Why I Stopped Going to AA After 20 Years of Sobriety

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Why I Stopped Going to AA After 20 Years of Sobriety

AA is the best way to get sober, as far as I’m concerned.

Photo by Marc-André Julien on Unsplash

I must admit, I don’t think I could have become sober without AA. It gave me a community of people who knew just what I needed to become sober and stay sober. The Steps of AA made me take a good look at myself and my character defects. These were things I had to admit and change to stay sober.

I married someone in the program three years into sobriety, who I’m still married to today. We would go to meetings and work. On weekends, I would compete in races. I had changed my addiction from alcohol to running.

This went on for many years until I fell and broke my wrist. By then, I was in my fifties and thought it might be too hard to start running again.

I was getting depressed not having an outside source of exercise, so I got into hiking. This was a more social activity than running, where you hike in the mountains with other people.

At twenty years sober, I had heard just about everything there was to know about AA. I have read the Big Book and Step Book many times, and they have cemented into my memory.

Newcomers and Ninety-Day Wonders (people who had only 90 days) would try to give advice at meetings. Years before, as a newcomer, my sponsor told me to take the cotton out of my ears and put it in my mouth. There were no words of wisdom that I could share. I had just begun my experience, strength, and hope with sobriety.

It seemed like the rules had changed. All I could think was they had been drinking three months ago; what wisdom of sobriety did they have at that point?

Another thing was pointing out my defects with little say about what I did or was doing right. I know I always have to remember my defects, but I was sick of hearing that I was such a bad person when I was in my disease. The sayings like “a drunk like me didn’t deserve to have my family in my life” or “we were only sober by the Grace of God” got to me after a while.

I came into the program of AA thinking that I was garbage. That I was good for nothing and full of shame. By staying in AA, I learned to have self-esteem and love myself. God had a big part in that transformation, but I had to do the footwork to change; it wasn’t handed to me. Constantly hearing how I didn’t deserve the family to be in my life was getting to me. Maybe in a newcomer, it is good, but at twenty years, it got to become offensive.

I was sick of people saying they would never drink again. It is a daily reprieve, not an until I die program. I told a girl once that I hope and pray I don’t drink again. She looked at me and told me with an air of superiority that she would never drink again. I wonder how that is working for her.

I had gone on many twelve-step calls where people needed help putting down their drinks. I sponsored lots of people, and I even brought AA meetings into our local jail for a couple of years. I felt I had given back enough to the still-suffering alcoholic.

I wanted to spend more time hiking and being one with nature. It became a spiritual outlet for me, and I felt a closeness with my higher power.

I told my sponsor this, and she wasn’t happy at first, but then we came up with a solution. We would leave messages for each other every day. We would say three good things we did the day before and what we are grateful for each day. It has worked for thirteen years now, thirteen years, one day at a time. Each day, the first thing on my gratitude list is sobriety.

This is just my experience with AA. Some people may think this isn’t a good thing to do, but everyone is different.

My husband still goes to meetings once or twice a week to help others and see friends he has made through the years.

It’s great to be married to someone sober. We keep each other on the right path. Without sobriety, we know we’d be back on a downward spiral with no hope.

Life is good; why would we want to do that?

A story about my telephone messages was published in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book, Attitude of Gratitude. The story is called Three Minutes. The book is available through Amazon, but I don’t get any commission from it. It probably is in your local library. I have had friends who have read it at Barnes and Noble.