42
askchapoActual in-person get togethers.
Mostly a straight rip off of AA, but for atheists and agnostics who don't want to acknowlede a literal "higher power".
Addiction to alcohol is often a thing that destroys a family, a childhood, a relationship, or a person's health and chance at happiness.
The only reason that mass distribution and advertisement of it is not outlawed is because it is insanely profitable. Who reaps those profits? Not home brewers and bartenders. Certainly not those whose lives are destroyed by addiction.
The bourgeoisie alone profit from the ruin of addiction to alcohol.
We need to support our young people and give them alternatives to alcohol (and other addictives) as the main method to overcome social anxiety and emotional struggles from trying to navigate and exist in the capitalist hellscape.
From what little I know about AA, the "higher power" part is a pretty core aspect of it so if you take that out I'm not sure how well it would work. You may want to consider alternatives that are already secular to avoid trying to reinvent the wheel. A brief search turned up this list of 7 secular alternatives to AA:
https://discoverhealthgroup.com/addiction/alcohol/recovery/
I mean I don't like AA, but I think you're completely misunderstanding the higher power thing and how it's used in modern contact. A higher power does not have to be a divine creator or anything supernatural. My higher power back when I did the program was simply the love humans share between each other. It's less about having God and more about having something bigger than you lead your decisions.
For example, when Leyla does whatever Leyla wants with absolutely nothing holding her back, she's grabbing a handle of vodka and as much morphine as she can find and getting blasted until the nukes kill us. This is maladaptive coping but alcohol and opiates do feel pretty great. However, with my higher power being empathy and love, I make my decisions based around how to best represent those ideas in my day to day, using it as an unchanging framework to view the world through. I love the people around me a lot, and alcohol specifically dampens my empathy quite a bit. Then if there's an opiate on top of it, I become a ghost to the world that haunts the few select people that don't throw me out of their life when I'm like that. Me fueling my addiction to those is contrary to my entire way of life now
Idk, the groups I always went to were substantially different than most modern AA groups, but that's the way we always explained it to people. Fair number of atheists in AA
You're absolutely right, I was only describing my impression of the program from outside based purely on hearsay, having never studied it or participated in it. Thank you for the explanation! It makes sense.
I gotcha! I will say, every group is self governed and supported, if the actual AA organization comes in and shuts down a meeting, words cannot describe how much of a cesspool it would have to be for that to happen. So a group can run under the AA name while completely rejecting the principles its based on.
Shitty vibes based recovery meetings have Christian churches propping them up as a sneaky way to recruit vulnerable people into whatever church is hosting. So the most popular, most materially accommodating (coffee better than Folgers, chairs that aren't shitty broken plastic, ect.) groups are the shitty ones. However the actual social scene is a lot different.
Idk, the outpatient I designed takes a lot of notes from 12 step programs but has some pretty major adjustments to make it suitable to be done alone and away from other people if the patient chooses to hide it. Personally don't think secretly doing an outpatient program, especially one like mine, is a very good idea but I mean hey, part of harm reduction and helping people in addiction is giving them tools that they'll actually use. Maybe they start the program in secret and it gets them to open up about the addiction in their lives. Naloxone/Narcan was pretty much a complete failure until nasal injectors overtook the loaded syringe that it was in the early days. You can literally be offering something that will directly save lives, and people like me still have to think of ways to actually get addicts to use the tool.
Things designed to help people get sober go doubly for this, a great outpatient program should be extremely low barrier to entry while offering lots to do for the people who want to take it as seriously as possible. So low barrier to entry with a high "skill" gap, like a good video game lol
Thanks for the additional info! All good things to know and keep in mind for future reference.
the "higher power" part is a pretty core aspect of it so if you take that out I'm not sure how well it would work
That's a very interesting idea.
I want to learn if there are any scientific methods for determining how well "higher-power"-intact-alcoholics-anonymous programs are at helping people achieve and maintain sobriety.
Especially in comparison to how well alternative programs are on the same metrics.
I suspect there's probably not much data on the effectiveness of alternative programs -- programs that abandon the second tradition of the AA 12, "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."
That capitalized P in power seems like a giveaway on what it is actually intended to refer to.
Anyway, I find the wording of that tradition statement to be problematic from many different perspectives.
Just got done designing a new type of outpatient rehab for an Ivy League school so I feel like I'm well qualified to talk about this. I use a mix of studies and personal experience to create my approach, some of what I'm about to say has data backing it up while other bits are taken from personal experience/my intuition around all this
First off, I wouldn't ever ask if a program is as good as AA as a compliment. AA has like an 8-12 percent success rate but most meetings start off saying that the program only doesn't work for people who don't try. So yeah, I can recommend trying AA because addiction is a very lonely journey and those meetings make it less so. Well, I was already doing many of the steps daily before entering rehab, gratitude lists and inventories are just applying writing to normal neurodivergent headspaces. Other than that, it's really just a place to shoot shit with like-minded people and ask other people for opinions on shit you did in your personal life lol
Then the power greater than ourselves has really changed definitions socially speaking in AA. It no longer refers to Christian God, it can now just mean anything greater than themselves. For some people, their higher power is the fellowship of AA, for me it's human love and empathy. Just like how Christianity is essentially a set of rules and principles that's supposed to be used to guide your decision-making, anything that functions as a framework to hold you accountable to yourself works
I want to learn if there are any scientific methods for determining how well “higher-power”-intact-alcoholics-anonymous programs are at helping people achieve and maintain sobriety.
Especially in comparison to how well alternative programs are on the same metrics.
I suspect there’s probably not much data on the effectiveness of alternative programs – programs that abandon the second tradition of the AA 12, “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
To be clear, I'm not saying that it's not possible to have an alternative to AA without using a "higher power" concept, but just that trying to retrofit AA to not use their "higher power" concept would probably be more work than adopting another framework that was already developed without it.
Regarding scientific comparisons of effectiveness, I've heard that there have been studies done about this question. Here's a recent one that says that the alternatives are just as effective as AA: https://www.phi.org/press/alternatives-to-alcoholics-anonymous-are-just-as-effective-for-people-with-alcohol-use-disorders/
I've also seen an older study from 2020 that claimed that AA had slightly better long-term outcomes. I have not looked at either study closely enough to find out the details.
Good find, thank you!
No problem!
I guess I'm officially a recovery professional at this point, but honestly I'd say SMART recovery would fit this site better. Not restrictive on addictions, no spirituality, science based recovery.
Seconded on SMART. Someone I know has made an active effort to find recovery support groups without the AA nonsense, and they really liked SMART.
The Satanic Temple's "Sober Faction" has also worked out.
Thanks for commenting, that sounds really good.
Yeah don't get me wrong, I've been to AA meetings I enjoy, but when I first got out of rehab I was like an annoying Christian friend trying to convince everybody in their life to go to church. AA is where I truly found community, people who understood me at a more visceral level than anywhere else, and it made me want to share it. But as I got back into doing my community outreach after rehab, I became a lot more thoughtful with the things I had people do rather than doing it all off vibes like I used to. Now to be fair I have great intuition when it comes to this shit, but intentionality has made that way better for me
I’d definitely be careful copying that model. You don’t want to ne a breeding ground for 13th steppers or any of the other problematic things that come with it.
Zoom is so much better for those types of meetings, fuck in person meetings. Around me, they're a bunch of white trash tweakers that don't actually have any understanding of the principles (anonymity, radical acceptance/tolerance, ect.) and just use it as a social room where you can find a couple of drug dealers afterwards lol
Also Zoom gives organizers more selectivity over things they don't allow. For example, if rooms around me kicked people out for transphobia, over half the people would be gone and there wouldn't be enough donations to make rent for the group hall. But a ZOOM subscription is way cheaper than rent and allows the group the reach more potentially good people
https://illwill.com/print/alcoholics-autonomous-addiction-and-sobriety
Thank you for the link! That looks helpful.
Plugging smart therapy, it's secular and pretty good. I did a bit of it in rehab.
Is this what you're talking about?
https://smartrecovery.org/
Indeed that's it! Pretty certain they also over virtual sessions too. You're welcome to come post on !self_improvement@hexbear.net it also doubles as a recovery comm.
"Anti-Aircraft? Oh! American Atheists! That makes more sense."
Thank you for your comment. I appreciate you.
