We Started An AA Meeting

Hey, Cadre. Chris Edrington back here with some more sober lifestyle nuggets. I guess today I wanted to talk about this specific AA meeting that some friends of mine started. I helped him a little bit about 20 years ago, maybe 17 years ago. I can't remember exactly, but the way. The reason I want to talk about this is that this meetings format was designed to help. It's an all men's meeting to help those people who attend this meeting to engage with more people. It was designed specifically around that.

And so there's a format at the AA meeting where it's called problems and solutions. You can raise your hand and you can say pretty much anything you want. You can say, hey, I'm having a hard time with this. I don't know about a sponsor. I hate my sober house manager. My mom's on my back. I can't find a job. I'm freaking out, or I don't know anything about step three, or I don't know anything about step seven. You can say whatever you want, and then what will happen is three to four people will share their experience with that topic.

They will chime in, and they will talk about, this is what I did when I was faced with that, as opposed to saying, here's what I think you should do, which, you know, direct advice in AA is commonly sort of shunned, but it happens all the time. It's happening right here because I'm telling you what to do. So, anyway. And. But this is an AA. So here's the. Here's the reason why I wanted to turn this into a video. I was sitting with the guy, one of them and two of them that helped start this meeting for coffee this morning.

These are guys I got sober with, and I've been sober 25 years, and they have 20 something. I don't know what. And we have been literally sitting at Starbucks together for 20 years. I mean, for ten years, we were there every single morning. That's where I got that giant frappuccino thing from. They had a display at the Starbucks, and they were remodeling, and they gave it to me. They also gave me a bunch of furniture that I used in my sober houses, and some of it is still there, which is amazing.

So we started this thing, or we hung out in this very tight group in these coffee shops around St. Paul, the meeting or the topic, and people would talk about stuff. There was a little bit of angst or pushback around what you could and couldn't say in AA. So we wanted to open it up a little bit. And there are meetings in AA that have crosstalk and they allow crosstalk and most don't. And I don't really want to get into that because it's really not that. I just want to make sure that we're not. I'm not.

I'm not denigrating any kind of aa stuff. I love AA and what it does for people. I just think that this particular meeting helps build those things in early recovery that I'm always talking about connections. People, people, people, people, people, people, people, people relationships with other alcoholics. That's where, that's. This meeting format allows you. It gives you more. Let's see, what's the right word? It makes it more. It makes it easier to access people because they are in front of you talking about what they're struggling with, what they're good at.

Somebody's talking about struggling with this. Three guys are talking about what they did when they struggled with that. And you get to go after the meeting and walk up to any one of them and say, man, the way that you dealt with that, man, that's what I needed to, you know, that's what I needed to hear today. Or you hear that sort of cliche a lot. But what I'm trying to say is we need to find inroads into other people's experience. We need to be able to connect with other people in terms of their similar experiences to ours.

That's where the magic happens. That's where the magic happens. In the sober house, in AA, in the general community. I'm not alone. I'm not that different from you. You got this. You got a life and a job and paychecks and girlfriends, and I don't have any of that. And I want that at you having that. How do I get that? I want to be that guy. Right? So those are sort of anecdotal ways of looking at it. But the meetings can give you more vehicle or more agency, I guess, might be the word to figure these things out.

Because what people would tell you with three, four years of sobriety, because the light really has come on at that point, they will most likely tell you, if you took a poll from a bunch of people, that the relationships and the models and the examples and the people they met and the things they learned through those people is what changed their life. It gave them the confidence to do it. It gave them the opportunity to do it. You could come to this meeting and you could tell the whole group, I am a moron, I am an idiot.

I am doing things so wrong. I am still stuck in my head. I'm doing all these things wrong. I'm living in my apartment by myself. I barely make it to meetings. I'm still crazy in my head. And a whole bunch of people are going to respond in the meeting. But then after the meeting, a whole bunch of other people are going to come up to you and say, hey, man, me, too. Me too. There isn't anything more powerful than another alcoholic walking up to you and saying, hey, man, me too. Let's talk about it.

It's gold. That's where the magic is in early recovery. AA is the place where those people are. But the dynamic happens in general in the greater community, and we designed this AA meeting to just push that up and push on that theory a little bit to make it even more available for new people. So new people in AA and St. Paul can walk into that meeting and go, wow, this is not what you hear critically, especially young people, is a bunch of, you know, stuffy old men talking about their, you know, war stories from 30 years ago.

These are young people talking about what's in their head every week. It's. It's super important, it's super valuable, it's super helpful. And I think I needed to express that because I like to talk about what's current, and that's what happened today, currently. So anything about early recovery, any kind of recovery stuff, I'm your guy. So sign in. Sign up to Cadre, and there's some incredible people there with a lot of good things to share. Till next time.