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Originally Posted by Crimson Ghost
I am powerless over my bills, and nothing but money may restore me.
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Folks, to be fully blunt with you all, I've seen more snide, self-righteous sentiment here on this board to this point than I have in any AA room I've ever been in. (Granted, I've also never been in a place that Rock described, but still.)
You lot can drink and put the bottle down. Congratulations. You are not an alcoholic. An alcoholic is not "that guy at the bar that has one final drink before last call". Alcoholism is a form of a mental disease whereby the victim simply cannot feel good about him or herself without an external stimulus to that particular part of the brain. Alcoholics use booze. Other drug users use their particular drug of choice. Sex addicts bone. Alcohol for an alcoholic is just the way that particular person manifests their problem.
The public speaking thing, you'd be amazed. First of all, someone doesn't walk in on their first day and spill their guts. It takes quite a while. Further - and this is just my hypothesis - people are spooked about speaking to crowds mostly because they know/see/interact with the people in said crowd on a fairly regular basis, therefore any error or public humiliation will stay with them long after they have left the podium.
In AA, you (by and large) don't know the people in the rooms. Everyone's on a first-name basis, which seven times out of ten is usually an alias. When you get up to speak, you know that (A) what you're about to say is very similar to what you've been hearing others say for the last X meetings you've gone to with your own personal twists to it, and (B) what you say in that room stays in that room. It won't be a topic of conversation at the water cooler, people won't be looking at you funny at the bowling alley, or at the grocery store, or when you pick your kid up at school. When you get up and say your story, nobody for whom it isn't their first time looks at you judgmentally beacuse they recognize the guts it takes to stand up and they also know they've been down a parallel path.
We hear terms "higher power" and "turning your life over" and we make them punchlines. But the fact is that these people cannot simply "stop drinking". They can't take control of themselves, by themselves. They admit this to others, to themselves, and I don't think enough of us realize the sheer magnitude of that admission in a society like ours where self-control and self-reliance come so highly prized.
Say what you will, make all the jokes you want, but the fact remains that there's some serious fucking courage in a lot of those meetings. It's not something to be mocked. It's something to be lauded.