Over the years, I’ve heard one idea a few thousand times in meetings: “When I came to the rooms of AA, I was told to come to meetings, sit down, shut up, and listen. It worked for me and it will work for you. Just come to meetings and everything will be fine.”
I’ve been sober in AA long enough to tell you this: Going to meetings is the easiest part of AA.
To become sober we need to do the same things athletes do: get a coach (sponsor), do our stretching exercises (reach our and shake a stranger’s hand), start eating right and getting the proper amount of sleep. (Why is it most alcoholics think it’s okay to skip over the physical part of recovery?)
And perhaps, most important, we need to do our homework (read the literature; do the Steps). Why do we alcoholics want to ignore, postpone, or drag out this part? Not doing our AA homework is like paying thousands of dollars to go to college and never taking any books home. Which brilliant alcoholic among us could do that?
In the beginning of our recovery, we don’t know what we’re doing because we don’t know what to do. But the solution is simple: we need to allow new data into our brains. Meetings are one way; reading the literature is another. At the same time, we need to go through the Steps with our sponsors so that new data about ourselves will enter our brains.
It’s certainly okay to tell the newcomer to get to meetings, but when someone has been around a while, isn’t time we debunk the meetings-only myth and tell them the rest of the story?
AAGrapevine, Oct 1997, J.Y.Russell, Pennsylvania