I once had a conversation with someone in recovery in which I asked which his home group was. He told me. I asked what he liked about it. He said that people were ‘honest’, there. I asked what he meant by that, because it couldn’t be that he thought they were dishonest at other meetings (although, to be honest, that is precisely what I thought he meant). He said that, at that meeting, they were ‘real’. This brought us no further, because it also implies that he believes people at other meetings are not ‘real’. He expanded: At his group, there were lots of people who were sober a long time who would experience regular difficulties and talk about applying the programme to such difficulties. Yet, apparently, the arising of such difficulties was a constant phenomenon. He found this useful. Honest. Real.
On one level, this is quite reasonable. It’s a good thing to hear people talk about the application of solutions to problems. But let us examine this more closely. If something is useful, instructive, illustrative, or practically helpful, I would not typically describe that as ‘honest’ or ‘real’. The unavoidable implication is that not to have constant difficulties years is in simply not honest or real. In other words: the best that can be hoped for is having problems but also having ad hoc remedies. Fly swatters rather than a solution to the fly problem.
As someone who has been sober a long time, I have to say I do not really experience difficulties on any significant scale and have not for a long time: and certainly not emotional ones, at least not more than occasionally. I have emotions, but they’re not really the subject matter of meetings. The ordinary, non-pathological emotions of life are not problems to be solved or difficulties to apply a solution to. I certainly have to put thought and effort into navigating my complex life, but that’s the deployment of skill, not firefighting. There are certainly situations that arise and generate interesting or instructive lessons, but the basic algorithms were learned a long time ago, and recent experiences more typically serve as examples not of how the programme can be used to extract me from practical or emotional predicaments but of points essentially learned long ago and in the process of ongoing refinement and understanding.
I’m already on the other side of the looking-glass from the maze of endless emotional challenges. In other words, I’m no longer the emotional incompetent I was when I got sober.
This problem-'solving' mindset is really a method of remaining spiritually sick but avoiding ever paying the price of guilt. The motto: I’m unhappy, but it’s life’s fault, not mine; and today I have somewhere to come to talk about it, to obtain relief.
To be attracted to such meetings is to set the goal of still having difficulties after many years and specifically not having solutions: the ‘solutions’ to difficulties that keep recurring are not solutions at all but methods of shoring up the problem, like duct tape round broken pipework or a strut holding up a wall that cannot stand without it. If you solve a problem and the problem comes back, that wasn't a solution.
Sometimes AA is presented as a sort of balm or ointment for the inevitable ongoing onslaught of ‘alcoholic emotions’ (essentially instability, lability, touchiness, volatility, or immaturity). Such an ‘application of solutions to problems’ is not really solution-oriented: it’s relief-oriented, and the relief lies in absolving oneself of guilt for still being unstable, labile, touchy, volatile, or immature by presenting such as a ‘human response’ to ‘life’ that ‘keeps on happening’ (‘life’ being ‘lifey’, ‘lifey’ meaning horrible). The purpose of relief is actually to keep the problem in place and avoid the actual solution: the destruction of self. To have problems, to have difficulties, is to be wedded to self. To have situations that are promptly turned over to God is the way out of this. No self, no problem, no difficulty, only God’s miraculous works.
I like solutions that actually solve problems and ways of living that avoid such problems arising. I like meetings where people who are years sober live in the solution rather than constantly fire-fighting teenage emotions. Moving along this path represents real progress. That’s the honest truth.