According to conventional AA wisdom, you will relapse, of course. Or, to put it another way, you will drink and then you will die.

Is this true? Are AA meetings really the crucial lifeline that everyone seems to say they are? Or is there something else going on here? Let’s take a deeper look.

A fear based response

Recovering alcoholics who have found sobriety through AA have a very limited perspective. They see people who relapse in the program and some of them come back to the meetings and they always seem to have the same story: “I quit going to meetings and I relapsed.”

So people figure that if they were to quit going to meetings, they would relapse too. But this is faulty logic based on the idea of a self-selecting group. What is a self selecting group? This means that the only examples that they see are the people who come back to meetings. They don’t see the people who do not come back. The fact is that some people find alternative recovery solutions and actually find a life of sobriety outside of AA meetings. The people in AA do not consider this as even being possible and therefore assume that everyone who has left the meetings has relapsed.

This is a fear based response. If you really study this response you’ll start to understand that it is all about the individual’s self confidence and their own tendency to reassure themselves. They are not really fearful of you relapsing if you quit going to meetings….it is more about the idea that there might be another way; a different path.

Think about it. Those who have accepted AA as their solution have already been through a great deal. It took a great deal of courage and a great deal of action to start coming to AA and make the program work for themselves. Now if you say that you are going to walk away from it all and somehow make sobriety work out for you, this idea is very threatening to those who are in AA. It is a threat to the protected “path of sobriety” that they have carved out for themselves. To the dedicated AA member, the only way to get sober is through AA. Nothing else worked for them so why would anything else work for anyone else?

And so the response in leaving AA meetings is always the same: fear. You will relapse and die if you leave. AA is the only way.

Dependency

Now the truth of the matter is, most people will relapse if they quit going to AA meetings, but only because most people are dependent on them as a means of sobriety.

Understand that this is not how AA was originally intended. Dependency on meetings was never part of Bill Wilson’s plan. In the old days meetings were few and far between, maybe one or two a week. And the program of AA was about working the steps, not about daily group therapy through a continuous stream of meetings.

Today, people who attend meetings are almost abusive of the system. They use the meetings as daily group therapy, and maintain sobriety through a social dependency. This is not what AA was originally intended as.

Unfortunately, this is what makes up the bulk of AA today and so if you ask people what is the number one cause of relapse they will tell you that it is a lack of meetings. For them, they are absolutely right.  If you take people who are dependent on meetings and then take the meetings away then yes, they will relapse.

But who wants to be dependent on daily meetings? This is almost as tedious as drinking was.

So what is the solution? The solution is to break your dependency on meetings and transition into a real life of recovery that is fueled with passion and purpose.

Transition

The goal is to transition from early recovery where you are constantly learning about addiction and networking with others to a life of long term sobriety where you are actually living the solution on a daily basis. This is ultimately the goal of recovery and if you stay stuck in the meetings then typically you will not grow much further than a very low level of recovery.

The key is to push yourself to grow holistically. Why holistically? Because our alcohol addiction affected us in so many areas of our life–physically, mentally, spiritually, and so on. Many in recovery mistakenly think that the solution is spiritual. It’s not. The solution is much bigger than that. It is holistic.

This means that in long term recovery, you will push yourself to keep growing in new ways. Relationships, emotional balance, working with others–it’s all important stuff and the key is to find some balance in your life and stay involved with continuous growth.

Recovery is a learning process. You are learning how to live without alcohol. This takes a long time and even when you are quite good at it you still have to keep learning new things in order to avoid relapse.

Complacency is the number one cause of relapse and in fact it is the only true cause of relapse if you thoroughly analyze the situation. Ask anyone who relapsed after many years sober and they will always say the same thing: “I got complacent.” (They will also say that they quit going to meetings, which was discussed above already).

So how do you avoid complacency in your life? You have to push yourself. This is the only way to grow and sustain continuous growth. If you’re not going to push yourself to keep growing in recovery then who will? No one will. It is up to you. You must keep learning and growing or you risk relapse. Simple as that.

This idea of holistic growth is nothing new, but applying it to recovery seems to be. For our purposes I refer to this as The Creative Theory of Recovery.

Living the creative theory

Living the creative theory of recovery for me has meant that I had to find a way to reach out and help others in recovery. I currently do this in 2 ways, neither of which involves a 12 step program. One way is online and the other way is at a treatment center that I work at full time. Both have become very fulfilling parts of my recovery and both are easily replaceable if I choose to move on.

This brings up another key point: find a way to help others in recovery on a regular basis and you have huge insurance against relapse. As I just pointed out, helping others doesn’t have to happen in daily meetings or even within a 12 step program. There is nothing wrong with doing so but there are other avenues with which to connect with people.

If you are living the creative theory then you will find passion and purpose in your life and you will no longer be dependent on daily meetings as your solution. This is not a rant against AA but it should provide hope to those who do not seem to fit in well with the 12 step program. There is nothing wrong with AA and it does work for some but if you are seeking alternatives then the answer is to create your own life in recovery…..