He and I were both 42 years of age when he had a heart attack and died.

When I had been sober ten years, I met my last husband, Bill, who had twenty years of sobriety. Bill and I dated and a few years later were married. He bought a condo on Maui as an investment. We both loved Maui and when he retired we sold the condo, bought a house and moved over here. We were married 25 years. Bill passed away in 2004.

After 30 some years of sobriety I just gave up meetings.

I got so I was only attending on special days and I did make a point of attending once a year on my birthday. We have a pretty large meeting on Maui called “Kihei Morning Serenity” – KMS for short and they gave chips. So for some years I would attend that meeting to accept my chip. When I gave my little talk I would tell them that I was an unbeliever. I would encourage anyone who was a believer to pray and do whatever it took to stay sober but that if they were atheists or agnostics to know that the program would work for them. I was very concerned about the number of people who were turned off by all the god talk and weren’t coming back to the meetings. So often I heard them say that they were told that they couldn’t stay sober if they didn’t find god. I would say that if anyone tried to tell them that you can’t stay sober without god, ask them, “What about Joan?” By then I had probably more years of sobriety than anyone else on the island. Usually, when the meeting was over, several people would come up to me and whisper that they were non-believers too. I think of them as closet atheists.

For some years I have been the AA liaison for the prison – Maui Community Correctional Center. About nine years ago I discovered that no one was taking meetings into the women’s prison. I went in to the prison for a week or two to set up meetings and realized I was going in by myself. Looking back I am surprised I got away with it – you are supposed to be certified to go in – background check, etc. Eventually I rounded up enough volunteers so that the meetings were held on on a regular basis. I am happy to say that we are going on the 10th year and haven’t missed a single Wednesday night.

I told an AA friend, “If you ever come across anyone who is having trouble with the religious aspects of the program, let me know and I will talk to him or her”. One day he called to tell me about a newcomer – Rich – who was an atheist. He invited me over to dinner and that is when I met Rich.

We became friends and talked about starting a meeting for nonbelievers. Rich discovered that there were “We Agnostics” meetings on the mainland that were recognized in New York and we were on our way.

We started out being listed as “We Agnostics – non religious format” – but there were howls of protest from the AA community – “This is not a religious program!” So Rich changed it to read “We Agnostics – no prayers” and that worked. Our first meeting was on July 27, 2006. As time went on more and more people were coming to the meetings.

When some vandals burned down the Bridge Club where our meetings were held, we moved outside to the adjacent park. There is a beautiful Flower Tree and we all bring folding chairs and have our meeting under this beautiful tree. It was pictured on the front page of the Grapevine a year or so ago.

We now have three “We Agnostics” meetings a week and have anywhere from ten or fifteen people to thirty per meeting. We plan to start a fourth meeting when the Bridge Club is rebuilt.

I left AA because I am a non-believer and became more and more uncomfortable in the meetings with all the god talk and talk of leaving everything in god’s hands – frankly superstitious gobbledygook. I am back because we now have meetings – We Agnostic meetings – where I finally feel like I belong.

Today I have a wonderful life. I have always been active in volunteer work in and out of AA. I have friends. I play Bridge. My health is good. Sometimes I look around and wonder, “How did you get from there to here?” In all my years of sobriety I have never felt as close and as much a part of Alcoholics Anonymous as I do since we have We Agnostics meetings.

New We Agnostic AA meetings are springing up all over the world. We are in the midst of great changes and now have a wonderful opportunity to offer help to all suffering alcoholics, including agnostics, atheists and all other nonbelievers.

---

This is a chapter from the book: Do Tell! Stories by Atheists and Agnostics in AA.

The paperback version of Do Tell! is available at Amazon. It is also available via Amazon in Canada and the United Kingdom.

It can be purchased online in all eBook formats, including Kindle, Kobo and Nook and as an iBook for Macs and iPads.

---

The post My Name is Joan first appeared on AA Agnostica.

Chapter 10:
Do Tell! Stories by Atheists and Agnostics in AA

Joan C.

My name is Joan and I am an alcoholic. I am an agnostic and my home group is “We Agnostics” on the island of Maui. I recently celebrated 46 years of sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous.

I was born 81 years ago in St. Louis, Missouri. I like to say that I was born and raised a freethinker but that only applies to the first ten years of my life. My father was a very intelligent man – and an atheist. I once asked him about churches and he explained that there were many different churches with many different ideas and that if I ever found one whose beliefs I agreed with I should join – otherwise I probably wouldn’t want to belong to something I didn’t believe in.

Everything changed when I was 10 years old. My father died of spinal meningitis. My mother’s mother came swooping in from California and convinced my mother that that was god’s punishment for not raising us as Catholics. We moved to California and I was sent to St Mary’s Academy, a private girl’s school, where I was a fish out of water. I tried to fit in – I tried to believe. I even erected an altar in my bedroom and said the Rosary over and over but I had many doubts.

Looking back I realize that I was a very disturbed child. I hated California and wanted my father to come back.

I acted out by refusing to do homework, breaking every rule that I could and spent a lot of time in Sister Josephine’s office.

In the 10th grade I was expelled. And I gave up any idea of being a Catholic. My doubts won.

I discovered alcohol when I was 13 or 14. I was introduced to Tom Collins by a woman for whom I babysat. I liked the feeling it gave me from the start – I was kind of out of myself. I remember the first glass or two and then my next memory is of my head in the toilet – very, very sick.

For the next few teenage years I attended public school – when I felt like attending – and did a lot of drinking. My poor mother had no control over me.

I quit school in the eleventh grade and I managed to get a job as a telephone operator. I worked and partied and lived at home for a year or two until I became pregnant and married my first husband. He had been drafted into the army and eventually was sent to Korea for a short stint and I went back to Los Angeles to stay with his parents. I was pregnant with our second child – the daughters were one year and three days apart. I was to go on to have four children – the fourth was born a few days before my 24th birthday. I decided I would like to have 12 children.

While staying with my in-laws I was introduced to the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. My father in law was an alcoholic – died of alcoholism – and at one point had called AA. He said that two men called on him and left the book. Being a compulsive reader I read it and even as a teenager there were parts I could relate to.

I realize now that I never was a social drinker. I never wanted one drink. Even as a teenage I would turn down drinks if there wasn’t going to be enough to get drunk.

My husband returned from Korea. As time went on our marriage, not too sound to begin with, really began to fall apart. He started staying out all night – “drinking with the boys” – and denied having other women. I was becoming more and more distressed and depressed. And then I found I was pregnant again.

I knew that mentally there was no way that I could go through another pregnancy with the marriage being the way it was. I called a mutual friend and begged him to tell me the truth and he said that yes, there definitely was another woman. When I confronted my husband with this fact, he informed me that he didn’t want a divorce but was going to continue seeing her. What he said to me was, “you’re pregnant and you have four children – there’s nothing you can do about it”. I knew then that it was over. I was thirty years old with four children and even if I had to take the children and go sleep in the park it was over.

I forged his name on a check made out to him and cashed it and started making phone calls. Abortions were illegal then but I finally found a woman from East Los Angeles who was willing to perform it. She came to the house with a coat hanger and a catheter and tried to abort me. It was not successful and she had to return a second time. She didn’t even wash her hands – nothing was sterilized – and I developed a terrible infection. Several months later – I hadn’t aborted the fetus – I started to hemorrhage and was taken to the hospital. Eventually they took me to the operating room and did a D&C. A year later I had my uterus removed.

I was now a single woman in my thirties. I drank a lot. I also had a pill problem. Amphetamines were readily available in the 50s and 60s. All you had to do was call the doctor, tell him you wanted to lose a few pounds and he would call in the prescription to the local pharmacy.

I didn’t drink much at home – I was a bar drinker. As my drinking increased I would be away from home several days at a time. I had a friend who would stop in with groceries and to check on the children. It was just a matter of time before child welfare would appear on the scene and put the children in foster homes.

I woke up one morning terribly sick – bed wet – hands shaking – looked in the mirror and saw what a mess I was. I was so very depressed. I knew that I was an alcoholic and had to stop drinking but I didn’t know how I could live without alcohol. My life seemed a hopeless, unbearable mess and I wanted to die. I knew that if I committed suicide that the children would end up in foster homes. I rationalized in my sick mind that if I could live another five years they would be older and better able to get along on their own. I was 35 years old and planned to wait until I was 40 – and I would do it then.

I went to my first AA meeting on October 5, 1968 and my whole world changed.

I knew that AA helped alcoholics stop drinking but I was very concerned when I attended my first meeting. There was something about turning your life over to god and a lot of other god words in “How it works”. If this was some kind of a religion I knew it wasn’t going to work for me. When the meeting was over a couple of people came over to me and I expressed my concerns about the god thing. I was told that I should just ignore that. The old “take what you can use and leave the rest”.

I didn’t want to find God – I wanted to find out how to live in this miserable world without drinking. I knew I was an alcoholic and I knew I had to quit drinking. I was uncomfortable with the praying and the hand holding – it was something that made me feel apart from the other members. It was the same feeling I had in St. Mary’s Academy. I was told the old “fake it til you make it” but for me it just didn’t take.

However, time went by and indeed things did get better. I got my high school diploma by passing a GED test and that was enough to get me into the nursing program and to become a Licensed Vocational Nurse.

I attended many meetings in the beginning years – the first year I went every day. I was very active in Twelfth Step work, answered phones in Central Office, took my turn as Secretary of different meetings and – yes – washed ash trays and coffee cups. When I came in, where I came in, there wasn’t all that much talk of god and miracles. Most people credited a god with their sobriety but in the discussions the talk was more of sober living.

Gradually over the years there were changes in the meetings. More and more the talk was of miracles from above and less of one’s own efforts to cope with life’s problems.

The only problem I had was that I was still an agnostic.

I met my second husband toward the end of my first year of sobriety. We dated for a few years and finally married. He and I were both 42 years of age when he had a heart attack and died.

When I had been sober ten years, I met my last husband, Bill, who had twenty years of sobriety. Bill and I dated and a few years later were married. He bought a condo on Maui as an investment. We both loved Maui and when he retired we sold the condo, bought a house and moved over here. We were married 25 years. Bill passed away in 2004.

After 30 some years of sobriety I just gave up meetings.

I got so I was only attending on special days and I did make a point of attending once a year on my birthday. We have a pretty large meeting on Maui called “Kihei Morning Serenity” – KMS for short and they gave chips. So for some years I would attend that meeting to accept my chip. When I gave my little talk I would tell them that I was an unbeliever. I would encourage anyone who was a believer to pray and do whatever it took to stay sober but that if they were atheists or agnostics to know that the program would work for them. I was very concerned about the number of people who were turned off by all the god talk and weren’t coming back to the meetings. So often I heard them say that they were told that they couldn’t stay sober if they didn’t find god. I would say that if anyone tried to tell them that you can’t stay sober without god, ask them, “What about Joan?” By then I had probably more years of sobriety than anyone else on the island. Usually, when the meeting was over, several people would come up to me and whisper that they were non-believers too. I think of them as closet atheists.

For some years I have been the AA liaison for the prison – Maui Community Correctional Center. About nine years ago I discovered that no one was taking meetings into the women’s prison. I went in to the prison for a week or two to set up meetings and realized I was going in by myself. Looking back I am surprised I got away with it – you are supposed to be certified to go in – background check, etc. Eventually I rounded up enough volunteers so that the meetings were held on on a regular basis. I am happy to say that we are going on the 10th year and haven’t missed a single Wednesday night.

I told an AA friend, “If you ever come across anyone who is having trouble with the religious aspects of the program, let me know and I will talk to him or her”. One day he called to tell me about a newcomer – Rich – who was an atheist. He invited me over to dinner and that is when I met Rich.

We became friends and talked about starting a meeting for nonbelievers. Rich discovered that there were “We Agnostics” meetings on the mainland that were recognized in New York and we were on our way.

We started out being listed as “We Agnostics – non religious format” – but there were howls of protest from the AA community – “This is not a religious program!” So Rich changed it to read “We Agnostics – no prayers” and that worked. Our first meeting was on July 27, 2006. As time went on more and more people were coming to the meetings.

When some vandals burned down the Bridge Club where our meetings were held, we moved outside to the adjacent park. There is a beautiful Flower Tree and we all bring folding chairs and have our meeting under this beautiful tree. It was pictured on the front page of the Grapevine a year or so ago.

We now have three “We Agnostics” meetings a week and have anywhere from ten or fifteen people to thirty per meeting. We plan to start a fourth meeting when the Bridge Club is rebuilt.

I left AA because I am a non-believer and became more and more uncomfortable in the meetings with all the god talk and talk of leaving everything in god’s hands – frankly superstitious gobbledygook. I am back because we now have meetings – We Agnostic meetings – where I finally feel like I belong.

Today I have a wonderful life. I have always been active in volunteer work in and out of AA. I have friends. I play Bridge. My health is good. Sometimes I look around and wonder, “How did you get from there to here?” In all my years of sobriety I have never felt as close and as much a part of Alcoholics Anonymous as I do since we have We Agnostics meetings.

New We Agnostic AA meetings are springing up all over the world. We are in the midst of great changes and now have a wonderful opportunity to offer help to all suffering alcoholics, including agnostics, atheists and all other nonbelievers.

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This is a chapter from the book: Do Tell! Stories by Atheists and Agnostics in AA.

The paperback version of Do Tell! is available at Amazon. It is also available via Amazon in Canada and the United Kingdom.

It can be purchased online in all eBook formats, including Kindle, Kobo and Nook and as an iBook for Macs and iPads.

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The post My Name is Joan first appeared on AA Agnostica.

Scientific study from a book about Recovery Pathways: Measurable factors that can improve or impede our outcome rates

Review by Joe C.

David Best’s Pathways to Recovery and Desistance: The role of the social contagion of hope (2019), as he said in a keynote address at Recovery Capital Conference, New Westminster (Vancouver, Canada) late in 2018, months before the book’s release “was seven or eight years of study and research.” The result for us, is a 200-page read, along with another twenty pages of notes and references for the keeners and skeptics in the audience.

From the podium Best described the book as being about “a model of recovery that happens interpersonally. Recovery isn’t something that happens without people; but it’s something that also happens between people. Recovery is  a social movement and a social movement for good.”

A professor at the University of Derby, previously Sheffield Hallam University and visiting Associate Professor of Addiction Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, David Best specializes in criminology and finds some commonality in desistence from crime and recovery from addiction. In fact, his work overlaps, helping England with the first recovery prison, changing the culture for staff and inmates. Any of you who works in corrections, law enforcement, whose story includes doing time, or take meetings inside correctional facilities, there is a good deal of fascinating experience and findings that will appeal to you. For the purposes of this book review, I’ll be leaving this out of our discussion.

Research that went into this book includes over 2,000 recovery stories from Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and America. He looked for a common element that everyone did, which he could not find. However, “What I’ve discovered from all of these stories is that nobody recovers alone.” Therefor Pathways to Recovery and Desistence is a social model of recovery.

What about spontaneous remission? We know that people overcome process and substance addictions without treatment or mutual aid. But are they recovering alone? Best’s  findings suggest, that the individual recovering “on their own,” has some recovery capital active in their life. Best spends a good deal of space talking about social models of recovery/ recovery capital that have nothing to do with going to mutual aid groups or treatment centers: work/life satisfaction, family, community, role models, etc. “People can and do mature out of addiction if the environment and the context is rich and enables them, supporting that process of change.”

Fun fact from the Best research: For any group of people who detox from alcohol or other substance use disorder, with the intention of maintaining abstinence, people who know at least one person who is abstinent—this factor alone—yields a 27% better chance at sustainable permanent recovery over others who know no one who is clean and sober.

Return to the crack house or the band on tour, or any other profession that glorifies or rewards drinking/using behavior, without anyone in their circle who lives clean and sober—this isn’t to say this individual can’t get sober. But this peerless lone wolf has a 27% less likely chance of achieving long term sustainable recovery.

“Recovery is a long-established phenomenon but as a professional phenomenon, we still struggle for it to gain adequate traction,” Best reports. “There are still huge barriers, misconceptions, professional jealousy and attitudes that block recovery. It’s been a very gradual process.”

Time for the next fun fact from the book? How many people do you think recover from process or substance use disorder? What percentage? No, 5% is not factual. The whole industry massively underestimates the outcome rates.

The findings of Best et al. is 58% will eventually achieve stable recover – effectively five years abstinent from their drug of choice.

“Why five years? That has to do with relapse risk.” Between leaving our first detox and making it to five years, the likelihood of relapse for both opioids and alcohol is 50 to 70%–you or I are more likely to relapse in our first year, so researchers have learned that getting well is not an uninterrupted (relapse-free) trip for all of us. By five years our relapse rate is 14% or less. Researchers argue that after five years, recovery is self-sustaining. People can do it by themselves at that point. The determinants of outcome rates, of getting people from that first year to the five-year mark has a lot to do with the quality of community.

If your guess about outcome rates was lower than 58%, you are not alone. There is pessimism among treatment workers. Best asked a group of Welsh workers, “What do you think the likelihood of success is among your clients; how many people do you think come to treatment and then find long-term recovery? The science says 58%. The average (guessed) score from Welsh drug workers was 7%. You might reasonably think, ‘Well, if that’s what you expect, that’s what you’ll get; because you’ll convey that message of hopelessness.’ This is what is referred to as a clinical fallacy. One of the massive challenges we have to overcome is the pessimism of the workforce.”

Borrowed from studies on mental health recovery, successful recovery interventions have five component parts that are essential, and they came up with an acronym, CHIME:

1. Connection
2. Hope
3. Identity
4. Meaning
5. Empowerment

Any system (including mutual aid groups) that embodies all five of these, in Best’s observations, will succeed. Any system that does not, will not succeed. So, it’s not Step this or Noble Truth that or affirmation-A or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy technique-B. All of these professional therapies and peer to peer supports can work equally well, so long as they incorporate these five essential elements.

She Recovers has intentions and guiding principles, Buddhist based recovery follow an eight-fold path, in LifeRing, efforts to strengthen the Sober Self and weaken the Addict Self are achieved by a do-it-yourself program. Like the 12 steps or a stylized AA philosophy, any of these “programs” relates the experiences from one substance use sufferer to another. Trust and engagement of a group and placing faith in a process, seems to facilitate better outcome rates, regardless of the group or the process.

Connection

Johann Hari famously concludes that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection. That makes a great bumper-sticker but like most reductionism, it holds only a modicum of truth. Lots of people have connection and community if they go back to the bar, the crack-house or into the arms of an enabling partner. The type of connection that leads to sustainable recovery is connection that channels hope. the connection to a community that models recovery lifestyle. The example of fellow sufferers who are coping and/or thriving in a life of abstinence. “If they can do it, I can do it.”

Connection is more involved than attendance. Connection comes from engagement. When trust and commitment are inspired from the community, that is the basis of a healthy connection.

Hope

My attitude changed from resignation about dying an addict’s death to the possibilities presented to me by my recovery community. And as I look back, they had hope for me before I could muster the integrity to do it for myself. Their hope – the hope from the community – was contagious; I caught hope, I didn’t muster it.

Identity

Identity brings into context the value of special purpose mutual aid groups like secular AA but a change in identity is important to all. As David Best reports:

“…The impact of identity of social group membership. The Social Identity Model of Recovery (SIMOR) frames recovery as a process of social identity change in which a person’s most salient identity shifts from being defined by membership of a group whose norms and values revolve around substance abuse to being defined by membership of a group whose norms and values encourage recovery.” (p. 64)

That makes sense, going from a community where using/drinking behavior is modeled, my identity was tied to my using, which was tied to being a renegade, a member of the in-crowd cool subculture. Then, hanging around people in recovery long enough, I started modelling their behavior and developing their identity as a person beyond drugs and drinking, someone who chose recovery as a self-image. But there is more; Best goes on to say, “For this model to apply, the new group that the person aspires to join has to be attractive…”

If the heteronormative language of AA literature bums your recovery high, listening to shared experiences in meetings for LGBTQ+ will be more attractive for you. This is true for youth or women, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and secular AA for agnostics, atheists – anyone who isn’t from or rejects a Judeo/Christian look at the world. When we find ourselves saying, “These people are a lot like me,” we identify and if we can identify, we can imagine modeling their recovery behavior. Identification is tied to self-image and identity.

Meaning

“We found that two best predictors of recovery and recovery wellbeing are 1) how much time did you spend with people in recovery and 2) how much stuff did you do? The number one biggest predictor of quality of life for people in recovery from alcohol and heroin was meaningful prosocial activity.” Of course some of that is in the rooms, but meaningful employment, volunteering and family life also discourage relapse events. Best et al. call it GOYA. “Get off your ass.” Do something, find a sense of purpose, and stay clean and sober.

As a side-effect of this search for meaning, society benefits. Best talks about a study of people in long-term recovery in the UK. 79% were doing charity or some other form of community work. What do you think the average rate was of this kind of generous civic engagement among the UK general population? About half of the recovery community’s activity. So it pays for governments and communities to invest in recovery. We have heard this from advocates before: every dollar spent on treatment/recovery, comes back two or three-fold in terms of productivity improvements, etc.

Empowerment

“Within a social identity model of change, this involves a virtuous circle of social engagement, purposeful action and an increased sense of wellbeing manifest in a growing sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy. …  recovery capital is captured in the empowerment component in which the individual derives personal strengths (and awareness of those strengths) from this cycle of positive identity change, engagement in meaningful and pro-social activity, and increased empowerment and self-determination.” (p. 184)

I can see CHIME in how my sobriety came to be and how it goes, today. I also see in others whose vastly different path than mine, the same Connection, Hope, Identity, Meaning and Empowerment at work in their recovery. I guess that all of our stories—then and now—are as individual as our own thumbprints. This book is a great source of the latest science; it challenged some of my views and it also validates some of my own anecdotal folk-wisdom. You may find—as I have—that the book is also a useful tool to test one’s unique journey against measurable recovery capital characteristics. To finish off from Pathways to Recovery and Desistance:

“This is the heart of the CHIME …  the start of a radius of trust which can inspire the drive and motivation that will enable a sense of empowerment and self-esteem that will inform the development of a new set of social identities linked to positive groups and activities.” (p. 198)

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Joe C was one of the founders of the Toronto group and meeting, Beyond Belief Agnostic and Freethinkers Group, Canada’s longest running secular AA meeting. He is also the creator and manager of a secular AA website, Rebellion Dogs Publishing.

Joe is the author the ever-popular book Beyond Belief: Agnostic Musings for 12 Step Life. This is a book of daily reflections that is often read at the beginning of secular AA meetings.

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Counting today’s, Joe has written 22 articles published on AA Agnostica. Here are the earlier ones:

• The Growth Rate of Secular AA (May 29, 2019)
• Recovery Capital Conference of Canada (September (September 30, 2018)
• International Conference of Secular AA – Toronto (June 24, 2018)
• Daily Reprieve: A.A. for Atheists & Agnostics – Review (January 25, 2018)
• Each Breath A Gift (June 21, 2017)
• Beyond Belief Agnostics and Freethinkers (March 09, 2017)
• No God? No Problem: Atheism in AA as a Human Right – Jesse Beach (March 02, 2017)
• AA Membership: Growth or Decline (September 06, 2015)
• A Changing Landscape (May 13, 2015)
• Living with Lillian (February 11, 2015)
• Letting Go of God (October 26, 2014)
• Together We Can (August 31, 2014)
• A Reverend at the Agnostic AA Convention (April 13, 2014)
• Is listability the new AA? (January 19, 2014)
• Six Shades of Nonbelievers (August 11, 2013)
• Pharisees and Recalcitrants (August 26, 2012)
• Quadrants of Knowledge (June 24, 2012)
• Never Fear Needed Change (June 3, 2012)
• The Silver Tongued Devil and I (February 25, 2012)
• Let the Wood Burn (December 13, 2011)
• AA Public Information: “Let it Begin With Me” (July 24, 2011)

For the record, Joe’s first article was the fourth ever posted on AA Agnostica.

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The post Pathways to Recovery and Desistance first appeared on AA Agnostica.

Scientific study from a book about Recovery Pathways: Measurable factors that can improve or impede our outcome rates

Review by Joe C.

David Best’s Pathways to Recovery and Desistance: The role of the social contagion of hope (2019), as he said in a keynote address at Recovery Capital Conference, New Westminster (Vancouver, Canada) late in 2018, months before the book’s release “was seven or eight years of study and research.” The result for us, is a 200-page read, along with another twenty pages of notes and references for the keeners and skeptics in the audience.

From the podium Best described the book as being about “a model of recovery that happens interpersonally. Recovery isn’t something that happens without people; but it’s something that also happens between people. Recovery is  a social movement and a social movement for good.”

A professor at the University of Derby, previously Sheffield Hallam University and visiting Associate Professor of Addiction Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, David Best specializes in criminology and finds some commonality in desistence from crime and recovery from addiction. In fact, his work overlaps, helping England with the first recovery prison, changing the culture for staff and inmates. Any of you who works in corrections, law enforcement, whose story includes doing time, or take meetings inside correctional facilities, there is a good deal of fascinating experience and findings that will appeal to you. For the purposes of this book review, I’ll be leaving this out of our discussion.

Research that went into this book includes over 2,000 recovery stories from Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and America. He looked for a common element that everyone did, which he could not find. However, “What I’ve discovered from all of these stories is that nobody recovers alone.” Therefor Pathways to Recovery and Desistence is a social model of recovery.

What about spontaneous remission? We know that people overcome process and substance addictions without treatment or mutual aid. But are they recovering alone? Best’s  findings suggest, that the individual recovering “on their own,” has some recovery capital active in their life. Best spends a good deal of space talking about social models of recovery/ recovery capital that have nothing to do with going to mutual aid groups or treatment centers: work/life satisfaction, family, community, role models, etc. “People can and do mature out of addiction if the environment and the context is rich and enables them, supporting that process of change.”

Fun fact from the Best research: For any group of people who detox from alcohol or other substance use disorder, with the intention of maintaining abstinence, people who know at least one person who is abstinent—this factor alone—yields a 27% better chance at sustainable permanent recovery over others who know no one who is clean and sober.

Return to the crack house or the band on tour, or any other profession that glorifies or rewards drinking/using behavior, without anyone in their circle who lives clean and sober—this isn’t to say this individual can’t get sober. But this peerless lone wolf has a 27% less likely chance of achieving long term sustainable recovery.

“Recovery is a long-established phenomenon but as a professional phenomenon, we still struggle for it to gain adequate traction,” Best reports. “There are still huge barriers, misconceptions, professional jealousy and attitudes that block recovery. It’s been a very gradual process.”

Time for the next fun fact from the book? How many people do you think recover from process or substance use disorder? What percentage? No, 5% is not factual. The whole industry massively underestimates the outcome rates.

The findings of Best et al. is 58% will eventually achieve stable recover – effectively five years abstinent from their drug of choice.

“Why five years? That has to do with relapse risk.” Between leaving our first detox and making it to five years, the likelihood of relapse for both opioids and alcohol is 50 to 70%–you or I are more likely to relapse in our first year, so researchers have learned that getting well is not an uninterrupted (relapse-free) trip for all of us. By five years our relapse rate is 14% or less. Researchers argue that after five years, recovery is self-sustaining. People can do it by themselves at that point. The determinants of outcome rates, of getting people from that first year to the five-year mark has a lot to do with the quality of community.

If your guess about outcome rates was lower than 58%, you are not alone. There is pessimism among treatment workers. Best asked a group of Welsh workers, “What do you think the likelihood of success is among your clients; how many people do you think come to treatment and then find long-term recovery? The science says 58%. The average (guessed) score from Welsh drug workers was 7%. You might reasonably think, ‘Well, if that’s what you expect, that’s what you’ll get; because you’ll convey that message of hopelessness.’ This is what is referred to as a clinical fallacy. One of the massive challenges we have to overcome is the pessimism of the workforce.”

Borrowed from studies on mental health recovery, successful recovery interventions have five component parts that are essential, and they came up with an acronym, CHIME:

1. Connection
2. Hope
3. Identity
4. Meaning
5. Empowerment

Any system (including mutual aid groups) that embodies all five of these, in Best’s observations, will succeed. Any system that does not, will not succeed. So, it’s not Step this or Noble Truth that or affirmation-A or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy technique-B. All of these professional therapies and peer to peer supports can work equally well, so long as they incorporate these five essential elements.

She Recovers has intentions and guiding principles, Buddhist based recovery follow an eight-fold path, in LifeRing, efforts to strengthen the Sober Self and weaken the Addict Self are achieved by a do-it-yourself program. Like the 12 steps or a stylized AA philosophy, any of these “programs” relates the experiences from one substance use sufferer to another. Trust and engagement of a group and placing faith in a process, seems to facilitate better outcome rates, regardless of the group or the process.

Connection

Johann Hari famously concludes that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is connection. That makes a great bumper-sticker but like most reductionism, it holds only a modicum of truth. Lots of people have connection and community if they go back to the bar, the crack-house or into the arms of an enabling partner. The type of connection that leads to sustainable recovery is connection that channels hope. the connection to a community that models recovery lifestyle. The example of fellow sufferers who are coping and/or thriving in a life of abstinence. “If they can do it, I can do it.”

Connection is more involved than attendance. Connection comes from engagement. When trust and commitment are inspired from the community, that is the basis of a healthy connection.

Hope

My attitude changed from resignation about dying an addict’s death to the possibilities presented to me by my recovery community. And as I look back, they had hope for me before I could muster the integrity to do it for myself. Their hope – the hope from the community – was contagious; I caught hope, I didn’t muster it.

Identity

Identity brings into context the value of special purpose mutual aid groups like secular AA but a change in identity is important to all. As David Best reports:

“…The impact of identity of social group membership. The Social Identity Model of Recovery (SIMOR) frames recovery as a process of social identity change in which a person’s most salient identity shifts from being defined by membership of a group whose norms and values revolve around substance abuse to being defined by membership of a group whose norms and values encourage recovery.” (p. 64)

That makes sense, going from a community where using/drinking behavior is modeled, my identity was tied to my using, which was tied to being a renegade, a member of the in-crowd cool subculture. Then, hanging around people in recovery long enough, I started modelling their behavior and developing their identity as a person beyond drugs and drinking, someone who chose recovery as a self-image. But there is more; Best goes on to say, “For this model to apply, the new group that the person aspires to join has to be attractive…”

If the heteronormative language of AA literature bums your recovery high, listening to shared experiences in meetings for LGBTQ+ will be more attractive for you. This is true for youth or women, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and secular AA for agnostics, atheists – anyone who isn’t from or rejects a Judeo/Christian look at the world. When we find ourselves saying, “These people are a lot like me,” we identify and if we can identify, we can imagine modeling their recovery behavior. Identification is tied to self-image and identity.

Meaning

“We found that two best predictors of recovery and recovery wellbeing are 1) how much time did you spend with people in recovery and 2) how much stuff did you do? The number one biggest predictor of quality of life for people in recovery from alcohol and heroin was meaningful prosocial activity.” Of course some of that is in the rooms, but meaningful employment, volunteering and family life also discourage relapse events. Best et al. call it GOYA. “Get off your ass.” Do something, find a sense of purpose, and stay clean and sober.

As a side-effect of this search for meaning, society benefits. Best talks about a study of people in long-term recovery in the UK. 79% were doing charity or some other form of community work. What do you think the average rate was of this kind of generous civic engagement among the UK general population? About half of the recovery community’s activity. So it pays for governments and communities to invest in recovery. We have heard this from advocates before: every dollar spent on treatment/recovery, comes back two or three-fold in terms of productivity improvements, etc.

Empowerment

“Within a social identity model of change, this involves a virtuous circle of social engagement, purposeful action and an increased sense of wellbeing manifest in a growing sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy. …  recovery capital is captured in the empowerment component in which the individual derives personal strengths (and awareness of those strengths) from this cycle of positive identity change, engagement in meaningful and pro-social activity, and increased empowerment and self-determination.” (p. 184)

I can see CHIME in how my sobriety came to be and how it goes, today. I also see in others whose vastly different path than mine, the same Connection, Hope, Identity, Meaning and Empowerment at work in their recovery. I guess that all of our stories—then and now—are as individual as our own thumbprints. This book is a great source of the latest science; it challenged some of my views and it also validates some of my own anecdotal folk-wisdom. You may find—as I have—that the book is also a useful tool to test one’s unique journey against measurable recovery capital characteristics. To finish off from Pathways to Recovery and Desistance:

“This is the heart of the CHIME …  the start of a radius of trust which can inspire the drive and motivation that will enable a sense of empowerment and self-esteem that will inform the development of a new set of social identities linked to positive groups and activities.” (p. 198)

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Joe C was one of the founders of the Toronto group and meeting, Beyond Belief Agnostic and Freethinkers Group, Canada’s longest running secular AA meeting. He is also the creator and manager of a secular AA website, Rebellion Dogs Publishing.

Joe is the author the ever-popular book Beyond Belief: Agnostic Musings for 12 Step Life. This is a book of daily reflections that is often read at the beginning of secular AA meetings.

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Counting today’s, Joe has written 22 articles published on AA Agnostica. Here are the earlier ones:

• The Growth Rate of Secular AA (May 29, 2019)
• Recovery Capital Conference of Canada (September (September 30, 2018)
• International Conference of Secular AA – Toronto (June 24, 2018)
• Daily Reprieve: A.A. for Atheists & Agnostics – Review (January 25, 2018)
• Each Breath A Gift (June 21, 2017)
• Beyond Belief Agnostics and Freethinkers (March 09, 2017)
• No God? No Problem: Atheism in AA as a Human Right – Jesse Beach (March 02, 2017)
• AA Membership: Growth or Decline (September 06, 2015)
• A Changing Landscape (May 13, 2015)
• Living with Lillian (February 11, 2015)
• Letting Go of God (October 26, 2014)
• Together We Can (August 31, 2014)
• A Reverend at the Agnostic AA Convention (April 13, 2014)
• Is listability the new AA? (January 19, 2014)
• Six Shades of Nonbelievers (August 11, 2013)
• Pharisees and Recalcitrants (August 26, 2012)
• Quadrants of Knowledge (June 24, 2012)
• Never Fear Needed Change (June 3, 2012)
• The Silver Tongued Devil and I (February 25, 2012)
• Let the Wood Burn (December 13, 2011)
• AA Public Information: “Let it Begin With Me” (July 24, 2011)

For the record, Joe’s first article was the fourth ever posted on AA Agnostica.

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