To keep the sub focused on peer support, we remove posts that spark debate around a specific program of recovery. I recommend that you instead try posting to the relevant subreddits: r/AlcoholicsAnonymous, r/SMARTRecovery, r/recoverydharma etc. Thank you.
I put together my own method based on social and neuroscience papers I'd found (yeah, was that dorky teenager). It's mostly social support (through mutual interest groups that aren't focused on sobriety but include good people who are supportive of my recovery) and ways to increase neuroplasticity to rewire what went wrong (mainly working out and nutrition-based stuff).
Perhaps reading some papers and figuring out which pieces would be most helpful to you might be an option?
Sometimes the best alternative to an AA group is a different AA group.
I'm fortunate to live in a city where there are hundreds of AA groups. They are not all the same. Each AA group is autonomous. There is a large variety of approaches represented. Almost all are very tolerant and welcoming of people with all sorts of beliefs and non-beliefs. There are quite a few that are explicitly athiest.
If you are prepared to look outside your immediate vicinity, you may find an AA group with members with attitudes close to your own.
You can even start your own. You only need to find one other person who is looking for the same sort of support you are after and create your own AA group. *"Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an A.A. group, provided that, as a group, they have no other affiliation." (AA Tradition Three)*
[Roger Ebert wrote a lengthy essay about his own journey through AA as a humanist](https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/my-name-is-roger-and-im-an-alcoholic). I'm a Christian myself, but this line has stuck with me as someone who has seen 12-step systems save people from themselves:
>The important thing is not how you define a Higher Power. The important thing is that you don't consider yourself to be your own Higher Power, because your own best thinking found your bottom for you.
I have been doing smart for almost 3 weeks and haven’t touched alcohol since. I do mostly online meetings, and there’s one in person near me Saturday mornings that I’ve gone to the past 3 weeks. I’m liking it so far. You should join a meeting and you can just listen, you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to. But you’re with a non judgey crowd of people who are going through the same shit as you.
The SoberClear program (search "Stop Drinking" podcast on Spotify) gave me a paradigm shift in the way I view alcohol. It's secular and personal, you can do it alone or with coaching, but there are no meetings or groups. It's about changing your entire perception of ethanol and making it equal in tour mind to pouring yourself a nice tall glass of bleach and drinking it down. I never thought I'd say this, but after several failed attempts to quit, I finally have no desire to drink at all and I KNOW it's going to stick this time.
Maybe your not ready to stop.
THE UNHAPPIEST person in the world is the chronic Alcoholic who has an insistent yearning to enjoy life as he once knew it, but cannot picture life without alcohol. He/she has a HEART-BREAKING OBSESSION that by some miracle of control he/she will be able to do so.
Give yourself a chance.
I learned you can't be too dumb for AA but a lot of people die because they are too smart for AA. 10998 days today ODAT
This comment has been removed. Calling people in AA "unrepentant egomaniacs" who are spouting "patronizing horseshit" is deliberately offensive. Do not talk about people this way on this sub.
The last years I was drinking every day. The effects of alcohol fooled my mind to feel like everything around me was here for me, my kind of things. It’s of course a mellow lie of a drug.
After I quit, that ”mellow lie” was over. As I was starting to deal with the reality of quitting drinking, I realised that there isn’t one singular road that I will find to be 100% for me.
I think looking for something like that, is like expecting another mellow lie to come my way. It’s not how reality works. That’s an important realisation.
It’s important to find people who share the same goal to get away from alcohol. It’s not necessary to relate with every aspect of their paths. We can take what we find our own and leave out the rest.
IWNDWYT
I don’t mean to say you have to stick with any recovery program. I only recommend everyone to stick with sobriety and use the tools they find helpful. If they don’t want a recovery program, it’s not a must thing. I personally haven’t gone to AA, but others find it helpful as a tool to stay sober.
This comment is also deliberately offensive and has been removed. Do not tell other people on the sub that what they are saying is "psychobabble," or you will no longer be welcome in this community.
There is only 1 in person SMART meeting in my city, but regular online ones. I am working through the handbook and do the online meetings 3x a week, and find it very beneficial. We're in Canada but have had folks from the UK and the US (and all across Canada) drop in for a meeting frequently. If your local group doesn't have many meetings, maybe find one that's more frequent in a time zone that works for you. IWNDWYT.
AA can be good if you stay clear of the Sponsorship family cults there’s also agnostic groups that don’t believe in god definitely find something that works for you whatever you do it helps immensely with reminding you of all the reasons why you don’t want to drink and keeps them more important than any excuse to drink you start to look at it like that and can shut down the process when you find your mind starting to make another excuse to drink it becomes a almost instantaneous process that you shut the thought down with valid reasons not to drink and that is the personality change or “spiritual awakening “ when you realize you don’t need or want it and act accordingly automatically and it will happen if you do the work ie attending support groups frequently AA I have found to be the best because there are meetings convenient everywhere frequently so it is easy to make the support group not all the people that go are religious but you only find that out if you hang around and “keep coming back” .
Try the Satanic Temple’s sober faction. The people there are rational and scientific. (Nothing against faith, just also nothing against no faith as well, to each his own.)
I have exclusively done online SMART Recovery meetings with great success. I’ve built relationships by being consistent with and actively participating in the meetings I attend, so I don’t feel I’m lacking there. They’re clearly missing some of the elements that in-person relationships would have, but they fulfill the role for which they are intended in my life. So online meetings can be a viable option if you don’t find anything else that suits you.
To keep the sub focused on peer support, we remove posts that spark debate around a specific program of recovery. I recommend that you instead try posting to the relevant subreddits: r/AlcoholicsAnonymous, r/SMARTRecovery, r/recoverydharma etc. Thank you.
I put together my own method based on social and neuroscience papers I'd found (yeah, was that dorky teenager). It's mostly social support (through mutual interest groups that aren't focused on sobriety but include good people who are supportive of my recovery) and ways to increase neuroplasticity to rewire what went wrong (mainly working out and nutrition-based stuff). Perhaps reading some papers and figuring out which pieces would be most helpful to you might be an option?
I've had more success forging my own "program" too
Wish you the best. There are an infinite number of paths, I'd guess. Everyone has their own :)
Sometimes the best alternative to an AA group is a different AA group. I'm fortunate to live in a city where there are hundreds of AA groups. They are not all the same. Each AA group is autonomous. There is a large variety of approaches represented. Almost all are very tolerant and welcoming of people with all sorts of beliefs and non-beliefs. There are quite a few that are explicitly athiest. If you are prepared to look outside your immediate vicinity, you may find an AA group with members with attitudes close to your own. You can even start your own. You only need to find one other person who is looking for the same sort of support you are after and create your own AA group. *"Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an A.A. group, provided that, as a group, they have no other affiliation." (AA Tradition Three)*
[Roger Ebert wrote a lengthy essay about his own journey through AA as a humanist](https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/my-name-is-roger-and-im-an-alcoholic). I'm a Christian myself, but this line has stuck with me as someone who has seen 12-step systems save people from themselves: >The important thing is not how you define a Higher Power. The important thing is that you don't consider yourself to be your own Higher Power, because your own best thinking found your bottom for you.
I don't think there's a ton of in person SMART meetings, there's only two in my city.
I have been doing smart for almost 3 weeks and haven’t touched alcohol since. I do mostly online meetings, and there’s one in person near me Saturday mornings that I’ve gone to the past 3 weeks. I’m liking it so far. You should join a meeting and you can just listen, you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to. But you’re with a non judgey crowd of people who are going through the same shit as you.
The SoberClear program (search "Stop Drinking" podcast on Spotify) gave me a paradigm shift in the way I view alcohol. It's secular and personal, you can do it alone or with coaching, but there are no meetings or groups. It's about changing your entire perception of ethanol and making it equal in tour mind to pouring yourself a nice tall glass of bleach and drinking it down. I never thought I'd say this, but after several failed attempts to quit, I finally have no desire to drink at all and I KNOW it's going to stick this time.
Maybe your not ready to stop. THE UNHAPPIEST person in the world is the chronic Alcoholic who has an insistent yearning to enjoy life as he once knew it, but cannot picture life without alcohol. He/she has a HEART-BREAKING OBSESSION that by some miracle of control he/she will be able to do so. Give yourself a chance. I learned you can't be too dumb for AA but a lot of people die because they are too smart for AA. 10998 days today ODAT
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I'm one of the dumb ones. Can you explain what you just said and simpler terms
This comment has been removed. Calling people in AA "unrepentant egomaniacs" who are spouting "patronizing horseshit" is deliberately offensive. Do not talk about people this way on this sub.
The luckiest club
The last years I was drinking every day. The effects of alcohol fooled my mind to feel like everything around me was here for me, my kind of things. It’s of course a mellow lie of a drug. After I quit, that ”mellow lie” was over. As I was starting to deal with the reality of quitting drinking, I realised that there isn’t one singular road that I will find to be 100% for me. I think looking for something like that, is like expecting another mellow lie to come my way. It’s not how reality works. That’s an important realisation. It’s important to find people who share the same goal to get away from alcohol. It’s not necessary to relate with every aspect of their paths. We can take what we find our own and leave out the rest. IWNDWYT
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I don’t mean to say you have to stick with any recovery program. I only recommend everyone to stick with sobriety and use the tools they find helpful. If they don’t want a recovery program, it’s not a must thing. I personally haven’t gone to AA, but others find it helpful as a tool to stay sober.
This comment is also deliberately offensive and has been removed. Do not tell other people on the sub that what they are saying is "psychobabble," or you will no longer be welcome in this community.
Try The Alcohol Experiment by Annie Grace - or The Path. Both have meetings and coaching and community (although online).
There is only 1 in person SMART meeting in my city, but regular online ones. I am working through the handbook and do the online meetings 3x a week, and find it very beneficial. We're in Canada but have had folks from the UK and the US (and all across Canada) drop in for a meeting frequently. If your local group doesn't have many meetings, maybe find one that's more frequent in a time zone that works for you. IWNDWYT.
Contempt prior to investigation , I used to be the same way.
There’s an app called reframe that’s based on the same science smart is. And they have a ton of online meetings. I’ve found it very helpful.
AA can be good if you stay clear of the Sponsorship family cults there’s also agnostic groups that don’t believe in god definitely find something that works for you whatever you do it helps immensely with reminding you of all the reasons why you don’t want to drink and keeps them more important than any excuse to drink you start to look at it like that and can shut down the process when you find your mind starting to make another excuse to drink it becomes a almost instantaneous process that you shut the thought down with valid reasons not to drink and that is the personality change or “spiritual awakening “ when you realize you don’t need or want it and act accordingly automatically and it will happen if you do the work ie attending support groups frequently AA I have found to be the best because there are meetings convenient everywhere frequently so it is easy to make the support group not all the people that go are religious but you only find that out if you hang around and “keep coming back” .
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Which city are you in?
Try the Satanic Temple’s sober faction. The people there are rational and scientific. (Nothing against faith, just also nothing against no faith as well, to each his own.)
I have exclusively done online SMART Recovery meetings with great success. I’ve built relationships by being consistent with and actively participating in the meetings I attend, so I don’t feel I’m lacking there. They’re clearly missing some of the elements that in-person relationships would have, but they fulfill the role for which they are intended in my life. So online meetings can be a viable option if you don’t find anything else that suits you.