In the year 2000 at the age of 45 I was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder (manic depression). This was eight years after stopping drinking and following a stay in hospital after my first ever full-blown manic episode.
Since getting this diagnosis, along with properly informed medical treatment, support and advice, I have tried to learn everything I can about this condition so that I can manage it better and avoid succumbing to the extremes of uninhibited elation and extreme depression to which it makes me prone.
Having this problem properly diagnosed has focussed my mind wonderfully. On balance, I wouldn’t take a tablet that made me “normal” if such a thing existed, because I value the extraordinary flights of mental energy and clarity of imagination that come with hypomania, even when the downside is that I have to ride out periodic depressions.
I am happy to say that alcohol has no place in my life today because it would undermine my physical and mental health and render any medication I take ineffective. I have not drunk alcohol for over fifteen years.
I am fortunate in having found a sympathetic GP and a very well-informed and helpful psychiatrist who encourages me to find whatever treatments work best for me with the emphasis on managing my own condition so as to avoid becoming seriously unwell again.
Since my late teens I have been aware that I had frequent fluctuations of mood between states of elation and enthusiasm when I was creative, talkative and gregarious and states of depression during which I became withdrawn. This mood pattern did not seem to apply to anyone else I knew. I now know it to be typical of a condition known as cyclothymia, a comparatively mild form of bipolar disorder, but nonetheless highly disruptive to people’s lives because of the frequency of the fluctuations between opposing moods. Cyclothymics often go on to develop full-blown Bipolar I, as I did, or Bipolar II. Cyclothymia commonly remains undiagnosed unless one goes on to develop full-blown bipolar disorder, which can then replace or accompany it.
Bipolar people very commonly self-medicate with alcohol or other drugs to sedate themselves when experiencing uncomfortably “high” periods in their mood cycle or to raise their spirits when sunk in a depression. The single greatest reason why I began to drink to excess was to calm myself down when hypomanic or “high”. It was a crude and ultimately ineffective medicine for an as yet undiagnosed illness. It was never a “drug of choice”. I didn’t even like it that much. This didn’t stop me developing the classic signs of alcohol dependence, from greatly increased tolerance to withdrawal symptoms and blackouts, which I liked even less.
In 1991 I finally conceded that the most appropriate course of action for me was to cut out drinking altogether so that I could physically recover and have a chance of addressing my underlying mental problem.
At that time I attended a day centre where counselling and group therapy were offered for people with drink problems. Some of the staff were AA members and passionate advocates of attending AA. They described AA only as a self-help and mutual support fellowship which believed in total abstinence. There was no mention of any “spiritual” agenda. Nor do I remember the pamphlets I was later given as an AA newcomer giving clear information about that.
I began to attend AA hoping it would be a source of support and encouragement from other people who wanted to remain abstinent and regain their health and control of their lives.
I was rather dismayed to find that, although many individuals seemed kind and helpful when talked to outside the meetings, the meetings themselves seemed to be full of a morbid and judgemental religiosity. The very format of each meeting was strangely liturgical in nature, like an odd parody of a church service, complete with “scriptural” readings, confessions and group prayer.
I eventually found out that the “scriptures” which were afforded such respect and authority (it really bordered on reverence) were mostly the writings of a failed Wall Street speculator who had once had a drink problem and was one of two people who started AA in the 1930s.
There was also a strange insider jargon used in meetings, which made no sense to me at all. People said things like:
“My mind is enemy territory…I handed it over, then I took it back…. I have to give it away to keep it…my disease is doing press-ups…I mustn’t trust my own thinking” and innumerable other gnomic utterances. I only gradually discovered that all of these odd notions derived, directly or indirectly from the writings of the author mentioned above, one “Bill W, whose rather muddled and, in my view, dishonest writings seemed to claim a religious solution for alcoholism.
I tried for some eight years to use AA as a mutual support and self-help group which is what it presents itself as to the outside world and to the newcomer, but in practice this was an uphill struggle. I received constant mixed messages: on the one hand there was no requirement for membership beyond a desire to stop drinking, but on the other I endured constant harangues and sermons from believers in the strange creed of Bill W that if I didn’t admit I was “powerless” and practice his “spiritual” precepts I would relapse into drinking and die.
Well, in 2000 real life intervened in the form of my manic episode and made me focus on the real problem which largely led to my having past difficulties with drink and seek out proper effective help. I’m glad it happened. That episode of mania may have saved me from a fate worse than death- a life stuck in the cult of AA!
A few years ago, I could not have imagined my life without meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I thought that attendance at these meetings, sometimes very unwillingly, was keeping me sane. Then something happened. I hadn’t had a drink, I’d been following the instructions, talking to sponsors, doing what was ’suggested’, going to meetings all over the city I lived in, sometimes twice a day, but still I was unhappy, I felt desperate most of the time and miserable.
But as I’d been taught to do in Alcoholics Anonymous, I blamed myself for feeling so terrible because I wasn’t ‘Working the Program’ properly…there must have been something I wasn’t doing right. Maybe I wasn’t praying in the right position, maybe I needed to do another step 4, maybe I needed to make tea and coffee at some other meetings, get more commitments.
What I realised was in fact I no longer liked going to Alcoholics Anonymous. It didn’t somehow feel ‘healthy’ to sit in room after room in which the predominant emotion is fear.
I don’t know how many times I heard in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results (drinking) and that’s ultimately why I stopped going to those rooms.
Meeting-hopping, I was going insane.
The fundamental concept of Alcoholics Anonymous, one person with a problem talking to another with the same problem, is a great one and I always kept in the forefront of my mind right until then end when I stopped attending meetings. Ultimately though, all the extraneous bullshit that has been built up around that core idea, and passed from room to room, swamped me. I wanted to feel happy and not be metaphorically looking over my shoulder the whole time for another character defect to battle.
Now I live a normal life. Married, kids, jobs, cat and I no longer refer to myself as an ‘Alcoholic’. I don’t feel the need anymore to identify myself as such and it is a huge relief. In my youth I drank hugely to excess for millions of different reasons, but I feel if I’d had a good therapist I could have avoided Alcoholics Anonymous.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a cult and I willingly, desperately and out of terror gave several years of my life to it. I have no contact with anyone from AA at all now. I feel relieved to be free from it and glad to be back in the ‘real world’.
I became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1984. I didn’t get sober until 1999. AA taught me that I couldn’t do it on my own, that I was a “mental defective” that I was insane. I became a “True Believer” when I finally sobered up. I was one of those people who told the newcomer that they would “Drink and Die” without AA. I told people that AA was the ONLY WAY. I have a dog eared, highlighted Big Book that would stack up against any of the true believers books. I have sponsored multiple women and have seen some of them die because they just couldn’t “Get It”…..I blamed the failures on them, not the sacred program. I was a local celebrity speaker. I came in high demand, because I could bullshit better than the best of the best bullshitters in the program…..I WAS an AA nazi.
I left the program in July, 2007. I had been questioning AA for a very very long time, something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right with me. I felt like a phony and a liar, because I knew that something was wrong. I started to pull away from AA, but didn’t give up my sponsees, they were my badge of honor. I still showed up at my homegroup, but sat in those meetings feeling angry and bored. I decided to leave AA when I poured myself a drink of whiskey over the summer. I brought the glass to my lips and stopped. I realized AA was the problem not me. I poured the drink out and called my sponsor (because that is what I have been taught) and she told me it was MY fault. That once again I had FAILED the program. She said I needed to start all over again with step one. She said that next time if I don’t do exactly as she said I would drink again…and probably die.
That is when I cried BULLSHIT! I realized in that split second of almost taking a drink after 8 years sober that the ONLY thing that kept me from swallowing that drink was ME…..NOT the 12 steps, NOT the fame in AA that I had acquired, NOT the Big Book, NOT my multiple sponsees and surely NOT MY SPONSOR.
I started doing some research about AA and found out that my gut feelings had been right all along. I left AA. After I left AA, all of the things I had read about AA being a cult started to ring true. I left AA ……but AA wouldn’t leave me. It first started with the phone calls of, “How are you doing?” The so so called caring phone calls reeking of condescension. The ones where the caller really means “Did Ya Drink Yet?” I stopped taking the calls. That’s when several of them showed up at my door. I was scared, I really thought they would never leave me alone. All of them, standing at my front door asking me why I left, and when was I going to come back……Then the famous
scare tactic that the AA Nazi’s employ so well was fire bombed at me….. “If You Leave Us You Will Surely Die.”
AA is a cult, I have no doubt in my mind. I was a true believer in AA. Now I am a true believer that AA is a mind numbing cult that produces glazed eyed robots that cannot feel. Feelings are anathema to true believers, for if you feel, you might THINK. If you THINK you might begin to question what AA is really all about.
I have been away from the rooms since July. I still get phone calls, I just don’t answer them. I got one the other day from a woman I do not even know. She had the phone list from my old home group. She called my number to see how I was doing. She said “We Miss You”……..I don’t miss any of them. I didn’t pick up that call….thank GOD for caller ID.
Once upon a time I used to spend a lot of time getting very, very drunk. I wasn’t pleased with myself for getting drunk so much but I couldn’t stop. Someone then told me I was an ‘alcoholic’ and that the only way I could stop drinking was to go to Alcoholics Anonymous.
So I joined Alcoholics Anonymous and spent a lot of time in church basements drinking powdered coffee and eating cheap biscuits trying to get rid of the ‘defects’ in my character, the defects that AA told me would keep me in the mess I was in. They introduced me to many concepts, and made many ’suggestions’ to me. The concepts that I was supposed to work the hardest at were surrendering myself to a ‘Higher Power’ which would ‘awake’ me spiritually and in the meantime, while waiting for that Higher Power (or GOD) to take over, I should pray and pray and pray to get rid of those defects.
Because, they said, if I didn’t get rid of those pesky defects I’d drink again and most likely die.
That was lie number One.
This site is for people who want didn’t have such a good time in AA or don’t believe any longer what AA told them. If attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous has been suggested to you as a possible treatment for a drinking problem, then only you’ll be able to decide whether meetings might help you. I, like many. many others have decided the meetings no longer help me. These are our stories.
Comment of the Week
In desperation, I had decided to give aa another shot, not believing that there was any other way. I was greeted warmly into the “fellowship”, which meant a lot to me, (as most people don’t care much for ex-hookers and aren’t comfortable with the knowledge that I may have blown their husbands). Immediately, I began to feel uncomfortable with the dirge-like use of cliches that were supposed to explain everything. Outside of these cliches, there were no answers. When I expressed concern, as an atheist, about turning my life over to a higher power that I did not have, I was directed to “stay open minded”, believe in a different god other than the god of the bible, or to read the chapter on the agnostic. My lack of belief means as much to me as the beliefs of a devout follower of jesus or mohammed and I had, nor have no wish to change. somehow, my position was not respected and I became an outcast, yet again. Now, as I attend the meetings I am forced to by my (aa based) program, I watch these people in wonder. I truly believe that the program is a cult and it’s only success comes from the new high and exhultation one recieves from belief. Count me out. From the Chieftest of Sinners-
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