Product Description
Currently there is nothing even remotely like this book describing life in AA, or how AA “lessons” are applied in the lives of sober members. What has been written about how and why AA works
misses the mark. With all its good intentions, you never walk away with a clear sense of exactly how AA changes people’s lives, and what it is exactly about their lives that actually changes. People have to believe there’s going to be a “payoff”; some tangible way for them to measure the value they’re going to get from their efforts. This book gives you those measurements. It’s a road map; a user friendly guide. Using short, easy to read directions, the book describes the “payoff”. Specifically, the actions alcoholics and addicts take, and the changes they achieve, real changes, that allow them to stay clean and sober, and live comfortably in their own skin.
Can I Stop Drinking? Changing Your life in Alcoholics Anonymous
I decided to write my first review because I’ve always felt that while our AA tradition of “attraction” rather than “promotion” probably saves all of us from a lot of self-promoters who may or may not ultimately do well in their sobriety, drinkers and their families never seem to get a clear sense of what we actually do in AA. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I’ve always thought we were doing struggling alcoholics a disservice by not letting them know more about what our program can really accomplish in their lives.
What’s the payoff?
OK. Everyone knows that the immediate payoff of getting involved in AA is that large numbers of men and women find a true way to not drink (or take drugs for that matter) one day at a time, for a very long time. For me it’s worked that way for more then 20 years, and I didn’t even get here until I was 44 years old.
But while the “not drinking” success is more then many folks can even imagine, it’s actually the entry card to a life most of us could never have believed was even possible before we got here. How does this happen? It’s simple, we change! Change “what” you ask. Well just about everything there is about us, that’s all. We change the way we deal with life; the way we deal with our wives, girlfriends, boyfriends and families; the way we deal with our jobs; the way we deal with our driving, resentments, rage, anger, and the feeling that if everyone simply did what we told them, everything would turn out fine. But they don’t, and more and more everything turns out badly. “We step on peoples toes and they react, and when they do, we feel more insecure then ever”. We actually come to believe that we can, and do, care about something or someone other then ourselves. Sound familiar? The purpose of this little book is to look at all of this, the REAL payoff we get in AA; The way our live’s change, the specific aspects of our personality and our behaviors that constitute the change, and the specific actions in AA that we are encouraged, directed and guided to, that make all of this possible. Sound great. Well, if your an alcoholic of my type it probably sounds like fantasy-land. You know what, it isn’t fantasy-land. It’s my life, the life of the men I “sponsor” (a kind of mentorship we do in AA), and the lives of hundreds of men and woman I’ve met in AA around the country. Hey, the book is only 78 pages, I promise it won’t be a waste of time. You could spend a few hours and a few bucks doing a lot worse things, right?
Rating: 4 / 5