12-Step Model Of Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting

I attended an open meeting at the Holy Name Church Broadway on 96th Street. The meeting takes place every Friday evening at 7:30 PM and it runs for one hour. The leader of the group immediately self-identified and was very personable. He started the meeting by reading the 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. He then welcomed the speaker of the night, a 40 something female who has been sober for the last 10 months originally from New Jersey. She was quick at sharing her past with a lot of enthusiasm and energy. She was the victim of negligent parents and used alcohol early in life to fit in with her friends and to deal with her depressed mother. She experimented with every single drug in the dictionary, dated many drug dealers and became a drug dealer herself for many years.
It was a very interesting and sad history to hear. Currently, she lives in a sober house in Manhattan and is optimistic about keeping her sobriety. She described her current life now as a woman dealing with “big girls problems” as suppose to problems from her previous life as an addict. She ended her presentation by saying that …show more content…
People who are spiritual in nature may benefit from a 12-step model. I feel that it has more of a behavioral tone but for me can be a little bit superficial. I personally feel that an approach that makes you understand the emotional forces driving the addictive behavior is more helpful and complete. For example, Dodes believes that helplessness is the common trait in people with addiction. Therapy can offer the space to get to the bottom of what exactly is making the person feel helpless. After the insight about causes of helplessness is uncovered, mindfulness and insight meditation can be used to work on fixing the underlying feeling of helplessness so that the addictive behavior can be