The most abusive part for my household regime was being sworn to secrecy.  I couldn’t trust my friends, their parents, or any of my teachers with our secrets—so I was isolated in my fear and guilt. As a teenager, my mom tried to make me confess that my uncle molested me.  I almost admitted it a few times because it was what my mom wanted to hear.  I felt the same way in AA when I made a moral inventory or I listed those I had harmed. The more names I added to the list of those I had hurt, the better AA liked me.   I needed to take personal responsibility for what others did to hurt me, so if I was upset that I was raped and beaten I needed to look at what I did to provoke being raped.  Victim blaming was something I could do to myself without anyone else’s help.

In AA I often heard that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action expecting different results.  By 2011, when I was arrested for my third DUI, it was clear to me that going back to AA meetings was not going to break the cycle for me.  And, so, I told my counselor at residential rehab that Alcoholics Anonymous was one of my triggers.  Now, because I was court ordered into treatment, the risk I took by speaking up against AA was being thrown in jail.

I wanted to recover—who doesn’t?  I made it clear that I was not rejecting help, only that my AA experiences were hurting me. The treatment center documented my struggles with spirituality, since I was an atheist.  One counselor explained to me that addicts aren’t able to imagine abstract ideas, and that my denying a higher power was another failure of mine.  But I wasn’t going to allow them to confront me until I broke down and gave up on my own beliefs and values.  Aren’t those the same techniques that abusers use to get victims to knuckle under?

My need to speak up about AA was as important to me as resolving my relationship with my mother.  I was determined to find my own way out of my own mess. I had to scramble to find rides to outpatient treatment because mom regularly refused to take me.  She invited herself to a court hearing, where she told the court and the audience that I was breaking her heart, had gotten worse after rehab, and was a horrible mother to my kids.  A day after that performance, I had my first full-blown relapse—I drank myself into a hospital.

I decided that I’d never set foot in another AA meeting, and instead I started a secular S.O.S. meeting. And, while I knew I had to stop trying to make my mom happy at my own expense, she could still hurt me badly.  She threatened to evict me unless I signed over custody of my son to her.  She did evict me just before Thanksgiving, without any place to go to.  I ended up staying with a friend who lived more than twenty miles away from my work. There was no bus line, so I had to arrange transportation with a rotating cast of friends.  Meanwhile, my mom was upset that I didn’t want to be her friend on Facebook.

For the next eight months, I worried that I would get in trouble for not going to the three AA meetings a week I was court ordered to attend. I attended S.O.S. instead, and I was prepared to tell the judge that I would rather go to jail than go to another AA meeting.  I worried about my mom’s irrationality, which was escalating.  During a Mother’s Day brunch at my grandmother’s nursing home, she said she saw my current boyfriend hit my dad, and started a melee. She seemed totally out of control.

Two months later, my mom, age 65, suddenly died. The last time I spoke with her, she yelled at me.  I had come to terms with the fact she was ill, but dead is forever.  I broke down and for a few months I drank like a fish.  Maybe more than people usually do when someone dies, but in terms of my life I was having a normal reaction to a very abnormal situation.  Since Christmas of last year, I drank twice, but only a couple of drinks each time.  I haven’t taken any medications since I left rehab. The man I live with now drinks a couple of beers occasionally.

I managed to inform my long lost, supposedly evil, uncle that his sister had died. We had a gathering with her side of her family, whom I thought I’d never see again. For twenty-three years (I am now 32), I obeyed my mom and never talked to them.  My children don’t know them.  My mom often said, “I don’t have a family,” and that was how I felt my entire life.

I no longer have to deal with my mother, for better or worse.  And I don’t choose to deal with AA.  Yet, for nearly everyone, AA is the only way to treat alcoholics, as though everyone will benefit from the AA experience.  But I didn’t.  I loved my mom so much I would rather hurt myself than hurt her.  I found it extremely easy to point out my faults.  I didn’t need the 12 steps to remind me of my character defects – my mother had made me only to ready to recognize them.  Fortunately, I  learned enough in therapy to know real recovery involves loving yourself as well as acknowledging when you are weak and wrong.

Juliet Abram is a clerk at a tool shop in Pennsylvania.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/em/149036

http://aarmedwithfacts.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/when-aa-hurts-guest-column-at-psychology-today/