The Atheist and the 12-Step Program (an introduction)

Did you hear the one about the atheist

who walked into the 12-step program?

(Hint: he didn’t find God)

by

Peter

I'm writing this story to give outsiders a sense of what goes on in the 12-step programs. I know that when I was first considering attending one of these programs, I was very wary and skeptical, particularly given that I am an atheist and I knew that there was a lot of stuff about a “higher power.” I ended up doing a year in program, six months of hard time, and six months of maintenance. It was an enormously powerful experience for me, and I am still grateful for it.

 The beginning

It was on December 7, 1992, that my wife told me that she wanted a separation and a divorce. (December 7 already was Pearl Harbor Day, which should have been enough negativity for one day.) We had been together for 20 years at that point, dating and living together for eight years and then married for 12. We had two young daughters, ages six and 10.

My wife’s announcement came to me out of the blue. I thought things were going along okay for the two of us and for all of us as a family. I knew that my wife had been going through some depression, but I had no hint that this was coming.

We went to a counselor to try to talk things through, but basically, this was a Humpty Dumpty that couldn't be put back together.

Along the way, my wife, who had had her own problems with alcohol in the past, had tried going to AA. She had, however, stopped drinking some years earlier, so AA was not all that relevant. Instead, she found what she was looking for in ACoA (Adult Children of Alcoholics), a program for people with alcohol issues in their family. While she was growing up, alcohol had been an ongoing “silent” problem with various of her family members, in particular her mother. ACoA helped give her a lot of insights about the dynamics in her family and how they played out in her own personality.

Since I was long past my own experiences with heavy drinking, and since alcohol was not any sort of issue in my family, my wife suggested I might want to look into CoDA, Co-dependents Anonymous, a 12-step program for people whose primary issues involved personal relationships.

All that higher power stuff? I was definitely not eager to check it out. At one point, my wife took me to an AA meeting in New Hope, Pennsylvania, just to see what it was like. It was an open meeting, so there was no problem with our being there.

I remember some guy who was telling his story – “telling your story,” what your life was like before, how you got to the program, and the changes that it has meant in your life, is a frequent centerpiece for a larger weekend meeting. The guy went on at considerable length, recounting the stupid, self-destructive, and often dangerous things that he had done earlier. I remember thinking that I didn’t really believe he was over it. He was enjoying talking about it in a kind of way that many of us enjoy telling stories of our stupid but endearing antics in the past. Let's face it, going on about how terrific sobriety is is not all that exciting.

So that certainly didn't encourage me about the 12-step movement.

In the end, I suppose it was pretty much desperation that led me to my first meeting. There’s a lot of talk in the program about how you have to “hit bottom” before you can come to the program, and I had definitely hit bottom.

Walking in the door

The meetings of this particular group were held in a small church in Kingston, NJ. I didn't know what to expect, but there I was.

There was a group of people sitting in a circle in the middle of the room on uncomfortable folding wooden chairs. I don’t remember exactly what I said in that first meeting, but it was the first time I had acknowledged what had happened with my marriage to anyone else publicly. It was, I suppose, a counterpart to “coming out.” It was no fun at all. I hated making it real, but I realized I no longer had a choice.

It was probably pretty much that way for the next meeting or two as well, and then I began to actually get to work on everything.

One of the terms that people use a lot in connection with program is “letting go.” It sounds so gentle and easy and peaceful and wafting. You just open your fingers and…let go. The reality is way messier. After all, “letting go” is the last thing you want to do at that point. You want to hold on to everything, everything you had, everything you loved about the past, everything you still want to be just as it was. So you sit there with your hands clenched and your arm gets ripped out at the socket, and it hurts like hell and bleeds all over the place. And you have no choice.

Once you start the process, and if you stay with it, it just happens.

How a group works

At this point it's probably a good idea to describe just how a group is set up.

Someone who is familiar with the program acts as a leader for that meeting. The role of leader rotates from meeting to meeting, depending on who is available and is interested in taking responsibility for that particular meeting.

At the beginning of the meeting, the leader reads a prepared script from a loose-leaf notebook. There is no winging it in terms of laying out the ground rules and explaining how things work.

One of the key requirements is a promise of confidentiality and anonymity (“What happens here, stays here”).[1]

Then the people would go around the room and introduce themselves with their first names, often adding something to the effect of: “Hi, I'm John, and I'm a codependent.”

During the weekday meetings of this particular group, the next step would be reading from one of the books about codependency, such as Melodie Beattie’s Codependent No More. (Beattie has written a number of books on codependency issues.) Each person would read a few sentences or short paragraph and then the next person would continue with the reading.

Once the end of the chapter had been reached or an appropriate amount of time had been spent reading, the meeting would then move on to sharing. Anyone who wanted would raise their hand and the leader would recognize them and let them talk. (The rule was that each person was to limit themselves to 5 minutes.) Often the sharing began with reflections on what the material that we had just read meant to them and how it connected with their own experiences.

In some cases, other people might follow this up by sharing about similar experiences in their own life and what they had done and how they had felt, or people might want to talk about something different that was going on with them. Around holidays, there was usually a wealth of stuff to discuss about what happened or didn’t happen with their family get-togethers.

No crosstalk

One of the most important rules in sharing was “no crosstalk.” What this meant was that when you talked, you talked only about your own experience, you did not comment in any way – positive or negative – about what anyone else had said. Obviously this meant that you did not criticize anything that anyone else had said or done. But equally importantly, you did not offer approval or sympathize with anyone else about anything they had done or said. So if someone talked about a very bad or very sad thing that had happened to them, you did not pat them on the shoulder, or give them a hug. You could pass them a box of tissues, but that was it.

This may sound a little bit strange, but I think it was the single key to the power of the program. This was what forced you to own what you said.

If you had someone criticize you, you could spend your energy being defensive. You wouldn’t have to bother thinking about it.

If you had someone give you a hug, you could just wrap yourself up in that. You could stop feeling your feelings and just snuggle in.

This way, when I said something, I just flopped it out there. No one else was going to do anything about it. It was mine, and I had to own it.

I should note that the no crosstalk rule apparently does not apply to all 12-step programs. I heard people say that in AA, people would often call other people on bullshit excuses and that sort of thing. After all, alcoholics do a brisk trade in excuses and self-delusion about their drinking, and other alcoholics are the best people to see through it.

For codependents, who are all about worrying about what other people think, crosstalk would short-circuit their opportunity to face their own feelings on their own.

Affirmations

Sometimes at the end of the meeting they would pass around a list of affirmations, and people, if they wished, could read one of them aloud. I wasn't terribly fond of this, since to some extent it veered a little closer than I wanted into the Saturday Night Live parody affirmations of Stuart Smalley. But sometimes they were actually a useful exercise in helping people find something positive to say about themselves.

The meeting would end with people standing in a circle holding hands and reciting the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,The courage to change the things I can,And wisdom to know the difference.

 For all my wariness about the “higher power” business, I never really objected to the Serenity Prayer since it really did seem to capture a fundamental truth. At the same time, however, actually figuring which is which doesn’t ever seem to get all that easy.

I should probably note that, although this varied from group to group, the people in my group were very strict about not allowing anyone to try to end a meeting with the Lord's prayer. It wasn’t necessarily that they shared my objections to anything having to do with God, but that many of the people in the group had suffered from growing up in highly religious families with very rigid views, so conventional religion was kept carefully out of the mix.

Codependency

It’s probably time to try to take a shot at defining codependency. Basically, to my mind, being codependent means constantly worrying about what other people will think, and not paying attention to your own feelings. You find yourself becoming the default setting for dealing with everyone else’s needs and problems. At the end of this tunnel, it’s easy to feel yourself completely disappearing. After all, your feelings aren’t important, and you probably haven’t done a good enough job of taking care of everyone else. Hell, you don’t even know what you feel or want anymore anyway.

I’m sure there are plenty of better descriptions available on the web, but this was kind of my experience of it. For many years, I had commuted by train into New York City every day to work at jobs that left me highly stressed out. The commute itself typically took a total of four hours or more each day, so by the time I got home, I was drained and exhausted, although I was still able to enjoy reading a bedtime story to my daughters. I finally found a swim group to swim with, but it meant getting up before 5 AM, arriving at the pool no later than 5:30 AM, and afterwards rushing from the gym to the train station. So the one thing I did for myself, I did when everyone else was still asleep. I never inconvenienced anyone else in any way.

By the time my marriage fell apart, other things had happened. I had gotten fired from my last job, and rather miraculously, my wife found a full-time job locally that pretty much duplicated my previous salary once you factored in the lack of commuting costs. My hope was to be able to launch a freelance writing career, but that’s tough anytime, and was complicated by my schedule of picking up my daughters after school.

In any case, between job issues and the end of my marriage, there wasn’t much left of my self-image. CoDA gave me a great setting for trying to think about who I was and what I wanted.

Codependency is complicated

One of the interesting things about CoDA was that it didn’t have any clear answers.

In AA, there was one clear metric – stopping drinking. Obviously, there were plenty of personality issues and lots of personal and family devastation too, but if you didn't stop drinking, nothing else was going to change.

At one point, I attended a meeting of Overeaters Anonymous, another of the 12-step programs, to see if it could help me lose weight. (As it turns out, the emotional turmoil that I was going through proved to be a spectacular weight loss program, and I dropped 40 pounds without even thinking about it.) What struck me about the Overeaters meeting I attended was that they seemed to have fixated on food as the enemy, and much of the meeting focused on the topic of “weights and measures” as a way to control the situation. In particular, they had a strict rule when people were sharing that they were not allowed to mention any specific kind of food because someone else in the group might have their craving triggered. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were mentioned as a particularly dangerous type of food to even talk about. (Since I’ve never been a fan of Reese’s, this struck me as weird.)

I can understand alcoholics needing to stop drinking, but no one can just stop eating. And if I had the kind of discipline and self-control needed to do the whole weights and measures thing, I wouldn’t need the meetings.

With CoDA, the problem is a little bit like the food problem. As human beings, we are by nature social animals, and we enjoy and benefit from helping others and doing nice things for them. So how and when does it doing good for others become a bad thing? Do you just stop helping anyone else ever?

Obviously it’s a problem of balance, but finding the right balance is a bitch. There are plenty of people who have no problem knowing what they want, sticking up for themselves, and even letting other people do undeserved things for them.

But for lots of other people, they know that doing good for others is supposed to be a good thing, and they’re not sure how to hold onto their own identity and to stand up for themselves. They hate confrontation, and this can easily be exploited by others. “Just say ‘No,’ ” is not part of their DNA.

Many people in helping professions, like nurses or hospital aides, would show up, exhausted and drained by finding themselves constantly taking care of everyone else. Obviously they were drawn to their careers in part because of the satisfaction of helping others and being a good person, but now they were just ready to scream.

Many of the members just found themselves unable to stand up for themselves and relationships, and found out that not only were they not appreciated for all their help, but they were not respected either.

A lot of people, myself included at the outset, think of the 12-step program as something that makes you more “spiritual.” I thought of it as being somehow in the same league with New Age churches or something of that sort.

Not true. The truth, at least for me, is that the program made me selfish. Which was a good thing. It gave me the space to think about who I was and what I wanted for me, something that didn't seem to be on anyone else’s agenda.

The “higher power” thing

As I indicated earlier, one of the biggest barriers to me about even thinking about going to a CoDA meeting was the stuff about a “higher power.” People in my group were extremely flexible about the whole idea. I remember someone saying you could think of a doorknob as your higher power if you wanted. I couldn't quite get behind that idea either, so I decided to just not worry about the question for myself.

I remember, however, there was one woman who had suffered all sorts of things in her life including a brutally abusive mother who, in this one particular story, was now reaching out from the grave to hurt this woman even more. And I remember this woman saying that she finally realized that her higher power was “gifting her” with all this suffering to help her learn. Now I admired this woman, and I admired the courage she showed in dealing with all the shit that had happened to her. But the idea of a higher power “gifting her” with suffering? All I could think of were some of those god-awful reality shows where the police show up in a trailer park and arrest the guy who's been beating the woman who called them for help, and then she starts saying, “No, don't arrest him! It’s not his fault. He was just doing it to try to teach me. It was my fault!”

A higher power in a wife-beater sleeveless T-shirt? Not for me.

There were some people in the group who said that when they first came in, they were skeptics or agnostics, but that now they believed there was something there. I never changed a bit. No higher power, no nothing.

But hey, whatever works… No more crosstalk.

A 1-step program

The classic 12-step program follows the AA model. Alcoholics and alcoholism tend to leave a trail of devastation behind them. Broken families, lost jobs, car crashes, bankruptcies, broken friendships and more.

This is where the 12 Steps come in. The idea is that not only does the member quit drinking, but they also undertake a methodical program to address the many problems that their drinking caused along the way.

CoDA, and I assume most of the other programs, have adopted this model as well. So I'm going to include the 12 Steps here, with the understanding that I do so for the benefit of other people rather than for my own use. Besides, what's all this business about admitting their wrongs and apologizing to others? For most codependents, the person they most need to apologize to is themselves.

The 12 Steps (based on AA but adapted for CoDA)

1. We admitted we were powerless over others—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2.  Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3.  Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.

4.  Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5.  Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6.  Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7.  Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8.  Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9.  Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10.  Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

11.  Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12.  Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other codependents, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Some people sought out a "sponsor" who was experienced in the program to help lead them through each of the steps. It was a long and committed and deeply thoughtful undertaking.

For me, the program ended up being pretty much a one-step program: Letting go. The shoulder being torn from the socket, lots of blood, lots of pain, nothing I ever want to go through again. But I needed it, and it worked.

There are a lot of sayings in program, but the one that worked best for me was : "Take what you want and leave the rest." Listening to so many different people telling so many different stories at so many different meetings, I took what worked for me and made it my own.

It may not work for everyone

There are a few additional observations I want to include.

One of the criticisms of the program is that it lacks trained professional leadership. One point I would mention against this is that various people who came to meetings said that their therapist was the one who had suggested that they check the program out, and some used it in combination with visits to their regular therapist.

But it’s true that there are people who the program can't help and really can't handle. I remember one woman, let’s call her Mary, whose behavior and stories were quite bizarre, and who would sometimes break into hysterical laughter while she was sharing. In one story, she told about some problem she was having in her office, and about how she went outside and sat on a bench and chanted to try to levitate the building. She was quite earnest about this. So no, program was not an answer for everyone.

But there were other things as well. I remember someone announcing with the conviction of someone who has stumbled on a new and profound truth, “There are two kinds of people, those in program and those who need to be in program.” She was not, by the way, the only person who recited this aphorism. For me, this worldview was pretty disturbing. To borrow a metaphor from the Iraq war, shouldn't there be an exit strategy? Or at least a prospect of graduation, letting you go back into the world on your own and ready to play?

For some people, program did indeed become a home and a lifestyle. I remember one older man, let's call him Walter, who was a program veteran and a regular with who knows how many years or decades in AA, and now a great many years in CoDA as well. He had been through several marriages and lots of life chaos, and now loved welcoming others into the program. At some point he invited me and some other members of the group to his birthday party, I think maybe it was his 80th, and I was astonished to discover that he had a quite impressive house in one of the priciest and most old-money parts of Princeton. He was not a rocket scientist, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me where the money came from, especially given his alcoholic past.

In some cases, I discovered that my powers of perception were not nearly as good as I thought they were. There was one guy, let’s call him Paul, who was somewhat younger than me and seemed very nice and outgoing. I gathered from some of the things that he said that he had had problems with women in his relationships, possibly involving verbal or physical abuse, although I really didn't know any details. But when I met him, there was nothing about him to suggest any problems at all.

At one point he was going down to one of the islands in the Caribbean where a friend of his had a house and a bunch of people were going to get together and relax. He invited me to join them but I didn't have the money or the time to get away. After he got back he was very excited about what a great time it was and was especially enthusiastic about “all the great recovery that was going on.” I confess my own thought was What the Fuck? Get a life! You go someplace exotic like that, with beaches and palm trees, and you do recovery? In any case, shortly after that, he began seeing a very attractive young woman who was also attending the meetings. I heard her talking to someone else after one of the meetings and she seemed to be very happy with the way it was going, but then a couple of weeks later, they had broken up, and she was telling someone that he was still doing his same old abusive stuff.

Finally, there's the rather fascinating story of a guy I’ll call Larry. I think the first time I met Larry, he was leading one of meetings. He was a nice guy, nice enough looking, and perfectly average weight. I mention this last detail because he shared a lot about his days in Overeaters Anonymous and the really grim problems he had had with food addiction, including scrounging in the trash can for the discarded ends of pizza slices when he was on a binge. He had presumably recovered from that, and was working on resolving issues from a rather nasty divorce. He had been going to singles events for the past couple of years, looking for someone new.

Finally, he began to talk about a wonderful woman he had met, and not too long after that, he announced to us that they were now engaged. We were all very happy for him. Then, a few meetings later, as his wedding to his new fiancée approached, he told us the story of what happened the previous weekend. He and his fiancée had attended the wedding of another couple; at the reception, his fiancée began drinking, and on the drive home, she threw up in the car. This was apparently his first clue that she had an alcohol problem, and that she was in fact an alcoholic. He promptly got her started with AA, and brought her along with him to a CoDA meeting where she dutifully fessed up to being an alcoholic. None of this, of course, led him to cancel or even postpone the wedding. I saw him again a few years later when I dropped by a meeting to say “Hi” to people; he had put his weight back on and, for better or for worse, was still doing program. He seemed happy enough, although I didn't feel like asking him anything about his wife or how the marriage was going.

Even beyond these individual examples, there were certain things that seemed to happen to people who had been in program a while. There's a tendency to share too much too easily. You get used to people laying it all out, and not passing judgment. You lose some of that more cautious social filter. I'm reminded a little bit of the “T” groups that were a fad for a brief while in the seventies. (I'm not even sure what the “T” stood for, maybe “trust”?) The groups used to involve a lot of exercises in telling your secrets to people you've never met before, or falling backward and trusting a group of strangers not to let you smash onto the floor. These groups created a warm, fuzzy aura of openness, which had absolutely nothing to do with the realities of the world once you walked outside the door. In the real world, you do not give everyone a hug. And in the real world, you need to know when to share and when to shut up, and who is safe to hug and when.

This kind of openness also creates obvious opportunities for game-playing, although I only recall one real case that bothered me. There was a guy who showed up one day who a few people knew from other meetings elsewhere; someone mentioned that he was very good at program. He was very self-confident and I remember a group of us going to a pizza place afterwards and having him take over the discussion and sort of go around asking each of us questions (“interrogate” is the word that comes to mind). This was not the program way. People shared when they wanted to and what they wanted to. I had the feeling he was kind of a predator, with his manner offering an easy way to impress some woman whose self-esteem problems had driven her to program in the first place. I wanted no part of him, and fortunately, he never showed up again.

Overall, I think that the fact that the problems I saw were so rare and so many people were being genuinely helped is pretty good testimony to how well the program is designed and how important its concepts are.

Sharing

Sharing was my favorite part of the meeting – especially when I was the one doing it.

My first couple of meetings, I was mainly just feeling crushed, and I don't think I brought much to the table except pain. After that, however, sharing became a terrific outlet. I had taught college for many years and always loved having an audience. Now I had an audience again and I worked hard to be interesting and entertaining, as well as, of course, humble and profound. I remember one woman who was obviously considerably more conventional than I was and who was going through a difficult divorce of her own. One Saturday morning when a group of us went for coffee after the meeting she told me that at the beginning she thought that my ideas and the things I was saying were pretty far out in left field, but after a while, she realized I was right.

I don’t know if the desire to be entertaining qualifies as some kind of variant of codependency or maybe crosstalk, since it certainly put a lot of focus on what other people thought of what I was saying. But I was always serious, and I knew what I was doing was as serious as anything I had ever done.

None of it was easy. Very little of it was fun.

I realize I haven’t really explained much about how the program “works” on people, or how it worked on me. The truth is that I don’t remember all that much of the details, and my own story isn’t all that different or interesting.

I did a year with the program, and I made sure to attend the meeting where I received my one-year coin with the CoDA logo on it. I still have the coin among the other knick-knacks on my bookcase.

Am I “recovered”? I know at the time I learned a lot and changed a lot, and it made a huge difference in what I did and what I was able to do. It's been 20+ years now, and all sorts of things have changed, and maybe some have changed back again.

On an immediate basis, CoDA ended up giving me the freedom to go back to Austin (where I had been a grad student – and had met my wife) and find myself again. Along with my day job, I became a two-step instructor in a honky-tonk and met people and had experiences that I would not want to have missed.

Since then, life has brought me back up to New Jersey. Over time, my now former wife and I got to be friends and talk and get together frequently. At holidays, she and I and my daughters can all get together without having to worry about who goes where when.

Am I happy with things now? Well, I’d like to be rich, or at least have a lot more money. I’m sure I wouldn’t object to being well-known and well-respected for a lifetime of outstanding achievements. But the past is why I am where I am and who I am, and the past is one of those things I cannot change. There are other things I would like to change, but I’m not sure I’m willing to do what it takes. Is there a Lazy People Anonymous program?

I’m not sure that “content” is the word I would use. I guess I’m okay with things, and more so because of what I learned and everything that happened in those meetings.

PS: “It works if you work it.”

One of the odd sidelights of all this is what the program has meant in my business dealings. Previously, when trying to figure out how much money to ask for in salary or in a job interview, I spent much (maybe most) of my time figuring out why I wasn’t worth much and why I should ask for as little as possible. (After all, you don’t want to offend the person on the other side of the table.)

After the program, I became much better at taking my own side and letting the other person deal with their side. In particular, there have been several cases, including one very recently, where I have had to name a price for my work, and rather than going lowball, I have suggested something much higher, with the expectation that we would then negotiate towards the middle (which would be higher than my lowball bid, and in fact would be more or less what I was hoping for). In many of these cases, the other person has, to my astonishment, simply accepted my price, without even trying to bargain. Ask, and ye shall receive. The program never talks about this, and it’s obviously not part of their purpose, but damn, it works.

[1] Some critics of the program object that, absent the legal guarantees of confidentiality associated with talking to a therapist or a lawyer, such promises are totally unenforceable. I never heard of that being an issue, but I can see where it might be an issue with celebrities. Apparently, Monica Lewinsky decided not to try the Sex Addicts Anonymous program because of quite understandable privacy concerns. Who’s going to be able to keep quiet about her and him?