Something Was Always Missing From AA...But It Saved My life.

My personhood was crushed by my alcoholic parents and the death of my father at seven years old. The whole system stigmatized me with living in a low income project. A throw away or poor  latch key child child. My mother loved me, but she did terrible things to me when she was drunk and all by herself. She never prepared me for the future. I think she lead a terribly neglected childhood with her being passed to relatives. Her parents were dead by the time she was 12. We were all traumatized by the deaths of our relatives at a very early age: death, destruction and disruptions all around us.  So you can't cure my alcoholism designed for stock brokers and the billionaires, their problems developed most from oversized egos and failure. On my first  drink, I remember the booze taking away magically all the sorrows and burdens I carried on my shoulders. The shame of being poor, living in a low income inner city housing project and somehow causing my father's death. And the pain of my father's death at 42 years old, an alcoholic mom with a infant and two children. It was a utterly tragic situation and somehow I survived it. The pain of that for years was so astronomically deep even till today. I somehow blamed myself for this, I was either dead drunk, or I wanted the world to beat the shit out of me for causing this tragedy. Or I  made them beat the shit out of me. My father Joe Mulligan was dead by congestive alcoholic heart failure by the age of 42 years old. He was called up for WW II and the Korean war. Maybe PTSD?  He had seen a lot of shit. This is freakin so tragic I can hardly talk about it today. I got so many deep scares on me today. I am more like this women than the billionaire Wall-Streeters: 

  Quite the opposite: They’re drinking because they have so little power, because all they’ve ever done is follow the rules and humble themselves, because their egos have been crushed under a system that reduces their value to subservience, likability and silence.

The Patriarchy of Alcoholics Anonymous

— from medically assisted treatments to cognitive behavioral therapy to the emerging use of psychedelics including psilocybin. For most of the people I know who have found success in recovery, it isn’t just one but a combination of treatments that ultimately works.

Women are the fastest-growing demographic becoming dependent on alcohol, which means we’re on our way to being a majority of participants of recovery programs. There’s no question that we need help. But we don’t need to give up our power.

AA was a miracle for those men who, until then, had almost nowhere to turn for help. It was radical in that it was free and it was fueled by an ethos of service. But it grew out of a fundamentalist Christian organization, the Oxford Group, and as a result, it is undergirded by the same belief system that asserts Eve grew from Adam’s rib.

The values baked into its founding continue to shape the way the organization works, and it still has too many echoes for my liking of the ways women are expected to blame themselves, follow instructions and fall into line in a patriarchal society.

I know a lot of women in recovery, in my real life and social media social circles, and through the recovery program I run. They aren’t drinking themselves numb because they are awash in oh-so-much power, or because of some pathological inability to follow rules or humble themselves, or because their outsize egos are running the show, as A.A.’s messaging would suggest. Quite the opposite: They’re drinking because they have so little power, because all they’ve ever done is follow the rules and humble themselves, because their egos have been crushed under a system that reduces their value to subservience, likability and silence.

When I entered recovery, I didn’t need to do a searching inventory to catalog all of my character defects. They had been played back to me my entire life by almost everyone around me. I was highly aware of the parts of me that were wrong, unruly and messy — those things that made me unlovable, or worse, unladylike. Ever since I could remember, I’d asked God to take those parts away. I drank to feel a sense of wholeness that had been conditioned out of me by society, to combat a powerlessness that was my birthright as a woman.

Submitting to the rules of A.A. was the last thing I needed. Instead, I tapped into a combination of existing approaches to recovery. I focused on developing self-trust, agency, compassion, self-nurturing and a reclamation of the agency I’d given up.

The antidote to my drinking problem was learning it was safe to trust myself, developing a sense of confidence and rejecting the humility women are conditioned to embrace. I also turned a critical eye on the society that helped make me sick in the first place.

In other words, the antidote to my drinking problem looked a lot like feminism.

To be sure, A.A. works for many people, including many women, and has saved millions of lives. I don’t want to see it dismantled or discourage anyone from trying it out — I simply want more people to recognize it’s not for all. There are many other evidenced-based options available now — from medically assisted treatments to cognitive behavioral therapy to the emerging use of psychedelics including psilocybin. For most of the people I know who have found success in recovery, it isn’t just one but a combination of treatments that ultimately works. 

Women are the fastest-growing demographic becoming dependent on alcohol, which means we’re on our way to being a majority of participants of recovery programs. There’s no question that we need help. But we don’t need to give up our power.