As part of my ADAPT program, if I only want to go to 20 classes, I'm required to go to 19 or 20 AA meetings (my ADAPT counselor seems confused about the real number of meetings). As with all the other probation requirements, I've been dreading this. I've been to several AA meetings in the past with an alcoholic relative and a college friend of mine when he got busted for public intoxication. The people I've met have always been very pleasant, some more outgoing than others, but for the most part, they're decent people all there for a common goal: to overcome their reliance on alcohol. I think AA is a great program for those who need it; after all, it helped my relative tremendously and they have never had a single relapse in 20 years. But mostly what I remember of the meetings is that they were incredibly depressing and there tended to be a lot of people that like to whine.
I'm not in need of AA services. I'm not an alcoholic. I know first-hand what one looks like and the last 20 years I've scrutinized myself when I take a drink to make sure I don't see any tendencies...and I just don't have them. Oh, I've detected them in other people, but not myself no matter how hard I look. Maybe you could argue that I had a problem with alcohol the night of my accident- that if I hadn't had any wine at all, I wouldn't have had an accident. I can argue that's not necessarily true and the real reason for my accident is my stupid decision to look for my cell phone while I was driving. The hundreds of other scrapes on the same Jersey barrier seem to indicate that there are countless others out there who have scraped that same wall (it juts out and it's on a sharp turn in the highway) and it's highly doubtful that alcohol was behind each accident that occurred there. My husband and I saw a news clip a month ago about that same stretch of road and how dark and dangerous it is for motorists. I was driving that same road a few months after my accident, reached down for something, and almost had the same thing happen again and there was no alcohol involved. And my BAC the night of the accident is not a useful factor in this argument, since it was greatly skewed due to a medical condition.
The point is, if I'm not an alcoholic, how am I going to stomach all these AA meetings? I could skip this requirement and go to 30 weeks of classes with ADAPT, but after my first class, I think I'd rather go to AA than spend an additional 10 weeks in that hell (and pay another $200 to boot). So, it's the lesser of the two evils in this case.
When I had been going to the AA meetings with my relative, I'd already heard all the down-and-out stories before- hell, I've lived them throughout my own childhood. I know first-hand what alcoholism does to someone, their life and those around them. It's been a long time since I'd gone to a meeting, so maybe because the pain of my situation was still raw back then, my impression of the meetings had been affected by that.
No matter what, though, I really wasn't looking forward to sitting around and talking and talking and talking about alcohol. Ever since November, I think about alcohol every day, several times a day. It's ironic, isn't it? I didn't really think or care that much about it before- I could have a beer or not, I could pick up wine for dinner or not, but now it's on my mind all the freaking time. The trial, the programs I'm in now, they all make you think about it constantly. It's a weird thing for me. It hasn't made me think that alcohol is evil or bad in any way- it's still people that give it a label. To me it's still just a liquid in a bottle and some people just can't handle it.
I haven't had a single alcoholic beverage since almost five months and it's not because VASAP or ADAPT asked me not to or that I'm afraid I have a problem, it's because it still makes my stomach turn to think about it after what I've been through. I had plenty of opportunity in the months between the accident and the trial, too, when I wasn't under any program's supervision, but I just didn't care for it. Lately, I've been thinking about whether or not I'll ever drink again and I think I eventually will, but I just don't care that much about it either way. Now, though, between ADAPT and the AA meetings, I have to sit for a total of 2.5 hours per week listening to people (or videos) talk about alcohol over and over and over again. It seems overkill to me. I'm well aware this is not the case for everyone and I'm just talking about myself.
I spent a lot of time choosing which meeting to go to. The AA website reveals there are a lot of them in the area. However, I've learned not to trust websites entirely because information can easily be out-of-date. The AA meeting schedule I got from my first VASAP contact was over a year old. The majority of meetings are held in churches, so I started going through the internet looking for the church website to see if they listed an active meeting. I wanted to make sure (1) I went to a safe location and (2) I went to a larger meeting. When I went with my college friend, there were only six others in the meeting and they actually made us all speak. That was unusual since AA is supposed to be all voluntary- no one should make you say anything at all. But I was trying to avoid the small meetings just in case there was a repeat of this. I did not want to disclose why I was there and I did not want to bring up painful memories from my past. I worked on a cover story, that I was there to get more information for a friend of mine- which is technially true since I have a friend that I am worried about- but ideally, I would go to a bigger meeting and this would not be an issue.
I settled on one in a nearby church, in a good area, but thankfully at the last minute I double-checked their website. The AA site had the meeting listed as open, which means that anyone can go- friends, relatives, anyone curious about the program. The church's website showed that this was a closed meeting, which means only those that have a problem with alcohol are welcome at the meeting. I did not want to be rude and go against the wishes of the other AA members, so I had to quickly find another meeting. I found one that was held at a hospital. My husband volunteered to go with me. He'd never been to AA before and was curious. He'd had a few family members that were alcoholics (and never sought help), so he had some interest of his own.
I honestly couldn't have picked a better meeting. Not only was it a large crowd, but everyone was exceptionally friendly. It's a shame that they only meet on Wednesdays because in another month, I have another obligation starting up that same night.
The meeting format, itself, was not unfamiliar. There was the traditional Serenity Prayer and opening readings. The host opened it up for a topic of discussion and the perfect topic was presented: How do you fight the 'blahs'? My husband and I looked at each other- we'd been going through our own 'blahs' for about six months. We have had a string of very bad luck in the past two years and we were succumbing to the 'blahs'. Both of us were somewhat down between work, our home life, our recent marriage, and our social life. We'd been wallowing in self-pity, disappointment, and general sadness for a while and it was ironic that this was to be the topic for the night.
And what we heard did help us! I was so happy about that- my husband even said maybe he should come more often since this was the cheapest therapy we could get. The others talked about coming out of self-wallowing by doing something nice for someone else, getting up and moving, not holding everything in and talking with someone as means for getting out of the 'blahs'. And my husband and I talked the entire ride home about how we could do things differently. I really want to believe this was Divine Intervention; we really needed this.
So, my outlook- in a single evening- was changed. I'm not going to say I believe every meeting will be as useful, but at least last night's was and maybe at least some of the future meetings will be, too. Even if you're not an alcoholic, the issues they deal with are the same damned issues we all deal with and the only difference is how you deal with them. In the case of an alcoholic, they want to turn to the bottle to avoid issues, so their added challenge is to find another means of working things out. But we all have our own method of avoiding things- whether it's delaying facing the inevitable, pretending things don't exist, keeping ourselves so busy so there's no time to deal with issues, or just internalizing things. We don't all turn to an intoxicating substance, but we're all dealing with same crap.
So, maybe, just maybe, I'll get something more out of this than just a means of getting through probation. Here's to hoping!
The only bad thing, though, is that just before the host opened up the meeting for discussion, he said 'If you have something for me to sign, please send it up now'. I looked at my husband and whispered, 'CRAP! I'll bet I was supposed to bring something!' So, now, tonight at my ADAPT meeting, I'm going to have to corner Ann, the counselor, and get her to tell me just what I have to do to prove I went to a meeting. The only thing I have to show is that I picked up a new schedule. Hopefully, she'll give me credit for this one- after all, if there was something I had to take with me to get signed, she failed to acknowledge this when I asked her about it in her office and in class last week. CRAP!
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