The Sober Truth Review

4/5

I’ve been sober coming up on five years now. It is one of the few unquestionably good decisions I’ve made in my life.

This book does a good job talking about some of the negatives of Alcoholics Anonymous. I would say it’s worth a read if you’re involved in the community. I’ll start the caveat that I don’t think I’d be sober without having gone to a lot of AA meetings in the first six months or so. But I’m definitely drifted from the community the longer I’ve been sober, for many of the reasons discussed in this book. Over reliance on religion, shame based focus, heavy denial of the self.

There’s a bit of a “ostrich with its head in the sand“ approach to some of the negatives in the aa community and unfortunately, what ends up happening is that people (me) who are dissenting often times find it easier to kind of fade away. I don’t see anything productive in trying to change something that’s helped a lot of people over decades, and I don’t think if I tried, it would result in much of anything other than a lot of frustration for all parties. But because of that, you’re left with just the sort of heavily traditional, highly invested folks who stick around long term. If you’ve been any meetings, it’s usually the old guy who looks like a bit of chewed up shoe leather sitting in the back talking about how “ it used to be this way” So I guess maybe i’m here to tell you you do not have to listen that guy to stay sober.

Only thing you have to do is not drink, and if you do that long enough, the rest of it’ll start to work itself out. I found that there was a combination of forcing myself to do step work early on and just hanging on by the tips of my fingers, but what I did manage lead to positive experiences and improved quality of living. That got me more excited about continuing to do it. It’s really relieving to not carry around the baggage of things you’ve done at some point. But there is this sort of dehumanized route advice to just blindly “find a sponsor to the step work“ without any sort of exploration of the individual.

If you’re really wrestling with it, go to some different meetings. There’s a lot of different types and usually similar. People are attracted to similar stuff. I spent the first three months only going to “atheist“ meetings, which now I don’t really connect with.

If you’re reading this random review on the Internet and find yourself struggling with overview of it, maybe check out some other books about sobriety. That helped me a lot. Books are safe, you take the parts that hit close to home and seem truthful and you just ignore out the rest of it.

I think if you’re looking at this review and saying, oh yeah, fuck those guys, maybe check out like SMART sobriety, I thought Russell Brand’s book was really good without being preachy. And for me, exploring trauma, and things related to that were really helpful. YMMV

Good luck out there