In this episode, Arlina Allen explores the truth about 12-step programs and dives deep into the common misconceptions, barriers, and unexpected benefits. Arlina shares her personal journey from resistance to transformation, highlighting how reframing common challenges—like the language of “character defects” and the concept of powerlessness—can make the 12 steps a powerful tool for healing.
Key Takeaways:
- [01:06] – Why 12-Step Programs Are So Misunderstood
- [05:00] – Reframing the Good Wolf vs. Bad Wolf Parable
- [07:22] – The Problem with “Character Defects”
- [15:46] – The Illusion of Moderation: Can You Control Your Drinking?
- [25:14] – Why 12-Step Programs Get a Bad Reputation
- [28:46] – Rethinking the Role of God in Recovery
- [37:35] – Why Words Like “Alcoholic” Can Be Both Useful & Limiting
- [46:31] – The 12 Steps as a Structured Path to Change
- [50:49] – The 4th Step: Why Looking at Ourselves is So Hard
- [54:28] – Is AA a Cult? Debunking the Myth
Connect with Arlina Allen Website | Instagram | Inner Compass Program
Arlina is the author of “The 12 Step Guide for Skeptics” a Certified Sobriety Coach (IAPRC), Certified Hypnotist CH, the Founder of Sober Life School, and host of “The One Day At A Time Recovery Podcast” with over 350 episodes. She helps busy professionals quit drinking and create a life they love! Her class “Reinvent Yourself-How To Rebuild Self-Esteem & End Self-Sabotage” is being taught to those who’ve suffered from low self-esteem, addiction, codependency, toxic relationships and many other issues.
If you enjoyed this episode with Arlina Allen, check out these other episodes:
How to Recover the Person You Were Meant to Be with Paul Churchill
A Journey to Sobriety with Laura Cathcart Robbins
How to Embrace Sobriety with Gillian Tietz
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Episode Transcript:
Arlina Allen 00:00
Anytime we get triggered or angered that is a sign or a place that is covering a wound, and so we need to sort of bring that to the light and process our feelings to resolution so that we no longer carry them.
Chris Forbes 00:21
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear, we see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf?
Eric Zimmer 01:06
If you’ve listened for a while, you know I’ve talked about my recovery, how a 12 step program saved my life, but also how I don’t go anymore. And every time I hear so you’re anti 12 step, I’m not. But when it comes to recovery, Nuance tends to get lost, and that’s why I was excited to talk with arlena Allen, author of the 12 step guide for skeptics. She breaks down the misconceptions that keep people from giving these programs a real shot and how to make them work, even if parts of them don’t resonate for you. We dig into the language of 12 step programs, terms like character defects and how they can be reframed. We explore navigating the spiritual aspects, even if you don’t believe in a traditional higher power. So if you’ve ever wrestled with recovery, been interested in 12 steps, or wondered if a 12 step program could work for you, this episode is worth your time. I’m Eric Zimmer, and it’s time to feed our good wolves. Hi, arlena, welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to have you on your book is called the 12 step guide for skeptics, clearing up common misconceptions of a path to sobriety and often on the show. I mentioned that I was in a 12 step program. I mentioned that I have some concerns about 12 step programs. I mentioned that I don’t go to meetings anymore, and the problem is there’s a lot, a lot of nuance that’s missed in that. And so from my side, I’m excited to have a chance to really explore all that nuance, so that people who are listening a understand, kind of my perspective on that, but also, more importantly, because this is your interview, they understand the perspective that you’re providing. I think you did a great job. Because this idea that you say, at some point, I wish that people, if they had some boundaries, some context, a shift in perspective, they could move past some of these common barriers and get a lot out of 12 step programs. And I think that’s really important, because despite there being lots of other things on offer these days, there is nothing that has the reach and is free that 12 step programs do. It’s amazing that they exist totally, and there are common barriers and misperceptions that I think keep a lot of people out or drive people out after a while, and I think your book does a really nice job of dealing with those. So yeah, I think you really accomplished your mission. That means a lot to me knowing who you are and all of your knowledge. So thank you for saying that. Yeah, that was mission. So we’re going to get to that book in a second, but we will start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent. They say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Oh, that parable, and I have thought about this a lot, and you’re gonna ask a question, not to be reductionist about it, what is so powerful about it is sort of this idea that energy flows where attention goes, like whatever we focus on expands, right? But if we sort of twist it a little bit and say that, you know, it’s not which one you feed, but what do you feed? It Right? Like, I know you’re very aware of like, internal family systems, and I would say, over the last four or five years, since I learned about internal family systems, which is the way to relate to all the parts inside of you, including what we would call, like, the bad parts, is that all of our parts.
Arlina Allen 05:00
Arts have a positive intention, and sometimes they do it in disruptive ways. And I had a mentor early on, who asked me, you know, we would talk a lot about self compassion, and she would ask me, Can you love your unlovable part? And I thought it was an impossible question, because oftentimes the answer is no, I had that experience, but I wanted to cut parts of me out, yeah, or parts of I wanted to kill but that’s not really possible, right? And there’s this old saying, you can’t hate yourself well. And so when she posed that question to me, can you love your unlevel parts? And it was no. But then I was introduced to internal family systems, I began to understand that what I would call like the bad wolf or the bad parts, the greed, the hatred, all that stuff, there was a positive intention for those roles in my life, and as I fed them, love and compassion and understanding and appreciation, recognizing that I was behaving in those ways out of survival skills that sort of lowered the tension in my body. It helped me to release fear and come more from a place of love, which is what I think we would commonly call the Good Wolf. And so the approach to getting rid of the bad wolf is to actually love it. Yeah,
Eric Zimmer 06:19
that leads us right into, I think, something we can talk about with 12 step programs, because there’s a lot of nuance in this and 12 step programs. One of the things that you say right out of the gate, and you say again and again and again, I just want to get it out there for everything else that’s about to follow, is that people are not the program. Thank you. Right. Right? People are not the program. And so as I talk about things that challenge me in 12 step meetings, you’re going to hear me talk about people from time to time, right? And so I think it’s really important that everybody understand that like, people are not the program. You can go to different meetings and get different experiences. You can just ignore the one person that says stuff that you don’t like like. There’s lots of ways to work with that all right. Now back to where we were, which is that you’re talking about loving all these parts of ourselves and the 12 step literature as we go into it. But the 12 step literature is largely based originally on the original text, which was a A’s big book,
Arlina Allen 07:21
I’ll call it some
Eric Zimmer 07:22
tends to be fairly strong in its language about selfishness is our problem? Yeah, we have these character defects that we have to get rid of, right? There’s not a whole lot there, necessarily, at first glance about loving these parts of us. Yeah, that are problematic. I often would hear people say, I’m still a liar, cheating, a thief, and that’s not said in a like, I’m proud of it way it’s there’s some part of me that’s bad, you know, and I need to use this program to get rid of it. So let’s just start talking there as a thing that I do know that rubs some people wrong about 12 step language is that idea they don’t want to talk about character defects. They may feel terrible about themselves already. So let’s help reframe that, or give that some context. Yeah, and
Arlina Allen 08:17
the truth of the matter, listen, that book was written 1935 right? Yep, we’re sort of judging their content of information based on the information that we have today. So we can see the stark contrast in, you know, these ideologies. And so I think, first off, I just want to say that that’s actually very valid. Yeah, it’s very valid to just be like, hey, you know, there is a lot of this language in there that is sort of reinforcing shame as opposed to resolving it, like this idea of character defects. I don’t actually like that word myself. You know, I will tell people to go back to literature all the time. And I do have my own opinions. And one of my opinions is that I like to think of character defects as survival skills, right? Like the character defects, like, if you do read the literature, they do talk about how these are natural instincts, yeah, that are out of balance. So while there is talk about character defects, there is also sort of compassionate language around, hey, this is a natural instinct, and it was just out of balance, yeah, but we do have this negativity bias where we do sort of focus on the negative and discard the positive. And so both things are in it. It just depends on what you focus on, like the good bulls and the babble, but both are actually valid. And I am very sensitive to people who are vulnerable. And you know, to go to this program feeling guilt and shame and to be confronted with that is very challenging on so many levels. And I think, like, when someone you know, kind of hits bottom, and they’re just like, okay, like, there are some things that are not working, I’m willing to surrender and receive and. Information, like you’re actually doing some stuff that’s wrong, just just flat wrong, yep. And so it is a little harsh. There is a lot of focus on character defects, because those are the things that need correct. We don’t need to correct the good things already. Yeah. It’s like, hey, let’s talk about the problems. Let’s bring some solutions and so that you can feel better,
Eric Zimmer 10:19
right? And I think the modern insight that underlies this, which isn’t in the book, and we could debate whether the book should be updated or not, but is that yes, character defects and yes, our selfishness are actually really problems, and they are part of the reason that we are stuck in the mess that we are in the more modern insight is those things exist for a reason. Those things are serving some sort of purpose, and again, that purpose is not working anymore. But it made sense, and so it moves from, as Gabor Mate famously said, Don’t ask why the addiction? Ask why the pain, exactly. But I do think, for me that that idea of, particularly the lines about, you know, selfishness, self centeredness, is the root of our problem. Those changed my life. It’s strong medicine. It is strong medicine, yeah. But for me, it was right because of what I realized was whether I was thinking good about myself or thinking bad about myself, what I was doing was always thinking about just myself, yeah,
Arlina Allen 11:29
yeah. I showed up pretty broken, yeah. You know, self centered to the extreme, self seeking to the extreme. But why was I seeking so hard? Yeah, had needs that were not being met, and all my survival skills that I had developed in childhood were not transferable to healthy adult life. And so, you know, I was met with that strong medicine, but I was just at that point where I was like, my way is not working. And I was in such a state of humility that I was like, Okay, tell me how you did this thing. Yeah, and let’s not get it twisted. You know, people typically go there because their lives are it’s not just that. They’re not going well, they’re going bad. Like, really, right? You know what I mean? It’s like, although there is a lot of conversation now with, like, dry January stuff, like, people are recognizing that living in alcohol free is about optimization. It’s not necessarily because you have a problem, but most people go there because life is terrible. And that’s where I was. I was in so much emotional pain. I was like, do I kill myself, or do I get sober? And it was something I had to deliberate. Was like, right,
Eric Zimmer 12:36
right? And I think that the couple of things that make a lot of this difficult in a way, are that indeed, addiction issues, alcohol use disorder, ranges on a vast spectrum. It’s one person’s quote, unquote bottom is very different than what another person’s is, yeah. And I think also it’s a good thing on the whole that there are alternatives to 12 step programs, because I think even when we get past some of the misconceptions that you’re talking about, they’re not for everybody. So I think it’s good that there’s other things out there. I’m kind of glad for me that there wasn’t me too Right? Because I was dying, I was going to go to jail for a really long time, and I’m glad I didn’t spend any more time than I already had, messing around with apps or this or that, like I just went and it was the only thing that there was saying, and it was a little bit intense, but it worked. It saved my life. You know, they saved my life twice. And so again, I feel mixed, because I think it’s really good that there are alternatives. And for some people, an app will stop their drinking in an optimization type way. Yeah, that would not have worked for me at that point, right? I needed something far more than that same.
Arlina Allen 13:53
Yeah, I think we got several the same year. And I’m also very grateful that there wasn’t anything else available, like there was no recovery memoirs, there were no, you know, there is sober social media accounts, which is kind of one of the reasons why I wrote the book, because there’s a lot of people that are openly bashing 12 step. But, yeah, you know, I’m not one of those that it’s this or and only this, like, I’m an and girl, I’m like, the hill I will die on is the 12 steps are a worthy endeavor. I’m not saying it’s the only thing that you should do. I’m just saying that there are amazing benefits to it, largely for free, and that it’s just a really endeavor. I’m an and girl, so I’m like 12 steps and therapy. I’m yoga and 12 sorry. You know, there’s just so many different modalities. It is such a great time to get sober or or to get alcohol free, if that’s kind of thing for optimization. But I’m just saying in this book that the 12 steps are a worthy endeavor. I just wanted to meet some of the roadblocks head on, which I think are actually very valid, and just be like, here’s a way to round that so that you get the benefit because it benefits your. So good, like you said, it saved your life, me too. But it not only saved my life, like it gave me sort of a very practical and pragmatic way for problem resolution, for self examination, for goal achievement. Yeah,
Eric Zimmer 15:16
I love that idea. And let’s address some of these barriers up front. Okay, I think there are two types of barriers right. Barrier one is, Do I really need to get sober? Barrier two is, do I need to do it in this way, in this program? So I want to talk about category one just for a second. And I think the first one there, and you talk about this is, you know, can’t I just learn to moderate and say a little bit about that? Well, listen,
Arlina Allen 15:46
in society, like alcohol is the only drug you have to explain why you’re not using it, we are just so bombarded with messages of, you know, drinking, it’s fun, and all that stuff. So there’s a lot of external influence to drink, right? And so it’s very hard to come to the just and listen like for me, it was a reliable source of medicine. It was medicine for me, to be honest, it was my way of emotion management that ultimately did not work well for me, because when I just alcohol, there’s like this switch that gets flipped, and all I want is more. And so I did try to moderate for two years after a particularly bad night involving the police, I didn’t end up going to jail, partly because I was dating this policeman.
Eric Zimmer 16:39
Good strategy, perhaps if you’re gonna get in trouble with the law often, yeah, yeah, I never contemplated that one till now. I never lost opportunity totally run this thing out a few more years at least. You know, geez,
Arlina Allen 16:56
yeah, I had a really bad night, and I woke up the next morning, I really hurt my sister and physically and emotionally and super traumatized, I woke up with that horrible, sickening, sinking feeling that something terrible had happened the night before, and I had to hear things secondhand because I was a blackout drinker. Yeah, right. And that’s when I started asking me questions like, Am I an alcoholic? Like, what makes me different from all my friends who drink like I do. And it just like one question, let’s do another. And so I was like, You know what? Let me just try to moderate this thing. Let me just try to learn how to control it. Drink like a lady. Yeah, because I was drinking like a trucker, I was not drinking freaking like a sailor. Lord have mercy. So I was like, let me try to control this thing. And so I spent the next two years in the Self Help section of Barnes and Noble like, trying to figure out what was my problem really? Yeah, yeah, it can’t be this. Truth is, is I was, I was kind of on the right track. But, you know, 30 years ago, I was reading books like, men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, the seven spiritual laws of success or money or abundance. I forgot what it was, a Deepak Chopra book, but I was trying to think my way into right living kind of a thing, and I was trying to moderate so it was like a glass of water between drinks that was eating before I went out. Blah, blah, blah, keep a couple of aspirin and a glass of water by my nightstand. Because when you wake up at three o’clock in the morning with cotton mouth, you’re like, yep, completely dehydrated. I thought, oh, yeah, if I could, you know, prevent the hangover. Maybe that was the thing, vitamins, whatever. So I didn’t have a horrible night. Every night I drank, but when I had a horrible night, it was because I was drinking, and I really just could not moderate. I couldn’t predict what would happen once I started drinking, even with all these crazy plans I had in place, and I kind of joke around that I had two alter egos when I was drinking. I had bad ass bencie or wimpy windy because I was either fighting or crying.
Eric Zimmer 18:53
There’s a third
Arlina Allen 18:54
bloody Susan,
18:58
and literally everybody loved her.
Arlina Allen 19:00
Yeah, I like to joke around that, if I could encapsulate my drinking experience is that if it was in a bottle, a bag or blue jeans, I was doable.
Eric Zimmer 19:12
That’s good. That’s
Arlina Allen 19:13
good, filled void, literally and figuratively, super fun. That’s good, yeah, good times,
Eric Zimmer 19:19
yeah. Moderation is an interesting one. There’s a line from the a big book that seared itself into my brain, which was, I may not get it exact, because I’m a little bit aways from it, but the thought that somehow, some way, they’ll control their drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. Control and enjoy. Oh, that’s right, yes, okay, so control and enjoy their drinking, because I was trying to control and enjoy it. From very early on, I knew, like, hang on. Like something in me was like, something’s off. But I tried moderation too. And the first time that I got sober, I was a homeless heroin addict who was no doubt in anyone’s mind, including mine. I had 50 years of jail time. I mean, there was just no doubt this isn’t working. Yeah, I stayed sober about eight years I went back out, and all I did when I went back out was drink and smoke an enormous amount of marijuana. And over time, it began to dawn on me, this isn’t going so well. Now I wasn’t having external consequences. Everything on the outside was okay. I had the best job I’d ever had. I was getting promoted, you know. But inside, I knew I was really sick, but I also knew that, like, I’m gonna have to be abstinent and go back to recovery. God, I don’t want to do that, so maybe I can moderate. And I thought to myself, there’s a program called moderation management out there. I’m gonna try this. And I was moderation management’s best student for a while. Or what I should say is I was its most ardent student at trying and still got NF. But I remember nights like this, where it’s like 1130 at night, I gotta get up at 630 in the morning. I’m already fairly hammered at this point, and I’m standing by the sink, and my brain is fighting. I’m fighting my brain. It’s like one more shot, one more shot. And of course, I’m going, there’s no reasonable reason to have one more shot. You’re already three or four shots over what moderation looks like. And yet, I mean, I lost that battle more often than I wanted, and I had that realization that you just talked about control and enjoy. I realized I can try and control my drinking, not very well, but it’s miserable. It’s miserable because I’m having that 1130 at night battle over a shot of whiskey that’s tearing me apart inside, or I can just let off the reins and enjoy it, except that at this point for me, there’s a little bit of enjoyment and a whole lot of trouble. And I’m really glad that I tried moderation, management. Like, really tried it, yeah, because it just now when my brain starts that dance up again. I’m like, Nope, you tried. Doesn’t work, not for you.
Arlina Allen 22:01
You had enough evidence. Yeah, I think that’s such important information to how, yeah, like, I love this idea of run the experiment, and we ran the experiment, we ran the moderation experiment, and we gave it the old college try, you know, an experiment. You know, I love the lens of science, because it has a way of depersonalizing things, so like shame and guilt are not involved, but it’s like, let’s just run the experiment. And I ran the experiment, and I tried and tried and tried. I fancy myself a clever girl. It’s like, okay, but an experiment is you have a presupposition, and you run the experiment, you take some actions, right? You have some beliefs, you can make some decisions, you take some actions, and then you examine the result, right? And my results were coming out pretty clear, yeah, that I am just not that person who can moderate. There aren’t some people who can, yeah, absolutely, in all transparency, there are some people who can do that. You know, like you said in the beginning, you know, addiction or alcohol use disorder is a spectrum, so there will be people somewhere along the line who can choose to soften it’s not a thing, or maybe they can choose to moderate. For me, it just took up too much mental bandwidth, because I have this element of obsession that maybe some people don’t have Yes, and so once I start drinking, it’s that switch that gets flipped that says more, and I don’t have any ability to moderate that. Yeah. So going through this process of trying to moderate, I would argue, is essential. You.
Eric Zimmer 23:55
You’re not going to give up something that you love without a really good reason, right? Love, love, yeah. And so I agree. I think the moderation is a useful experiment. And I love the lens of experiment, too. And I tried that experiment, that’s how I went back out after eight years. Was this belief like, Well, I’m just not going to do heroin. Obviously, that’s a terrible idea. We all know that, yeah. And so I’m just going to drink. And the experiment, it’s sort of like when they test the effectiveness of a drug, you know, in the first month, you’re like, hey, this drug’s pretty effective, and then they realize that after three years, it’ll kill you. That was kind of my experiment, and that’s not an experiment that I want to run again, because experiments can be expensive, you know, and deadly these type of experiments. And so, I ran it once, didn’t work, and I remain fairly clear that I can’t do that. So okay, moderation, you go through it, you figure it out, and let’s say We now arrive at a point where I’m like, okay, it seems pretty clear that there’s no moderation for me, right? I’m either on or off, but I don’t have that slow down switch. But the cost is. Us too high, yeah. So now I need help. I’m looking around at help, and I see 12 step programs, and I go, Ugh, right?
Arlina Allen 25:09
Isn’t that funny that that’s like the common response to 12 it was like, oh God. Like, Well,
Eric Zimmer 25:14
I think honestly, for nearly anybody who is facing down getting sober, it could be anything, and they would be like, Oh, to anything that asks much out of them, right? But 12 step programs, people know more about them than they do any other alternative, because of the media and all of these different things, right? We have an idea of what that means. Whereas, if I said you should go to smart recovery, people would be like, Okay, what the heck is that no one has any idea, because it’s a small thing. So one of the things that you say is, I almost missed out on my sobriety because the program isn’t what I thought it was going to be, a sad, shameful group of dingy church basement dwellers. That’s what I thought it was. Well, some meetings are kind of that way to be honest.
Arlina Allen 26:00
There’s a few to be honest. You know what? I’ve grown to love those too Me, too, me too. But yeah, because the essence is that it wasn’t what I thought it was, yeah? And it’s so interesting, you know, I coach people who want to get sober who don’t want to do that, and I will always ask, Why, yeah, or even the people that interview, I always ask, why not? And it’s always like, so there are three big trigger words that typically heat people out. If you look at the steps at face value, like when I read that, like I wrote this book because I’m a skeptic, I saw the steps and I saw God, I saw alcoholic and I saw powerless. And I was like, No, thank you, yeah. But then my way wasn’t working. There was nothing else. I was like, Fine, I’ll go, Yeah, you know. And I met this girl. I talk about her in the book a lot, kimmers, you know? I was like, Listen, if this is religious, if this is the God thing, like, I’m not gonna be able to do this, because I grew up in the church, and I felt like I had been begged God my whole life to fix me. Yeah. And here we are, still human, right? I was still making all these mistakes, I was still acting in ways that were not in alignment with the values that I grew up with. And so I thought I was a bad person. So I kept asking God to fix me. And I got to this point where I was like, you know, what, if I can’t be good, I kept failing. I thought it was failing, and so I decided that if I couldn’t be good, I was gonna be good at being bad. And early,
27:20
but I got sober,
Arlina Allen 27:21
and, you know, I was like, if that’s what this is, I’m not gonna be able to see that. And this girl pulled me aside, and she was like, hey, you know, it’s not a thing. Don’t worry about it. She’s like, just for funsies, let’s do this little exercise. She said, Take paste paper out on one side, write down all the attributes that you would want God to be. And I was like, Okay, well, it’s like, loving, powerful, I’m clearly the favorites. Like, it had to make sense to me, like, what did I really know about God? Because I grew up with God, and there were times when I had spiritual experiences. And so I was trying to draw from, like, all the positive things I had felt growing up. And she’s like, well, what don’t you want it to be? And I was like, well, punishing, you know this idea of hell? What is that all about? How can you say that you love me but then condemn me to hell like I’m born on the wrong side of the planet and they have a different religion or whatever? And she was like, Okay, so when I was done, she said, hand me a piece of paper. And I handed it to her. She tore it in half as she handed me back the positive side. And she’s like, let’s just start with this. I was like, that’s it. And she’s like, that’s it. I was like, okay, so it was introduced this idea that you could redefine words, yeah? Like, who gets to decide what God means to you, right? You do. Like, I have, like, this rebellious nature. I was like, nobody’s gonna tell me what God means to me. Yeah, I’m gonna decide. But I just didn’t know that that was an option until she told me it was an option that was revolutionary to me.
Eric Zimmer 28:46
I think that line that as a last second decision tacked on to the end of the third step after a whole lot of debate about it, God comma as we understood him, and now it still says him, but at least it gave this little wiggle room there, right? And I bet that line saved millions of people’s lives. Yeah, you know, my problem was different around God. My problem was I came in and I didn’t believe in God, and so I came in and I was told, you need to have a higher power, and it needs to, you know, you can make it whatever you want. But it’s 1994 in Columbus, Ohio, and this is what 95% of us are talking about when we say, God, we may drop the judging shameful pieces, but we still believe it’s this thing that’s going to intervene on your behalf and get you sober. And I was so desperate. I was like, Okay, fine, okay, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in, I’ll do whatever it takes. And I tried and I tried and I tried to believe, and then something really bad happened in my life, and I realized that I didn’t have a God that made any sense to me. And that was the beginning of the unraveling. It still took me a few years, but, but eventually I went back out. So when I came back, I was like, All right, I can’t pretend. Again, what do I do with God? Because I don’t believe in an interventionist God that does anything. I don’t believe in a person. I just That’s me, right? And what I realized was, I can’t build my life on something I don’t personally believe that’s a bad strategy. And so then for me, it became, I need to do an even more radical re understanding of what this means. And so my problem was slightly different, but it is doable. As you mentioned in the book, some people just have God be an acronym for group of drunks, meaning, I believe the people in the program, the support of that can help me get sober. And I think that’s a really good one. Some people say good, orderly direction, right? That’s another one for me. It ended up being I believe that there are these sort of principles that we see again and again, across religious traditions, across philosophical traditions, across psychological traditions. And my belief became, if I try to live according those principles to the best in my ability, yeah, it’ll be enough to keep me sober. It’ll be enough for me to handle what happens, and that turned out to be a foundation that I could build on. Yeah, I will say that over time, because I don’t go to 12 step meetings anymore, and we’ll eventually get to what that is over time. I got tired of translating in my head. I got tired of hearing somebody talk about God and me go, Okay, well, what that actually means to me, because a lot of the ways it was talked about was in the interventionist sense, and that didn’t make sense to me. So not only was I translating the word, I had to try and translate the sentiment. And just for me over time, for me, it grew tiring.
Arlina Allen 31:42
I could see that, yeah. And the truth of the matter is, is, you know, it’s for a lot of people, it’s a great place to start. Yeah, yeah, no, I love this idea of layering tools, yes, right? So let’s just say, for argument’s sake, you know, the book Alcoholics Anonymous talks about, you know, gaining access to power like that, really, if we kind of boil it all down, that’s what it’s about. Access to power, and you and I together is stronger than me by myself. Absolutely. There’s this idea that you can’t read the label from inside the jar. And when I’m in the swirling emotions of despair and all that stuff, I’m in a jar and I can’t see but if you said, Hey, arlena, just share with me what you’re thinking and I talk about it, there’s something about talking about it that relieves some sort of stress. There’s a connection that happens. There’s some validation you feel like, yeah, I could see how you feel that way. Like, to me, those are, like, the magic words, I could see how you feel that way, yeah. So validating, right? And there’s something that then makes me feel safe, and then my defenses come down, and then the truth comes out, yeah? And so let’s just say that it’s a good place to start, because those are the types of dynamics, and that is a power greater than myself, like, just at bare minimum, yeah? That, in and of itself, to me, was enough, and I really struggled with making sense of God, until chemist was like, just focus on these things and just work out everything. Yeah, the mental gymnastics required to try to figure it out, sometimes it’s just too much, right? Yeah? But, you know, we focus on what we do want, not what we don’t want, right? Yep. And so I have had this ability to sort of like, let go of the rest. Yep.
Eric Zimmer 33:29
Your book talks about why people don’t go to a and then why people leave, and so we’re going to come back around to leave, although I keep sort of jumping in because we’re in the right spot. But what are the You said three big reasons that people kind of resist. You know, I think we talked about God. The other was the word alcoholic. Talk to me about that one. Yeah,
Arlina Allen 33:47
resistance is huge. Put a pin in that. I want to circle back to that. But the word alcoholic typically brings up these ideas of a man in a trench coat. Homeless people typically serves up really negative images. But I started going to meetings and meeting these amazing people. I’m from California, the Silicon Valley area, and I was exposed to a lot of like professionals. There was like homeless people too. And this is one of those things, like I found the right meetings that served me. I went to like, the Bougie side of town and hung out with the fancy people who were sober, and I wanted to be like them, because they were seeing things that resonated with me, and they see that you’re kind of the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So I decided to hang out with people who were like, account executives or doctors lawyer. Like, yeah, I related to them better, and they had what I wanted. So I did a lot of that, but I was like, if that’s what an alcoholic is, sign me up, right? Like I want to let these people have and so really, what I’ve come to understand that when people use that word freely, is because these are people who have stood at the abyss of despair, of life and death, and. And even though they had tremendous guilt and shame, they decided to do self examination, which requires a huge amount of courage. Like these people are bad ass, like they are able to practice. They’re really striving for things like honesty and integrity, like you’re talking about the principles. Yeah, I have a friend. He’s a staunch atheist. He’s been going to AA for 40 years. Yeah? And he just decided that he was going to listen for the principles and do that. I was like, saying same. Because even though, you know, I have this relationship with this higher power thing that I don’t really understand, I kind of think of it as love, we’re both still talking about the same thing, yeah, and practicality. And so people rail at the word alcoholic at first, it’s because they’re missing some information. That’s a limiting belief. A limiting belief is either missing information or incorrect information. And so I would sort of argue that if you are like throwing you know, AA out, it’s because you’re harboring a limiting belief. And I’m what you would call recovery, promiscuous. I want all the tools that are gonna benefit my life. So yeah, I don’t see the word alcoholic is a shame label. I see it as a badge of honor.
Eric Zimmer 36:11
Yeah, it’s interesting. We’ve explored this topic a lot on the show, and it’s this idea of labels and diagnoses when it comes to addiction, mental health, all of this stuff. And I think that ultimately what we want is we want to be able to use labels when they are useful to us and discard them when they’re not exactly and to your point, know what that label actually really means, or at least means to me, I still I’m 17 years sober, I still I don’t go to 12 step programs. But if you ask me, Are you an alcoholic, I would say yes, but that only means one thing to me today. It means that I’m someone who could not successfully drink alcohol. That’s the extent of it. It doesn’t mean I’m still sick. It doesn’t mean that I have character defects. It doesn’t mean that I’m different than other people, except in one way, right to me, because I don’t feel like I’m different than the average person, right? I don’t feel like there’s like people in recovery and then normal people like I think that’s a useful distinction for a while, and then eventually, for me, became un useful. And so for me, it’s just that one thing I cannot successfully take mind altering substances. Yeah, I love what you said about eliminating belief right being either incorrect information or was it not enough information or missing information? Yeah, yeah, that’s really good. Yeah. It’s
Arlina Allen 37:35
just interesting because this program has allowed me to grow and evolve what I need also changes, yep, right? And I went to meetings for so long because it was sort of just a convenient way for me to check a lot of boxes, yeah,
Eric Zimmer 37:47
and it is, I mean, that in a good way, like when I stepped away, I had to reverse engineer in my mind, what do I think I’m getting there? Yeah, why is this working? And now I gotta make sure that I’m getting those things elsewhere. Yeah, and that does take some patching together, whereas AA, like you said, is a very convenient in a one stop shop for a lot of good things.
Arlina Allen 38:13
Yeah, this is where I’m an and girl like I still do 12 step meetings occasionally, but I moved five years ago, and so I quit going to in person meetings, yeah, because in the area that I’m in, it just wasn’t feeding me anymore. Yep. And so I decided I needed to layer in more things you
Eric Zimmer 38:54
I should be clear, I will go to a 12 step meeting. I mean, like my friend Chris is fairly active in the program. I’ll go with him occasionally. I will go just because, I mean, on one level, I love them, like I do. Think there is a type of beauty that you see in a 12 step meeting that you don’t see most of the time anywhere else, and it’s there in pretty much every meeting, if you look for it. And I’m not like, against AA or 12 step programs in any way, shape or form, and I’m not like, I won’t go they, just for me in the last X number of years, didn’t feel like the best way for me to become the next best version of myself. Yeah,
Arlina Allen 39:35
I think that leads to a really good point. Is that we need to really trust our instincts. Like everything you said is so valid. The whole point is that we’re growing and evolving, and so we need different things. And it’s not that I don’t like 12 step meetings, it’s that I have a craving for to go deeper or for more, yeah, and so I started at school. Boring other things, yeah, but at the end of the day, sometimes it’s just easier to jump on a Zoom meeting and see some friends and hear some good stories, be reminded of information that transformed my life. You know, they say that we have a quick forgetter, but you know, something you were talking about sort of made me think of what neuroscience calls the default mode network. It’s sort of like the way that it’s like the neural and I love science, because when I don’t have faith, I have science, and science is actually explaining a lot of this spiritual dynamics that you and I understand now, right? Yeah, and so what I know now is that our brain operates on a default mode network. It’s the way our neurology was developed. There was this really good book called What happened to you, by Dr Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey, and it’s a slight variation on the question of what’s wrong with you, and it’s such a more gentle, compassionate that it’s like, what happened to you. Well, what happened to me is that I had a lot of trauma when I was growing up, and it shaped my neurology. It shaped how I respond to stress in a very specific way. And so in my adulthood, I have learned tools and practices that reshape that default. But what I know for sure is that if I stop doing all these practices, I will revert back to my default, which is basically at the essence to be super reduction as a fear based, right? Like, I come back to my survival skills, which no longer serve me in adulthood, and so I just feel like it’s a more compassionate lens, instead of thinking that I’m an addict or I’m an alcoholic, like, I don’t really talk about that a whole lot anymore. I’ve been sober for 30 years. It’s been a long time with all that stuff. When my fear gets kicked up. I do respond in very specific ways. And so I sort of liken it to, you know, diet and exercise. Like I could go to the gym every day for a year and be in great shape, that if I stop, I revert back, yeah, I lose all my gains, which is very painful, or, like, I wouldn’t eat one salad and expect to be healthy the rest of my so it’s like, right?
42:02
So totally, kind of
Arlina Allen 42:04
gets that. So that’s why, you know, going to meetings like I state in the book, it’s like, I’m not saying that you got to go to meetings forever. You’re a beautiful example of you don’t have to do that. And there will be people who say you have to go to meetings for the rest of your life, otherwise you’ll relapse and die, yeah, you know, which is what we see. Actually, I’m sure you have too. They told me when I first got sober, that if you stick around long enough, you’ll see people die and, yeah, and that has definitely been my experience. I’ve, you know, lost people. I really loved this, you know, yeah, this thing, whatever you want to call it. So I think, you know, when we’re talking about the people being problematic, let’s just have a little compassion for them, because they’re afraid. They’ve seen some terrible and experienced some terrible things. Yeah, but no, you’re right. You don’t have to do this forever. For me, it was just like a convenient place to get check all the boxes of gratitude and remember what it was like for the future, be of service and connect with spirituality. You know, in my everyday walking around life, I really don’t have a lot of opportunities to talk about spirituality unless I’m in those rooms where, you know, it’s encouraged to talk about it. Yeah,
Eric Zimmer 43:12
I mean, I think if I didn’t do this show, I would probably still go to 12 step meetings. You know, if a huge chunk of my life was devoted to doing something different with my mind. Let’s say I was still in the software business, which was a great career in many ways. It’s just simply that, to your point, I need to be reminded of things very often. I just happen to be in a position where I get reminded of these things all the time, because I’m talking to people all the time. I’m reading these books all the time, and I’m helping teach these ideas to other people all the time that I swim in them, yeah? And that’s beneficial, but I may not always do that. I mean, you know, maybe I go back to be a software guy in five years. I don’t know, and my needs might change, yeah? And so, you know, I want to go back to something you said a second ago about trusting our instincts, because I think this is interesting, because today I can trust my instincts. Yeah, when I was still drinking or very early in sobriety, my instincts were terrible. What my natural reaction to do was always like by that point, generally, a really bad idea. You know, I don’t know if they still say it, but they used to say it all the time, like it’s your thinking that got you here. And so, you know, I think that that idea of instincts is an interesting one, because I think sometimes we can trust our instincts, but our instinct might be, I shouldn’t go to meetings. Yeah,
Arlina Allen 44:35
you bring up a good point. You know, you and I are pretty far down the road trust our we’ve had the ability to learn how to trust our instincts. And I was, in the beginning, not able to trust my instincts, because my instincts were out of balance, and my default mode network was still in survival mode. And so I just needed new information, and, you know, new ideas to help me think, because the way I. Was thinking made sense to me at the time, you know, and it’s interesting how decisions are made. It’s like you have a feeling, and you consider the information that you have, and you make a decision based on the information that you have, and then you take action, you invoke the law of cause and effect, and you experience a result. That’s a cybernetic loop. So, like I found myself in the same spot over and over again, and I was like, What is going on? And what I learned later is that we decide emotionally and justify logically. And what I was deciding from emotionally was I had this aversion, this aversion to myself, because I hated who I was. Had so much self loathing, I kept making these mistakes, but I just didn’t know what to do instead. And by going to meetings, by actually working the 12 steps of a sponsor, yes, a loving, compassionate you know, there’s a whole discussion around, how do you choose one and what do you actually do? I actually described in the book how I did it. It’s not the right way. It’s just a way it worked for me, whatever. But yeah, it was a process that just, you know, ended up helping me get the result I wanted. But it did start with examining my whole decision making process, like really breaking it down, and the 12 sets, specifically the four step was a very pragmatic and practical way to sort of unpack all my baggage. Yeah, so helpful. Let’s
Eric Zimmer 46:31
spend a minute there, because I think that’s important. I think one of the aspects of AA, the reason that it works, is the peer support. I’m talking to you, one alcoholic talking to another. There’s some sort of magic in that, right? So there’s that that’s a big component of it. The other is that there is a actual program to change who you are. That’s what the 12 steps are. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to say it. Maybe it’s not to change who you are, but it’s to help you change the coping mechanisms and the ways that you relate to the world that are causing you to stay, as you said, stuck in the same place. And that’s a real benefit. Are the 12 steps the best way to change? I don’t know. Is there a best way to change? Of course not. There’s lots of ways to change, but it is a way, and it is a way that lots of people have done, and I’m so glad that I did them multiple times, right? I’m so glad that I went through that process multiple times, because they do. And so when I look at my life and I’m like, okay, if I’m not going to meetings, what do I need? One of the things I need is some sort of structured way of continuing to examine my inner world and change. And there’s lots of different ones, but that’s a component of what I think in my sort of reverse engineering. You know, I need the support of other people, and I need to support other people. I also need some sort of structure, yeah, to how I change, yeah. And the 12 Steps gives that,
Arlina Allen 48:01
yeah, what I loved about the four step. And to be honest, I kept hearing that people were doing steps one, two and three and relapsing, and that terrified me. And what I get is that, because of the guilt and shame, people are so afraid to look but what I want people to know is the four step is licensed to bitch like you,
Eric Zimmer 48:23
at least at first, at least until your sponsor gets a hold of it.
Arlina Allen 48:26
Well, listen, I had a captive audience. I had a really passionate sponsor, and I and I wish I would have known that before going in, and I was like, Oh my God, that’s just a different perspective. It’s like,
Eric Zimmer 48:38
what you
Arlina Allen 48:40
get to talk about you get to name the people that you’re mad at or resentful of. You get to get really specific about the cause and how they hurt you and how they hurt you. Was it your self esteem that they damaged? What kind of kind of sounding a little victim me, but it’s like what was affected? It was my self esteem. It was my emotional safety, financial and security. Relation, I got to exam, and then the last part was, what was my role in all this? What was the dynamic right in every relationship was sort of a 5050, share, so what was my part? And that was the light bulb moment like. And when I wrote it all out at once, I began to see these patterns emerging in that light, and it was largely around responsibility. I was taking inappropriate responsibility for others and not taking that responsibility for myself. And when I was able to sort all that out with a sponsor, I was able to let go of what wasn’t mine so that I could bear the weight of what was,
Eric Zimmer 49:40
which was a lot. That’s a really beautiful thing to say this
Arlina Allen 49:44
one thing is that it wasn’t that I changed, it was I emerged like through this process. It’s like my authentic self is able to emerge. And so it wasn’t like I was bad and needed to be good. It was like I was holding on to these survival skills that were actually hurting me, yeah, and but I wasn’t able to let go of them until I knew what to do instead. Like, that’s super practical, right? If
Eric Zimmer 50:14
something is the only way you know how to cope with certain situations in life, you’re gonna stick with it until you have something else that works, because that’ll make it make sense. Yeah, I love that line I emerged. I think that’s a really beautiful, beautiful way of saying it. That is what happens. There’s this, yeah, we change, yeah, we recover parts of ourselves. But on a different level, it’s something new that is still made up of me. It’s still me shaped in some way, but it’s a much sturdier, beautiful thing. I
Arlina Allen 50:49
wonder if I’d ask you a question. I wonder, what did you discover about yourself that surprised you? Well,
Eric Zimmer 50:55
I think that the primary revelation I already sort of hit on, and the rest of the steps helped me just to see it more and more clearly, was this idea of my complete focus on myself, even if I thought that I was doing something for someone else, if I looked underneath closely enough, it was still me, me, Me. And that’s still largely the case, I think for all of us, to some degree, right? I’m not trying to pretend that I fixed, that I didn’t, but it’s from a different mood, don’t you think? Yes, actually, what I think is I tend to believe that we have multiple motives underlying things. So I do kind things for other people, some of that is because I just want to be kind. It’s a value. It emerges naturally for me. There’s all that, and I’d love you to see me that way, right? Like doesn’t mean that it’s not valid. It just means that, you know, it’s mixed. But I think that was a big one for me, was just seeing all the ways. Because if you’d asked me, Are you selfish, I would have said, No, of course not. Now I clearly was. I mean, I guess if you’d asked me at that time, I probably would have said yes, but that was a real light for me. And then I think as we got into doing the fourth step, I saw that I’m not a resentment based alcoholic, primarily, I’m a fear based alcoholic, right? You know, you do a resentment inventory and you do a fear inventory. At that time, I didn’t see that I had resentments. Now, with years later, things become a little bit clearer, and I’m able to see things I didn’t. But what I did identify with was I was scared of everything. Yeah, I didn’t believe I could be anything good or useful that was all gone. And, you know, you quote the line in the book somewhere, it’s like we’re egomaniacs with an inferiority complex that pretty much described it. I think it just showed me all the subtle ways that I was always trying to arrange life to be the way I wanted it, yeah? And I think that’s natural, like you said earlier, these are natural instincts. It is a natural instinct, and it’s a useful instinct a whole lot of the time, yeah? And instincts, I think this is the actual line from the book, can run amok, you know? And mine had, and I loved what you said about the fourth step, too, because it’s amazing to me. I can see it so much more clearly now, but the vulnerability in people and they’re terrified of writing that stuff down and sharing it with someone else. Now, after you’ve done a couple of fifth steps, your ability to be shocked by anything is largely gone. I mean, I would say to people, there’s like, nothing that you’re going to say. There’s nothing that you could possibly say. I don’t think that is going to make me, you know, like, judge you harshly. But until you’ve done that a few times. Now, it’s easy. You know somebody I know, I relatively easily can be like, Well, I’m like this. I’m like that. I felt this. I felt that. But, boy, those first few times so hard, but life changing.
Arlina Allen 54:06
Yeah, it’s like that, the treasure you seek is in the work that you’re avoiding. Yeah?
Eric Zimmer 54:11
I heard somebody say the other day, the answers you seek are on the other side of the actions that you’re avoiding. Yeah.
Arlina Allen 54:16
Or the treasure you seek is in the cave you fear to enter, but it’s, it’s like the thing that we’re most afraid of hold the most power of transformation or us.
Eric Zimmer 54:28
One last thing I want to cover here is this idea that AA is a cult. Just kind of help us reinterpret or see that differently.
Arlina Allen 54:37
I mean, it is a little culty, but if it is, if it is a cult, it’s the worst cult, because people don’t do what they’re supposed to do anyway. Well,
Eric Zimmer 54:46
you said something in the book that I think is really important to this. You said that one of the things about a cult is that there is one person who has authority, and AA is a completely decentralized thing. No one has authority. It’s a bizarre organizational system. Them, but no one has authority.
Arlina Allen 55:02
Yeah, we’re really bumping up against is recovery resistance, right? We will look for reasons not to do this thing, right? We will look for all kinds of reasons not to do this because it’s so confrontational to our very identity, which I want to tie back to the default mode network, right? Like drinking was such a part of my identity, it was really difficult for me to think of not doing it. And the idea that AA is a cult like that is something that the brain can latch onto and point out very valid reasons why it might be a cult, right, right, right? And again, like you were talking about earlier, this is sort of a people based problem, yeah, right. So, you know, we started this conversation by saying that the people are not the program, the 12 steps are the program. I always take people back to literature. Don’t rely on what I say, or you say, go back to literature. But this idea that 12 step is a cult, largely, is centered around how people behave and listen. 12 step is not the hotbed of mental health. I’ll just admit that right up front,
Eric Zimmer 56:11
as I used to hear people describe it, it’s like you gathered all the sickest people in like, one place,
Speaker 1 56:16
yeah, yeah. But you know this, this sort of
Eric Zimmer 56:20
brain, not true, but anyway, yeah, but it sort of leads me to this idea that the people that offend
Arlina Allen 56:27
you at meetings or put you off or whatever, they’re triggering something inside that actually needs to be healed. So I would encourage people to notice when they feel angry about something, like if someone’s coming off as culty or controlling or whatever, to work that feeling and that thought process through the steps to to find out what’s going on underneath. And I liken the meetings to this example that Mary Ann Williamson shared. She used to lecture a lot on the Course of Miracles, and she talked about a gemologist will take two raw, rough Amethysts and put them in a tumbler together. And as these Amethysts bump up against each other, they rub off their rough edges, and then they come out. They’re smooth. It’s almost as if we go to meetings and we tumble around with all these people. We hear all kinds of ideas that challenge us, and if we can stay the course, stay with the feeling, stay with the thing that pissed you off. They say that the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. I’m saying, lean into that. Don’t leave the program because somebody made you angry. I’m saying, don’t waste a good crisis. Use that as a way to examine what is going on underneath, because anytime we get triggered or angered, that is a sign or a place that is covering a wound, and so we need to sort of bring that to the light and process our feelings to a resolution so that we no longer carry them. So yeah, people at meetings can be problematic. I’m saying with a few simple boundaries and with a little bit of courage and persistence, that even those people have something to teach us and to help us heal. Ultimately,
Eric Zimmer 58:15
yep, that’s a beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation. I’d like to talk a little bit more about finding the right meeting, because this is really important. I’d like to talk about the how mindset and how important that is to recovery and wherever else we happen to wander. But listeners, if you’d like, access to the post show conversation, all the other post show conversations, an episode I do each week about a teaching a song and a quote or a poem that I love. And if you want to support us, because we can really use the support one you feed.net/join is the way to do that. Arlena, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the book, and this was a wonderful conversation. And I would just end by saying, anybody out there who’s struggling with your substance use and you’re thinking about 12 steps, this book is a great, great guide to help you as you enter that world, or to get you into that world. If you’re having trouble getting into it, that’s beautiful. Thank you so much. You
