daily gratitude list 3.17.23: My personal view is that the attitudes around anonymity and AA need to start changing. I think, too often, our inclination is to treat AA like Fight Club—and we all know the First Rule of Fight Club. But the AA equivalent of the First Rule of Fight Club is very, very different:
That’s funny. I remember agreeing with several of her points when I first read the article, but I’m glad you caught the omitted half of the sentence she left out.
Saving this so I can re-read her piece and read your response after I’ve had my coffee.
Ms. Szalavitz is a persuasive writer. Perhaps she would be less persuasive if she had provided context (thanks TBD!) for her assertions. And, of course, the writer/speaker has control of the narrative and can direct the audience down the path that leads to the preordained conclusion.
When I read her Atlantic article, from 2015, my reaction was the same as yours when she dismissed the idea of a hijacked brain. At that time the “hijacked brain” had been entral to my understanding of addiction for nearly 20 years, but it really threw me when she said "it makes it sound like we were turned into some kind of zombie." That does make the idea sound a bit extreme. Cognitive dissonance and confusion reigned.
However it wasn't long after that when I read about Brazilian zombie ants, victims of a fungus that hijacked the brains of ants and turned them into zombies, undead ants, who forgot about being an ant and made their way not back to their colony, but up to a place where their invaders could direct them to attach themselves and feed upon leaves that would feed the next generation of fungal spores that would consume the ants body which then would be up off the jungle floor high enough for the spores to get blown around a wider area than if they had just been killed and eaten from the inside out, back on the floor of the jungle. They are not the only example of zombification.
Here’s a long shot. Why did I poison my gut microbiome, night after night and wake up sick and tired? Were there traitorous fifth column microbes at work in my belly? Construction work is hard enough when a person is feeling good. Was my gut sending messages along the Vagus nerve to my brain, causing me to go on autopilot and turn into the bar?
In spite of my aversion to repeated hangovers so savage that they ruined my days, and hence my life, alcohol turned me into a willing, even eager, zombie. Every day after work, my vows of the morning were forgotten as lethargy turned to anxiety and the memory of that surcease from all worries was enough for me to yield to Slick’s blandishments to “have just a couple, go home, eat supper and get a good night’s sleep.”
I like to think I am fairly good at detecting patterns, but after 24 years of this cycle, I still had only a muddy grasp on what became a certainty. My "couple beers” were going to lead to me plugging money into the juke box at closing time, to hear Willie once again sing, “Good Night, good night, the party’s over…”
As the old saying goes, Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern, four times is a standard.
“Where we part company is when the author, Maia Szalavitz, asserts that AA is nothing more than peer-support, a helpful add-on to the non-secular, real therapy that actually cures alcoholism. She asserts that AA is really a form of Secret Christian Worship that is suitable only for protestant alcoholics.”
I am not sure who I am replying to, but I was trying to reach michaelmohr. And intend to get back to "The Spittoon."
I do not know where I stand (if anywhere) on your free trial.As a newbie, I have subscribed to a number of free subscriptions, but due to health issues, I have not read them all.
I finally clicked your link on AA, as I, like TBD, have tired of seeing AA take all the cheap shots, and that article from 2015 I have "intended" to write a response ever since, but...
Since I don't know where I stand, I am not going to go on abuut that. You can see some of my ideas on Thanks for Letting Me Share.
You are a good writer and I would love to exchange ideas with you and TBD on AA, but I cannot afford to pay for subscritpions, until such time as I might get some paid subscribers. I am 80, retired and trying to help my family through tough times, so I am going to cancel the Washington Post and NYT and a few other things, for now.
Besides, they offfer too many distractions and the internet is rife with "rabbit holes," as well. Given that I write and write and write, but I don't "post and post and post) because I am an Imperfectionist, (letting the perfect get in the way of any good I might have in me.)
I am hoping that my health issues are behind me now as I had a triple bypass shortly after joining Substack, then had a stroke, followed by another heart attack (family history includes rhythm issues as well as high cholesterol). I now have a pacemaker and am on blood thinners, so I am mildly optimistic that I can download a useful portion of 80 years of experiences with using, treatment, AA, counseling, traveling, reading and bad choices. In fact, I have kicked the bucket...over and am only going to put a few items, all related to recovery from having my brain hijacked. Given the current battle between authoritarian and democratic governance, I can't help but notice the fact that the reptilian brain has hijacked humanities future just like it my own system hijacked my higher brain functions.
I know. The above sentence doesn't account for the newer understanding of the brain, but this was going to be brief. I am not used to writing in Substack. I usually write in Word, the copy/paste, but I was only going to write a brief reply. But I can't seem to stop. I am addicted to "More" even when I write.
I agree with you that politics at AA is holding a bottle to the heads of new folks. I seldom confront anyone at a meeting, but did once with a person I liked who wanted to talk about how a certain politician was upsetting him and made him want to drink. I find that I can come into a meeting stressed out, but leave relaxed and inspired. I don't need my heart rate to accelarate when opinions on outside issues are raised. I love to discuss such, but not in AA.
One time I walked in the door to a meeting already underway and didn't even get to a chair, ready to share what a tough day I was having, and heard, "I have to remember that I can start my day over at anytime." That was the end of my intention to review my day.
I couldn't stop writing on this unfamiliar platform, because the thoughts were flowing. I will copy this before I hit post and see it bounce back.
BTW, I just realized that I am not on your page, but TBD's , so you might see this. I don't know how I will handle subscriptions once I begnn posting more, but my plan is to keep it free so I can get feedback from anyone who is interested. Substack has something like 35 million subscribers and something like 2 million (?) are paid. Noahopinion is making a good living on paid subscribers, but leaves a lot of them open for free. I guess I don't know if they are allowed to comment, but guess I will find out when i revert.
I imagine that romorrow's Writer Hours will have a lot of commentary about "Notes." Looking forward to it. I made a comment on their "Introducing Notes" piece and encountered my first flat-out troll. Maybe Elon has set loose Chatbot on this new rival. I will post that on Merlin's Newsletter, the name of which is going to change to Early Recovery soon.
My last stroke left me with an impaired left field of vision that wiped out my peripheral vision on the left side and blurs both sides, so proof reading is difficult. I basically don't "look at" the world. I "peer" at it.
Ms. Szalavitz seems to be making a cottage industry out of dogging AA. I was introduced to her in the late 1990’s, when she was one of the people Bill Moyers interviewed for his *Close to Home* series on PBS. She spoke of waking up one time to a disgusting scene and deciding to quit. It happens, but sometimes results in a dry drunk that isn’t sobriety. Maybe that is why she is taking it out on AA.
I say “cottage industry (side hustle to “Sober Girl.”), because the first time I saw her again, she had penned an opinion piece in *The Atlantic* wherein she expressed some of the same uninformed opinions as in the NYT.
At one point in that article, she said “…and if you don’t get sober, they blame you for not trying.” Indeed.
You can’t sit through meetings, cursing the court for “interfering with your life,” and “get the thing” by ass-mosis.”
I stumbled across the Atlantic opinion a few years ago. My BTL (Blood Temperature Level) shot up to the boiling point and I vowed to write a companion piece, Cognizant of the strictures about publicly mentioning membership in AA, I decided to title it, “Why I resigned from AA after 35 years.” I would start by presenting her points, then my opinion of her points and at the end, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go rejoin…”
With that many years of sobriety, my blood could boil, without setting my “go ahead and drink to calm down,” neurons to firing. A piece of advice I got in treatment, “Don’t pick any fights that you that are not absolutely necessary,”had kept me from boiling my blood for enough years to rewire my brain. “Neurons that wire together, fire together.” And the corollary, “neurons that *do not* fire together, lose their connection.”
Like when of those old head phones with a frayed wire on one side, in early recovery your “stay sober wiring” is frayed and does not make a good connection. Meanwhile, Slick’s voice is being delivered over broadband cable and drowns out any feeble sounds from your mammalian brain (remember the children, your job, your health, your freedom…)
I have made a number of notes on her opinion, but I need to gather them. I will expand on this in Marlin’s Newsletter, but another piece of advice I got back then was “Nothing good happens after midnight…”
Since my stroke, heart attack last fall, I have had impaired vision in my left eye that leaves blurry areas as I peer at the page, so please excuse typos and “wordo’s. You have something above that looks like the latter, but I don’t know if I can find it right now. Looking for that right now, I saw a few more, but “…Midnight…”
Lies are bad news. Bad news. Bad news. And Maia deliberately lied when she consciously did not include the CBT success rate. That alone made her “opinion” suspect on several levels.
What else did she “forget” to tell the reader? What did she “Ignore” as she did her research? “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest…” Where did she decide to stop pursuing a line of thought? When she got the answer she wanted.?
I am a big believer in the Scientific Method. I get more skeptical about “scientists all the time. “Publish or perish,” can be the death of “science’s” credibility.
That’s funny. I remember agreeing with several of her points when I first read the article, but I’m glad you caught the omitted half of the sentence she left out.
Saving this so I can re-read her piece and read your response after I’ve had my coffee.
Ms. Szalavitz is a persuasive writer. Perhaps she would be less persuasive if she had provided context (thanks TBD!) for her assertions. And, of course, the writer/speaker has control of the narrative and can direct the audience down the path that leads to the preordained conclusion.
When I read her Atlantic article, from 2015, my reaction was the same as yours when she dismissed the idea of a hijacked brain. At that time the “hijacked brain” had been entral to my understanding of addiction for nearly 20 years, but it really threw me when she said "it makes it sound like we were turned into some kind of zombie." That does make the idea sound a bit extreme. Cognitive dissonance and confusion reigned.
However it wasn't long after that when I read about Brazilian zombie ants, victims of a fungus that hijacked the brains of ants and turned them into zombies, undead ants, who forgot about being an ant and made their way not back to their colony, but up to a place where their invaders could direct them to attach themselves and feed upon leaves that would feed the next generation of fungal spores that would consume the ants body which then would be up off the jungle floor high enough for the spores to get blown around a wider area than if they had just been killed and eaten from the inside out, back on the floor of the jungle. They are not the only example of zombification.
Here’s a long shot. Why did I poison my gut microbiome, night after night and wake up sick and tired? Were there traitorous fifth column microbes at work in my belly? Construction work is hard enough when a person is feeling good. Was my gut sending messages along the Vagus nerve to my brain, causing me to go on autopilot and turn into the bar?
In spite of my aversion to repeated hangovers so savage that they ruined my days, and hence my life, alcohol turned me into a willing, even eager, zombie. Every day after work, my vows of the morning were forgotten as lethargy turned to anxiety and the memory of that surcease from all worries was enough for me to yield to Slick’s blandishments to “have just a couple, go home, eat supper and get a good night’s sleep.”
I like to think I am fairly good at detecting patterns, but after 24 years of this cycle, I still had only a muddy grasp on what became a certainty. My "couple beers” were going to lead to me plugging money into the juke box at closing time, to hear Willie once again sing, “Good Night, good night, the party’s over…”
As the old saying goes, Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern, four times is a standard.
I like your writing.
“Where we part company is when the author, Maia Szalavitz, asserts that AA is nothing more than peer-support, a helpful add-on to the non-secular, real therapy that actually cures alcoholism. She asserts that AA is really a form of Secret Christian Worship that is suitable only for protestant alcoholics.”
Check my recent piece out: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/misunderstanding-alcoholics-anonymous
I am not sure who I am replying to, but I was trying to reach michaelmohr. And intend to get back to "The Spittoon."
I do not know where I stand (if anywhere) on your free trial.As a newbie, I have subscribed to a number of free subscriptions, but due to health issues, I have not read them all.
I finally clicked your link on AA, as I, like TBD, have tired of seeing AA take all the cheap shots, and that article from 2015 I have "intended" to write a response ever since, but...
Since I don't know where I stand, I am not going to go on abuut that. You can see some of my ideas on Thanks for Letting Me Share.
You are a good writer and I would love to exchange ideas with you and TBD on AA, but I cannot afford to pay for subscritpions, until such time as I might get some paid subscribers. I am 80, retired and trying to help my family through tough times, so I am going to cancel the Washington Post and NYT and a few other things, for now.
Besides, they offfer too many distractions and the internet is rife with "rabbit holes," as well. Given that I write and write and write, but I don't "post and post and post) because I am an Imperfectionist, (letting the perfect get in the way of any good I might have in me.)
I am hoping that my health issues are behind me now as I had a triple bypass shortly after joining Substack, then had a stroke, followed by another heart attack (family history includes rhythm issues as well as high cholesterol). I now have a pacemaker and am on blood thinners, so I am mildly optimistic that I can download a useful portion of 80 years of experiences with using, treatment, AA, counseling, traveling, reading and bad choices. In fact, I have kicked the bucket...over and am only going to put a few items, all related to recovery from having my brain hijacked. Given the current battle between authoritarian and democratic governance, I can't help but notice the fact that the reptilian brain has hijacked humanities future just like it my own system hijacked my higher brain functions.
I know. The above sentence doesn't account for the newer understanding of the brain, but this was going to be brief. I am not used to writing in Substack. I usually write in Word, the copy/paste, but I was only going to write a brief reply. But I can't seem to stop. I am addicted to "More" even when I write.
I agree with you that politics at AA is holding a bottle to the heads of new folks. I seldom confront anyone at a meeting, but did once with a person I liked who wanted to talk about how a certain politician was upsetting him and made him want to drink. I find that I can come into a meeting stressed out, but leave relaxed and inspired. I don't need my heart rate to accelarate when opinions on outside issues are raised. I love to discuss such, but not in AA.
One time I walked in the door to a meeting already underway and didn't even get to a chair, ready to share what a tough day I was having, and heard, "I have to remember that I can start my day over at anytime." That was the end of my intention to review my day.
I couldn't stop writing on this unfamiliar platform, because the thoughts were flowing. I will copy this before I hit post and see it bounce back.
BTW, I just realized that I am not on your page, but TBD's , so you might see this. I don't know how I will handle subscriptions once I begnn posting more, but my plan is to keep it free so I can get feedback from anyone who is interested. Substack has something like 35 million subscribers and something like 2 million (?) are paid. Noahopinion is making a good living on paid subscribers, but leaves a lot of them open for free. I guess I don't know if they are allowed to comment, but guess I will find out when i revert.
I imagine that romorrow's Writer Hours will have a lot of commentary about "Notes." Looking forward to it. I made a comment on their "Introducing Notes" piece and encountered my first flat-out troll. Maybe Elon has set loose Chatbot on this new rival. I will post that on Merlin's Newsletter, the name of which is going to change to Early Recovery soon.
My last stroke left me with an impaired left field of vision that wiped out my peripheral vision on the left side and blurs both sides, so proof reading is difficult. I basically don't "look at" the world. I "peer" at it.
Ms. Szalavitz seems to be making a cottage industry out of dogging AA. I was introduced to her in the late 1990’s, when she was one of the people Bill Moyers interviewed for his *Close to Home* series on PBS. She spoke of waking up one time to a disgusting scene and deciding to quit. It happens, but sometimes results in a dry drunk that isn’t sobriety. Maybe that is why she is taking it out on AA.
I say “cottage industry (side hustle to “Sober Girl.”), because the first time I saw her again, she had penned an opinion piece in *The Atlantic* wherein she expressed some of the same uninformed opinions as in the NYT.
At one point in that article, she said “…and if you don’t get sober, they blame you for not trying.” Indeed.
You can’t sit through meetings, cursing the court for “interfering with your life,” and “get the thing” by ass-mosis.”
I stumbled across the Atlantic opinion a few years ago. My BTL (Blood Temperature Level) shot up to the boiling point and I vowed to write a companion piece, Cognizant of the strictures about publicly mentioning membership in AA, I decided to title it, “Why I resigned from AA after 35 years.” I would start by presenting her points, then my opinion of her points and at the end, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go rejoin…”
With that many years of sobriety, my blood could boil, without setting my “go ahead and drink to calm down,” neurons to firing. A piece of advice I got in treatment, “Don’t pick any fights that you that are not absolutely necessary,”had kept me from boiling my blood for enough years to rewire my brain. “Neurons that wire together, fire together.” And the corollary, “neurons that *do not* fire together, lose their connection.”
Like when of those old head phones with a frayed wire on one side, in early recovery your “stay sober wiring” is frayed and does not make a good connection. Meanwhile, Slick’s voice is being delivered over broadband cable and drowns out any feeble sounds from your mammalian brain (remember the children, your job, your health, your freedom…)
I have made a number of notes on her opinion, but I need to gather them. I will expand on this in Marlin’s Newsletter, but another piece of advice I got back then was “Nothing good happens after midnight…”
Since my stroke, heart attack last fall, I have had impaired vision in my left eye that leaves blurry areas as I peer at the page, so please excuse typos and “wordo’s. You have something above that looks like the latter, but I don’t know if I can find it right now. Looking for that right now, I saw a few more, but “…Midnight…”
I will trade you “proof reads” tomorrow.
Lies are bad news. Bad news. Bad news. And Maia deliberately lied when she consciously did not include the CBT success rate. That alone made her “opinion” suspect on several levels.
What else did she “forget” to tell the reader? What did she “Ignore” as she did her research? “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest…” Where did she decide to stop pursuing a line of thought? When she got the answer she wanted.?
I am a big believer in the Scientific Method. I get more skeptical about “scientists all the time. “Publish or perish,” can be the death of “science’s” credibility.