How To Rebuild Yourself After Alcoholism. And Why AA Makes You Weaker.
- chphurst
- Dec 27, 2025
- 7 min read
During my brief interval when I attended a few meetings in AA, in different locations, it was disconcerting to witness the minority of members who actually stayed sober using the techniques established by Alcoholics Anonymous. One would expect to see an aura of empowerment from those who managed to beat a very difficult addiction that leads to the death of many, who did not defeat it. For the strongest people in the universe are not those who had life handed to them easily but underwent tragedy and came back from it. Those who always walked the straight line should be admired and modeled for certain, but the greatest victories are the ones who completely torpedoed their own lives and managed from the bottom of the abyss to not only climb out of it but reach a high summit of greatness.
That isn’t what I witnessed in those few long-time sober members in the rooms.
What I saw in the sages of the circle, those who pontificated to the newly sober that you must follow the AA principles, were not people of tranquility. They were cult-like in their mantras as they smoked those cigarettes at the breaks in-between the circle story sessions of rehashing their once catastrophic lives, which they never emotionally left behind. None of them resembled ones on a fitness program or clean diet, noted by the sugar, nicotine and caffeine dump they engaged in five to six nights a week. They certainly weren’t advancing themselves other than their status as a forever addict leader among other forever addicts, who they claimed would never be relieved of that status.
By the time I entered the rooms, I was eleven months sober. I was halfway through the long, protracted withdrawal phase, which can continue up to two years from the last consumption of John Barleycorn’s magical potion. I was on a highly active physical fitness program and a meditative program five days a week. I was advancing my own career in continuing education in the physical therapy realm. I was writing books, fiction and nonfiction. I wanted to see if AA had anything else to offer in my reinvention of Self. I had family members who had ventured into the rooms and already had familiarity with AA meetings but wanted to investigate for myself. I listened to the senior members who spoke frequently. I felt not only no commonality with them but that we were polar opposites.
Perhaps if I had entered the rooms right after the initial five-day detox, I would have been drawn into AA’s twelve steps and mantras. For no one is strong in this phase of recovery toward cure. I was in the most weakened state I could remember. But I didn’t enter the rooms at that time. I went through the second phase of intense cravings and cognitive chaos that lasts to the thirty to forty-five-day mark. Day forty-five clean was the first day I could say I felt good since I ended the friendship with Johnny B. That was the day I began the reconstruction of Self. By the time I had entered the rooms, I had built a great deal of fortitude. When one has fortitude, it is very easy to decipher someone else who doesn’t.
It was extremely evident that the methods of Alcoholics Anonymous not only did not make participants strong but created a continual weakness in its members. If your life is sober but you are taken hostage by the very group that claims to help you, you do not possess strength. You have a new emotional addiction. Your psyche is addicted to the AA cult. You have become someone who is afraid to leave the safe haven and live in the real, albeit sometimes uncomfortable, world that the rest of us exist in without an hourly meeting most nights to escape from it.
The first reason that the AA method creates weakness in its members lies within the physical plane. Everyone, not just former alcoholics, should be taking care of their physical sphere. The two points to a person’s physicality are fitness and diet. Most of us don’t work the land today. We have become the most sedentary and out of shape people that has ever existed in the history of mankind. Many who never drank excessively are developing health problems due to rampant obesity and lack of movement, where the McDonald’s bag sits in front of the continuous stream from the iPhone.
My recovery plan includes physical fitness engagement four to five days a week. I spend an hour and a half at the gym; thirteen rounds in Thai boxing for cardio and forty more minutes of weightlifting. But you don’t have to lift weights or as long as I do. You don’t even have to join a gym; just finding some cardio engagement for forty-five minutes to an hour, four to five days a week will suffice for a lifetime of excellent health. It could be as simple (and inexpensive) as speed walking right from your doorstep after work.
The second tier to the physical reinvention is the diet. I wrote in my work, Reinvention of Self: How To Change Your Life and Being Forever, that if exercise is the foundation of your reconstruction, then the diet is the cement that holds the bricks together. You don’t have to give up caffeine, just keep it to a minimum, like my daily two cups of coffee. You have to minimize sugar intake as well. I have one small dessert a day. The meals should consist of good carbs and proteins and many vegetables. I have a few vegetable and fruit smoothies daily to cover this intake.
As I stated, the physical reinvention is the foundation of your new mansion. AA’s foundation is built on rotten wood. They ingest sugar, caffeine and nicotine in every meeting. And what type of exercise is the member doing if he is spending his evenings locked away in the rooms? The chances are he is not engaging in fitness at all. Those in the circle don’t concentrate on advancement of Self, they focus on their never-ending recovery. So their physicality is not only not improving, it is being weakened by the very group that claims to help them.
The second plane that is being weakened by AA is the emotional realm. In my program, it is essential to regain a calm mindset. This is not only good for a person’s physiology but helps reduce cravings in the first six months to a year. It doesn’t matter whether you prefer yoga or Zen meditation as long as you have a program that is engaged with the physical routine. The two planes work in harmony. If one is physically healthy, then he tends to be mentally at peace and mental tranquility makes one more likely to continue to stay in good physical health. It becomes a vicious cycle but in a positive way.
Alcoholics Anonymous members are not only not building strength in the emotional plane, they are actively weakening it. Some have claimed they engage in meditation activities which are usually prayer oriented in their rooms. This would be fine if those events weren’t being negated by the toxicity of that constant regurgitation of the past. Not only does the member rehash his own dark existence from his alcoholic days, he gets to live it over and over with the same stories from the other members in the circle. Also, the labels of forever addict and forever diseased are psychic poison for the newly sober. AA is sentencing these souls to be in this weakened status for the rest of their days. Their psyches will not become ones of fortitude; they will transform to a mental worldview of deficient.
The potential for advancement in career or outside endeavors will also be hindered by the AA philosophy. Anything in life that is worth pursuing will take not only effort but a belief that these goals are achievable and deserving of the individual who has entered the arena to obtain them. This is a warrior mindset. It isn’t all just belief, much of progression in life is the ability to construct a strong strategy and willingness to get back up when you fail. Mental resolve is something that can be built from nothing. There are those who were simply born with mental fortitude, but there are also countless stories of many who drew it from a once empty well.
You will not achieve advancement of Self if your time revolves around a forever recovery in AA meetings. First, your off time is spent sitting in that very circle. Time is limited in our existences. If one is going to pursue greatness, that path does not lie in the negative aura of the rooms. If a former alcoholic just spent that evening hour to improve his life, he would find great outcomes at the end of even the first year sober.
There is also the factor of damage to the psyche in the rooms. I just mentioned that in order to achieve success in anything, one has to believe he is deserving of that success. If one unconsciously does not think himself worthy of greatness, that mindset will reflect in any pursuance of it. He is already defeated and will most likely quit at the first obstacle and run back to those rooms for assurance. Ponder this for a minute, AA member. Your priority for the rest of your life is staying sober. But after six months you are sober. At two years the protracted withdrawal phase is over and you can claim cure. You don’t have to forever focus on some method, which fails the majority. You simply keep your contract of never touching the offending substance again.
Your mindset should be one of ever deserving of good things, healthy things in your life, not a worldview that you are a deficit, diseased, forever addict. And if you lose the rooms, you will now have the time to pursue all of those good things. Because Alcoholics Anonymous shuts the door on Reinvention of Self. It is literally walking its members down a path that descends into an abyss: physically and emotionally.
I, like the members in the rooms, also believe in the spiritual plane. But my definition of this sphere is how you look at yourself as an integral part of the universe. Are you living the best version of yourself in these planes above? If you take an honest look at the AA method, you will find that they haven’t been enhancing these planes but weaken every single one of them. And that is why I contend a person’s alcoholic recovery should not include the methods propagated in the rooms. It should consist of every aspect of your being advancing to the best version that is possible.
And to reinvent all of your planes to progress forward check out:
John Barleycorn: taken from Jack London's memoir of his alcoholism. John Barleycorn: First published, 1913
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