I’m seriously contemplating quitting drinking entirely. Not because of a rock bottom situation, more to prevent it. Basically I spend too much on alcohol and like drinking it too much and have found I can’t just quit and be done.
I tried AA a couple times years ago and it helped. For a couple months each time. Just hated being bored and antsy and went back to alcohol.
Anyway, a few years ago I came to realize I was also chasing a faith that I just don’t fundamentally have. To steal a line from Penn Jillette, it’s not that I don’t believe in God. It’s that I believe there is no God. AA obviously isn’t my place. There is simply no way I’ll ever think there’s A Supreme Being taking care of everything.
So I’m wondering if there’s a place like AA but with a more scientific approach. Well, maybe not scientific so much as non theistic.
I don’t have any experience with any of these things. I just Googled on “alcoholics anonymous for non religious” and copied over the first few websites. Try some similar search terms and you should find a lot of such organizations.
There’s Secular Organizations for Sobriety. (I haven’t used them myself, and thus can’t really personally vouch for them, but they exist and are explicitly intended to be what the OP is looking for.)
I have several friends who were addicted to alcohol and/or drugs, and turned their lives around using AA. They’re not religious at all. I asked a couple about the role of God in AA and they said that they don’t use it in the religious sense, but more philosophically. From everything they say about AA, it sounds to me like it’s actually a kind of free version of group cognitive behavioral therapy, and that’s why it works for them.
IIRC, doesn’t AA permit/allow/tolerance/accept that an atheist can believe that a “higher power” can be anything other than self? IOW, if you believe that people collectively meeting in a group AA setting is more powerful than you doing it alone, then the group is the higher power.
A good friend who was already suffering from liver disease tried AA but couldn’t take the religious aspect. Fortunately, he had excellent insurance that paid for a month at a dryout camp. That was 35 years ago and he is still alive.
I’ve had atheist friends who went to AA, and treated the “higher power” nonsense as referring to Nature or the four fundamental forces, and got thru it that way. But one of them found that his AA group was quite different – seemed to be a religious ‘witnessing’ group and spent time trying to convert him. So he dropped out. But one of the others heard about this, and took him to a different AA group, a non-religious one, and he was pretty successful there.
So it seems like local AA groups vary. Some are fine for atheists; others are way to religious.
The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. AA encourages members to find a power greater than oneself, since the individual was unable to stop drinking on their own. The group serves that purpose for many AA members. AA practices at meetings are slowly moving away from blatantly christian prayers since I started going in 1984. Individual groups set the tone, and the ones in more religious areas may reflect that, but the vast majority of groups these days aren’t going to try to convert anyone to a particular belief. That can and has gotten certain groups de-listed as AA groups.
I haven’t been hassled about religion at a meeting (and I’ve been at meetings in the US, Canada, and Europe) since the 80’s
QtM, regular 12 step meeting attender and pretty much atheist.
As others wrote above, you can map ‘God’ to your own preferred abstraction: — my personal faith, confidence or will— the power of positive thinking — help from friends — fortune — purpose — mystery — whatever. (Carried to extreme, you can invent your own rational deism.)
This should work well UNLESS the meeting-mates at AA want to inflict and/or impose their own religious agenda. IIUC this is rarish at AA.
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ETA: Since we’re already in IMHO let me plug the Nick Nolte movie Good Thief. Nick’s character is a heroin addict, attends a meeting, but appears to design his own god(s).
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I’ve been to Rational Recovery meetings, too. Their literature resonates with me. But their meetings are far from me and infrequent (while AA is absolutely everywhere) and the RR meetings I did attend had a lot of folks there spending a ton of time bashing AA. As a result of those factors, I haven’t been back to their meetings.
AA really depends on the local groups which range from special AA for atheist groups to Bible thumpers.
I’m about as hard core atheist as it goes and have had no problem in the almost eight years of sobriety. I roll my eyes at what some people share, but I roll my eyes at a lot of things in life.
Not suggesting AA and the like aren’t useful for some, but the main thing you need is to truly WANT to stop. If you don’t want to, no program will make you. Just offering the sole datapoint of this atheist ex-drinker (and smoker/druggie) who quit all 3 on his own (at different times.) At some point, doesn’t it come down to simply saying “No” when the urge comes upon you?
I don’t understand the bored and antsy thing, tho. If you find yourself bored and antsy, you can make the conscious choice of doing something OTHER than drinking - instead of choosing to drink. Of course, I have a very high tolerance for boredom…
Well, no, except in a trivial and useless sense. You might as well say that somebody with severe OCD should just stop doing it. The entire question is how an addict can achieve that behavioral outcome. And the evidence is, in general, that simplistic “will power” usually fails for most addicts.
You may be an exception, but there’s good evidence that addicts respond well to group therapy in the formal setting of a recovery program. It may be difficult to assess the outcomes from AA rigorously, but as guizot noted, that’s essentially what AA provides - informal free group therapy.
