One of the common AA sayings is "your best thinking got you here" and "stinkin' thinkin'" is another popular one. Basically, they have a lot of saying amounting to "don't think, thinking is bad".
https://www.eliterehabplacement.com/overcoming-addiction-2/best-thinking-got/The statement "your best thinking got you here" is used to shut you down if you ever start a statement with "I think" and then disagree with something from the "one true book" of AA that was written back in the 1930s. Effectively, they're locked in with some nutty 1930s alcoholic preacher's view of how addiction works, and they never update that. But if you don't agree with any of it, that's that bad "thinking" at work.
The goal, as I stated, is to stamp out your personality and rebuild your self-image as an "alcoholic" which is a strictly defined thing in the "Big Book" of AA, which you're literally not allowed to question. you're an alcoholic, alcoholics are exactly one way, as stated in the 80 year old book, and without AA all alcoholics will end up in institutions, dead or in prison. Apparently it's a common thing to tell to sober people who decide to leave AA: you'll end up in an institution, dead or prison if you stop going to the meetings.
https://www.wired.com/2010/06/ff-alcoholics-anonymous/Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don't Know How It Works
That won't be a problem for a thickset man in a baggy beige sweat suit. "Doesn't matter how much snow we get—a foot, 10 feet piled up in front of the door," he says. "I will leave my apartment tomorrow and go find a meeting."
He clasps his hands together and draws them to his heart: "You understand me? I need this." Daily meetings, the man says, are all that prevent him from winding up dead in the gutter, shoes gone because he sold them for booze or crack. And he hasn't had a drink in more than a decade.
Process that for a second. The guy hasn't had a drink in 10 years, but he's panicking because they're not holding an AA meeting that day, and he actually believes that if he doesn't attend them he'll "sell his shoes" for crack or booze and end up dead in the gutter.
This is not the mentality of someone who's been
helped, it's the mentality of someone who's been brainwashed, since AA
constantly talks about alcohol. This is in fact how they work. They convince people that the meetings are the only thing standing between them and oblivion, and they make claims that your Higher Power grants you freedom from your addiction, but only
today so you need to keep reconsecrating every day to maintain the willpower thing.
If you really want to help people, get them off booze then reduce the amount they talk or think about booze. Don't do some fucked up daily meetings where the only topic of conversation is booze, and telling them that if they ever stop going then booze will take over their lives whether they want it to or not. It'd be like helping rape victims by having daily meetings where everyone talks about rape and claiming that if you ever stop going, you might get raped.
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Topic: Things that made you mildly upset today thread (Read 1223953 times)