I guess this means that AA’s definition of “alcoholic” is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re an alcoholic if you can’t control your drinking. Alcoholism is lifelong. Therefore, if you are able to get your drinking under control, you aren’t an alcoholic. But what if that control isn’t permanent? A person could “control” their drinking for 20 years before being overcome by their drinking habit. Was this person always an alcoholic?
The experience of many seems to indicate that is true. I encountered many patients who had an early history of drinking alcoholically and then because of circumstances (work life, a family, etc.) lived a sober lifestyle for several decades.
Then when they retired or lost their partner to death they returned to problematic drinking. There are a number of people who believe that the illness progresses even when the person is not drinking so that when a person begins again he begins at a more serious stage. I’m not convinced that holds true for everyone.
How can alcoholism progress when a person isn’t drinking? There are two facets to the illness - psychological and physical. Physical addiction can be cured by detoxing. Psychological addiction can continue unabated indefinitely.
People in AA call it a “dry drunk.” Negativity of attitude and behavior are it’s main characteristics.
It is because of this tendency of alcoholics to have unhealthy thinking patterns that many people continue to attend AA even though they haven’t drank in years. A good AA group will be one that encourages it’s members to think and act in a positive manner.
I am lucky, I did a lot of traveling for work and so I got to go to at least a thousand or more different meetings of AA, CA, OA, SA and what not all over the country.
I have been in some really strange meetings but I have never been in one where a designated driver who did not do anything stupid ever got harassed.
Most actually sat outside to read or listen to tunes or went for coffee & came back in about an hour.
I could not read comfortably in a room full of people discussing AA stuff or reading & commenting on Big book stuff. If it was a closed meeting for alcoholics only & not an open meeting, they were wrong to NOT kick you out. They could change it to an open meeting if no one objected but in all the ones I was ever in, if even one person objected to opening it up, the DDriver, the non alcoholic SO, the teenage child had to leave. The meetings are not really for them.
So, was it too cold for you to go outside. Too far for a cafe or mall, why did you insist on staying?
AA meetings are not for people to sit and read books & drink free coffee just because they brought someone.
IMO, the people who were being asshats were wrong and were actually harming AA’s image. But IMO, you were not blameless either.
Why were people back fussing at you while a meeting was going on? Never been in a meeting where that was put up with by that meetings leader.
How did they know you were not an alcoholic? Were you talking to them before the meeting started? Were they old cranky people? How many were back with you?
I think there has to be more to your story. It was not that simple out of the blue IMO. Did they do this to you every timer you took the guy to that meeting? How many times did you take him to that meeting?
Okay, I went back to your original post & you say, “once.”
I have made bold two sections. How did these come up? They mean nothing to an AA group unless you told them those things. Why did you tell them? So this question & the ones in my prior post still remain.
Also, was this on the east coast? How long ago was it? How old were you at the time?
AA, “Hi, what is your name? Welcome to our meeting.”
"My name is aruvqan & brought Jim My friend to the meeting. I am just his driver. I am not here for the meeting. I will just sit back here & read if that is OK?
AA, " Why sure that is fine." ( It is an open meeting )
Alternate statement:
AA, Well glad you brought him but if you are not an alcoholic, I need to ask you to leave because this is a closed meeting. If you are not sure or may be think you could be or become one, I will send some people over to talk to you in pvt."
aruvqan, “Nah, I’ll just go read in my car, at the cafe, outside on the bench, will be back in about an hour, right?”
And maybe you just all the crabby old farts who had too much bad coffee.
If you had never been to the SDMB before and did not read anything on it but came in and posted and that first post got some negative reaction, would you condemn the SDMB for all time and say that it was no good and… and …? If not, why do it to AA?
I stay away from that first drink because I’ll just have one. For the first night. Then the next night I’ll have two, and three the next and then all bets are off.
Before I went to AA, I had quit a good six or seven times, sometimes for up to six months or more. I think close to a year was my best effort. But then I’d go back to that same damn pattern.
I did some really stupid shit when I was drunk. As the adage goes, I didn’t get into trouble every time I drank, but every time I got into trouble, it was when I drank. I’ve got some dark emotional issues which I can keep better at bay when I’m not drinking. The drinking makes them worse and they make me want to drink more.
Am I an alcoholic? Who knows? All I know is that I have two wonderful kids who would be terrible hurt if their father did the same kind of stupid shit he used to.
The very second meeting I went to, I ran into an extremely in-your-face, “you do it this way or you’ll go back drinking and will wind up dead” type. Fortunately, I found some other people who were more my style.
While I was still in Tokyo, I was able to go to an atheist group, which was nice. Although one of the more pushy people was that leader, which unfortunately can typical for leaders of many groups.
My inner pop psychologist has a theory that it’s the people who have unhealthy thinking patterns who wind up as alcoholics or drug abusers, etc., etc. Of course, that’s based on a non-random sample size of one, so I’m not writing a book yet.
TB, sober for 2 years and 1 month.
Seems like some posters who haven’t “been there” know what it is.(?) And what it shouldn’t be.(?)
AA isn’t for everybody. Not everybody who drinks is an alcoholic, for sure. But if you know drinking is messing up your life and need help to stop, it’s there. I’m not talking social drinkers. I’m not talking people who sip wine with dinner. Or go out for a drink and only have one or two. I’m talking people who drain the dregs on the way out. I’m talking “make sure there’s enough at home.” I’m talking blackouts.
Yes, it’s boring to be sober. Some groups have pot-lucks or volleyball games or do service work in different areas. It’s rarely as much fun as “they told you you had.” But you remember every “boring” minute, don’t feel bad about it later, and have nobody to apologize to the next day.
FWIW One thing I heard in AA is how the disease progresses even if you’re not imbibing. I thought really? Sober for years, I decided to have a drink. Within weeks I was turning up a bottle of vodka bought and on the way home and drank it straight. Something I’d never done before. (Yay me.)
So now I “maintain.” Not too much (usually), and not really enough. That may be where the OP is. Maybe she’s coming to a realization kind of sideways, talking about her boyfriend’s behavior first, then going to a meeting for the first time in ten years (but kind of blowing it.) It’s hard to change. It’s hard to share. It’s hard to need.
I have cancer; you may use my name as a reference.
You kidding me? This sort of thing has happened to me and I’ve never even been to an AA meeting!
There are people who bring up alcoholism at every turn and grill you about your drinking habits even if you didn’t say anything and nothing alcohol-related is going on. “I baked cookies last night.” “Did you use real vanilla extract?” “Yes.” “Zomg, you’re totally an alcoholic and you have to abstain forever and ever or you’ll end up dead in a gutter.” “Um…can I take that to mean you don’t want a cookie?” (And I’m only slightly exaggerating here.)
I’ve found these people tend to be the ones who are new to AA and sobriety, so I’m more than happy to cut them some slack because I know they’re going through a rough time, but they’re annoying and sometimes downright insulting. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that someone took the fact that aruqvan was actually AT an AA meeting as an excuse to start in on her. Just because you don’t see it happening doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. After all, they’re not going to bother you. That would be preaching to the choir.
I don’t take these few (usually temporary) bad apples as an indictment of AA or anything, but they do exist and I hope you can see how they make AA seem nutty and cult-like to outsiders.
I am surprised nobody has brought up http://www.orange-papers.org/.
I was in AA, and it never felt right to me. I googled “Is AA a cult” one night and was shocked at what I found. EVERYTHING that I have felt about it was written there right on my computer screen! It was nice to be validated after how fragile I was just getting out of the hospital from detoxing.
I then found https://rational.org/index.php?id=1 to be a much better fit for me.
So, anyway, I guess you can say I am NOT a friend of Bill W. That was all just a weird experience for me, and not my cup of tea.
Y’know, I really wish the OP would come back to this thread. I assume she went to the group for some help with her BF’s drinking as evidenced in her other posts, or for some validation of her current social drinking as opposed to her problem drinking earlier in life. If these were the reasons, AA isn’t for her in either case - but that’s conjecture.
There are certainly a lot more people who have dual diagnoses now than in the “old days.” But I don’t know if that’s because we are psychologically more unhealthy than people in the 1950s, say, or if a greater effort has been made to identify all the factors which may cause relapse.
Or maybe psychiatrists just decided to get into the act (for you skeptics.)
I’d meant to mention that I think it’s important not to label people with alcoholism but to help them see where it is causing damage to them and their lives and allow them to make that decision for themselves. For some people it takes a very long time and a lot of personal pain to accept that alcohol is not their friend.
Allowing them that painful discovery is a difficult thing to watch but vital to recovery. A halfway-convinced alcoholic is not going to be able to maintain sobriety.
Of course hospitals need to provide a label in order to provide services. And that diagnosis is based on a variety of factors chosen to identify alcoholism. But people have the right to reject any medical diagnosis they don’t want. Sometimes it works out.
I think it’s equally important that people show respect for someone who chooses to say they are alcoholic. Would you try to convince a cancer patient that he didn’t need medical care?
Yeah there are people like that. What does that have to do with AA?
I know many religious people like that. I have no bad feeling towards JH folks even though my personal experiences have not been very good.
You only ever have it happen with an alcoholic, in recovery or not in recovery?
Or is it just AA?
And no, I have never seen anything like this going on during a meeting in any 12 step meeting I have ever attended. Not for long enough to cover what was claimed.
It could have sure, but before or after the meeting much more likely & I am really puzzled if he first said he was just a driver & that was all.
What ever, no ignorance being fought IMO.
Hm, 1988 in tidewater VA. It was January and a bit too cold to just hang out indefinitely in a car even in ‘the south’. As it was listed as an open meeting in some little booklet the court clerk had, we were told it was OK for me to go as everybody was welcome. I was directly asked if I wanted to speak as was new, I declined and said that I was not an alcoholic, just there driving a friend to the meeting. So I got asked if I drank, and I said that I might have a glass of something as a toast, and I liked an occasional dab of brandy in coffee and as a diabetic I used wine in cooking rather than for drinking. So several people tried to get me to admit that I HAD to have brandy in my coffee, and had to have something to drink when out with people. Nice way to misinterpret ‘toasting’ - maybe they thought I did the Japanese KANPAI all the time or something. Doesn’t everybody like being cornered and badgered? Why, no I haven’t stopped beating my wife yet because firstly I am female and secondly I never stared beating her … :dubious:
They must have “saved” you cuz you’re still here. 
Your post makes little sense. This thread is about AA, not religion, so I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. Also, you’re continuing to believe “I haven’t seen it so it must not happen.” You can’t snark about fighting ignorance if you’re not open to having your own fought.
Now that you’ve seen aruvqan’s more detailed account, I wonder what contortions you’re going to go through in order to find a way to blame the situation on her. She didn’t know that many people feel that she shouldn’t have been in the meeting room if she was just a driver. What else you got?
Show me where I said she did not belong there in an
OPEN meeting?
Well, for one, it happened what, about 25 years ago.
She still does not say how they found out what her drinking consisted of. How did they know if she did not tell them?
She found one meeting on the first try which had asshats.
I have found many bad meetings but never one which attacked a designated driver at an open meeting. But I have never seen a DD talk about their own drinking in a meeting either.
I have been to way more than one meeting. Sure it could happen. But why won’t she answer the question of how they knew?
But I will back off because one anecdote from one time 25 years ago is how you judge anything on the SDMB… Right?. :rolleyes:
She said that after she told them she was there to drive a friend and that she wasn’t an alcoholic, they asked her if she drank and she answered. You seriously can’t imagine how the rest of that exchange could have gone?
Them: Do you drink?
Her: Well, I mean, yeah, a tiny bit…
Them: How much is a tiny bit?
Her: Oh, you know, like a sip of champagne at a wedding toast.
Etc.
A lot of people answer questions that are none of someone’s business when put on the spot, especially if they have nothing to hide. If she had said “NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS” as soon as they asked if she drank, then she WOULD look very defensive.
I’m not supposed to talk about that.
I’m not supposed to talk about that.
There is no Keyser Söze.
ETA: this was a response to your second post. I chose to ignore the first.