November 20 - Discontent in the middle of things

1 post / 0 new
Medea
Medea's picture
Offline
Last seen: 15 years 8 months ago
OLGA member
Joined: 09/17/2005 - 8:19am
November 20 - Discontent in the middle of things

This is a citation from a longer post made by an AA member in a forum. I found it worth thinking about. Please visit www.livejournal.com/commu...45582.html to read the whole post.

"I see and hear a lot of discontent from people recently about what they're getting out of their sobriety. Not only here on LJ, but also among the people in the fellowship in my area. I know what this is like. I've been through it recently myself. I was looking around wondering what the hell was going on because there seemed to be a whole lot of things not related to helping other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. Meetings seemed to have turned in @#%$ fests about all kinds of things which had nothing to do with alcoholism or the recovery from it. So many of the people showing up at meetings seemed to just be totally full of @#%$ or just there to make themselves feel better by either telling someone else how to run their lives or by getting as much attention as possible for what was going wrong in their lives. I'm not talking about any kind of really big problems either, death of loved ones, terminal illness, @#%$ like that. I'm talking about "My mother ****ed me off," "My room mate broke my TV", etc. You know what I'm talking about.

I was just really unhappy about a lot of things in the fellowship, the people running around keeping the rumour mill running and so on. But, I was lucky enough to be shown something which took care of all of that. What it boils down to is if I want things to change or I don't like things being done, I can't change what others are doing, I have to change what I'm doing. I did. I stopped spending so much time looking at what I didn't like about the fellowship, what was bothering me about the people in it and so on, and starting being a part of the things I really love about AA. I started a meeting in which the topic comes from the literature three times a month, on the fourth week of the month we ask, "Is there anyone who has not been through the Twelve Steps or who is in their first six months of their sobriety having trouble with a sobriety threatening issue?", that way the meeting is always about the newcomer or the person who has yet to get the solution. I started reading the literature more often so I knew exactly what message I was carrying into meetings and that I am coming from the common solution which has worked so well for seventy years and not playing junior therapist, or practicing medicine without a licsence (no matter what anyone says, AA has no opinion on whether or not anyone takes anti-depressants, it's an outside issue), and making available to others the solution which has saved my life"
Alex Anthony