Over here at AfterParty, we receive an onslaught of questions from people about addiction and recovery. And well, our video series AfterParty Answers gives us an opportunity to address them. In this episode, Anna David and Danielle Stewart examine past AfterParty stories to answer a reader’s question: can you be addicted to AA meetings?Want to see all of our AfterParty Answers videos? Good news! You can simply click here! You can also submit your questions for future episodes here.
Here’s the deal: the question asker’s girlfriend is trudging the road and he has concerns that she’s traded her old habits for a new one of meeting addiction. Anna and Danielle are all over this topic, both ardently arguing that there’s no such thing as an addiction to meetings and that the entire concept is nonsensical. Meetings, they argue, make people feel better—unless they don’t (in which case those people should look for alternate paths that do). Even people who don’t support the idea of 12-step programs agree that group support is beneficial for overcoming any difficult situation.
Anna and Danielle reference a Johnny Plankton story about why he still goes to meetings after years of sobriety. As Plankton writes in the piece, “There’s a guy in my group who’s 26 years sober that still goes to four or five meetings a week, and he says this often: ‘Insanity may be doing the same thing over and over, but for me, insanity would be for me to stop doing what has worked so well for so long.'” The girls also talk about one of Danielle’s stories where she writes about how she goes to meetings despite hating them. As she explains in the piece, “Much like working out, no matter how much we might despise showing up and doing the work, we typically feel much better afterwards.”
There are, of course, many nuances to this query. So if you want our complete answer, check out this vid. While the girls aren’t in any way medical professions (emphasis on “aren’t in any way medical professionals”), they are sober folks who have not only grappled with some of the issues being asked about but have also written scads of articles for this very site on them. Tune in every Wednesday to see what you, our faithful readers, want to know.
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