How To Cope With Feeling Alone After Leaving AA.

I have stated before that the reluctance of one to leave Alcoholics Anonymous is due to an initial and then prolonged brainwashing, scrubbed in the tenets of AA into the newly sober. One enters the rooms in his weakest state, usually right after initial detox withdrawal, which all of us remember as a glimpse of hell itself. He is exhausted from the walk in the inferno and now will enter the next phase of recovery, which the emotions ride like the roughest roller coaster at the park. Insomnia is ever present and the little he does sleep is induced with strange dreams and graphic nightmares.

Alcoholics Anonymous becomes the newly sober’s safe haven.

Humans are social animals. I am an exception to this rule but that is an exception, not the rule. They form tribes, whether in area of residence or on the top floors of corporate America. The communities comprise of commonality. A neighborhood isn’t a mix of mansions and paupers. People naturally gravitate to those in which they have life goals in common. A community in the workplace may be toward the end goal of the company or comprised of complaining toward the injustices of the company. But regardless of the scenario, people want to be around their own.

In these communities of commonality evolve friendships. This is why we are socially stratified as a species. Animals may have a pack but they aren’t really considered friends with each other like humans. They operate on primitive instincts and humans run on intellect and emotions. That is Darwin or Magic Elf’s great separation from us and all the other species on the planet. We seek our own based on that very intellect and emotion. Those of high financial status naturally drift toward others of similar status. The same rule applies with individuals stricken with poverty. Athletes have friends who are fellow athletes and alcoholics associate with those who sit next to them in the tavern.

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And in the community located in the rooms, friendships develop like any social setting. Except it is much more intense in the AA meetings. They are indoctrinated that it is the forever addict whose only close relationships could be other addicts as all will go to their graves with this master status etched into the headstone. Hence, why so many who cease drinking and trade alcohol addiction for addiction to the rooms end up divorced. Alcoholics Anonymous is a diseased tribe but no one can say it isn’t a close knit one.

It is already hard enough for someone who wishes to cease being a part of AA, the twelve steps and all the mantras that follow when that person decides to leave. The reaction will be a snarl from the wolf pack. Fear tactics will follow. The sponsor will harass you by phone after the last meeting. You can’t make it on your own. AA is the only way. We’ll be here waiting for you when you screw up.   

There is also the effect I mentioned in another article of suddenly having no tribe at all. You can’t go back to your pals at the tavern, outside of the tavern they weren’t alcoholics and now the only place you had commonality with you just exited out the doors. That alone will keep people for years in the rooms after they knew intuitively that they should have left.

But you’ll say there is the risk that once you walk away from the tribe, you will lose the friends that forever reside in it. And I am stating very clearly. It isn’t a risk. You are going to lose them. You may try to hold on to those relationships, but as the sun sets, they are going to end. For one cannot live in both worlds of one which is forever diseased and the other which is on the path of holistic recovery.

This concept is true outside of the rooms as well. When you are living your fifties, you aren’t the same person who was living his twenties. Ideas, politics, religious beliefs and mental mindset metamorphose with time. Sometimes friends remain on the same karmic path hence remain as close later in life as they did earlier. Other times those paths diverge. Have you ever looked up a once good friend or acquaintance that you have not contacted for years or even decades? If you both walked the same trail, it is described as picking up right where you left off those years ago. But there are instances when you realize you are on the phone with a stranger. You click off with the uncomfortable knot in the pit of your stomach of thinking you could have just randomly picked someone to talk to from the phone book. All of us who have been around for more than a few decades have lost friends who were close for years, sometimes since childhood, in which we came to awakening that we no longer had anything in common with them.

The difference is when you lose a friend, usually you have a plethora of other friends as back up. But if AA is your main social setting, your tribe of commonality, you won’t have this failsafe. You aren’t going to lose a friend from the rooms. You are going to lose them all.   

AA is a cult. I equate many times that Alcoholics Anonymous is no different than a fundamentalist Christian or any other religious cult. I know what Christian fundamentalist cults are; I’ve had friends from their churches and dated one for a time. You basically have to join their cult or you have to lose them. For they will not be satisfied until you are one of them. I had one couple I was friends with from the Evangelical community. They were good friends for decades. Not one single time when I talked to the husband or wife did they not try to convert me, whether directly or subtly. There was never a time when the wife didn’t bring up scripture, never once in any conversation in over two and a half decades. I finally had enough and let them go.

The people who are brought up in fundamentalist churches and try to leave don’t just lose one couple as friends like I did. They will be met with a tidal wave of anger from their tribe. Many don’t have the fortitude to step beyond the perimeter. If they do, they can never be friends with their former cult members again. If they attempt to continue the relationships, there will never be a time when their friends don’t try to reign them back into the clan.

There are liberals and conservatives who are friends. They remain friends because they aren’t so obsessed with their political beliefs that they can’t ignore the differences and embrace the usually many more things of commonality. It is the same if a run of the mill Christian marries a Jew. The overall highway of both parties leads to the same destination. They just use different lanes.

But this isn’t the case with cult members. Cult members are fanatics. And there are certain traits to cults that other groups don’t own. One of those is anger if you leave. Another is the coming harassment from the members who will try to retrieve you. They can’t just agree to disagree and ignore belief differences like regular people. Their master status is the tenets of the cult. The doctrine is the focal point of their lives. If you take that doctrine away, they have nothing else. That concept is what keeps the long sober in the rooms year after year.

The AA member won’t leave it alone once you leave. You can try to keep him as a friend and you will fail. Every conversation will gravitate to the steps or the mantras. He will always be trying to pull you back in or condescendingly prophesizing of your future downfall. Eventually you will have to let him go and all the others who were friends from the cult in the rooms.

You have to look at these losses as an advancement in your being, even if it saddens you initially. They weren’t positive people. They weren’t enhancing your life. I never stayed in AA long term so didn’t develop friendships in the circle. But I have lost friends outside of it since sobriety. I was an alcoholic and for well over a decade. One friend I had since my reconnaissance team days in the military in my early twenties. He is a late-stage alcoholic today. I didn’t realize until I let him go that every time I visited, I went back ten or fifteen years to the toxic person I once was. You mirror who you associate with. Another long-time friend wasn’t an alcoholic but had the same chaotic life. I didn’t recognize it during my years of alcoholism because I was the same. Simply put, I outgrew him. A few years after I quit the barley, I began to notice that I dreaded seeing him and was counting the hours to leave. It took several more years before I realized why. Although he wasn’t an alcoholic, his life reminds me of when I was. He didn’t do anything wrong but I had to put great distance between us.  

You can find a new tribe. Today, I only associate with people who are on the path to advancement of Self. I have few people who I consider friends but the ones that I do are engaged in holistically healthy lifestyle. They are always trying to advance themselves in career or side pursuits. They embrace the constant pursuit of excellence. And we all rise with the tide of positivity.

It will be painful to lose friends who are cult members. But it is more painful to keep them. When you walk away, you build a new community. Eventually the old one will stop searching for you. But you’ll be surrounded by people who are in constant pursuit of those peaks in the distance. When you join that footrace, your new tribe will reflect the new strength and healed soul from your former addiction. And you’ll carry that fortitude with you every step of your now reinvented life.  

To journey on a tale of epic transformation on a 2,660 mile trail check out: THE SHEPHERD AND THE RUNNINGWOLF: A PATH TO FORGIVENESS ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL

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John Barleycorn: taken from Jack London's memoir of his alcoholism. John Barleycorn: First published, 1913