Re:Alcohol-related deaths spiked during the pandemic, a stud...
by kar5pt on Thursday March 24, 2022 @08:58PM
(#30797559)
You can't ignore the religious stuff. It's baked into the program. Daily prayer is considered a non-optional part of the 12 steps and atheists and constantly derided as being arrogant and unlikely to stay sober. They're a reason why atheists have found it necessary to create separate meetings and why regional intergroups often exclude those meetings from public meeting lists since they consider it to not be "real" AA.
You can ignore the religious stuff and still make use of AA's highest-impact features:
- regular meetings, no appointment required
- being open and vulnerable in front of other people who understand the hell of addiction in ways your partner or family won't.
- having an accountability partners to call during moments of temptation, and having that reciprocal commitment is a far stronger deterrent to relapse than calling a crisis hotline offering scripted responses.