Once I stopped attending 12 Step meetings I realized that even if I was clean and sober (or what 12 step considers clean and sober) there was a hidden cost. Time. There are 24 hours in a day. We are asleep for 8. That leaves 16 hours. Most of us are not in jobs we love, especially those in recovery, so work lops off another 8 hours. So for most of us we get 8 hours out of every day to do what we want, to get after a dream, to learn a new skill, etc. A common suggestion when someone starts down the road of recovery is to do a 90 in 90. 90 meetings in 90 days. You also hear "meeting makers make it" parroted a lot. A standard meeting is an hour to an hour and a half. So let's assume the low end and say an hour. Just in the first three months that comes out to about 90 hours... 90. Just so you can have a relative idea of what can be accomplished in 90 hours I encourage everyone to watch this amazing TED talk.

Now let's talk more about the cost in time for the average 12 stepper. I would assume that within the first five years three meetings a week is fair. So 52 weeks in a year X 3 comes out to 156 hours a year, but that is just the start. That doesn't take into account step work, coffee after meetings, meeting with a sponsor, and sponsoring other people. Year after year. After watching Josh Kaufman's TED talk you can start to see just how much time and mental real-estate "recovery" can take up. As someone who did 12 Step for many many years it pains me to think of all I could have accomplished devoting those hours to something else.

In trying to think about what separated the people I ran into that I considered a "success" in 12 Step I realized that most of them had one thing in common. They went to very few meetings and most of their life existed outside of 12 step. They had normal friends, they did normal things, and they spent very little time in the rooms. Most of the time they went to meetings was to speak so as to help any newcomer who might benefit from their experience. I want to be clear that just stopping whatever drug does not qualify as "success" in my eyes. I knew many people in my time in 12 step groups lived their lives very different from what I would consider a success story. Sure they were clean off of whatever but didn't have things like a steady career, purpose or meaning in their lives, were judgmental, gambled all the time, and sometimes were even engaged in criminal activity. But a lot of these people got a lot of respect around the rooms of blank anonymous. I am not a believer that the 12 steps or the associated programs go away but what I do believe is that a cycle of 12 step, at the very least, should be looked at as one step up the ladder of life for an addict. Going to meetings for such a long time showed me that after a certain point your just hearing the same stories over and over again. You are hearing the same annoying phrases repeated over and over. It becomes this cycle where nothing new is learned and now is just a crutch wasting time and preventing growth. Every time I met someone with years clean who said "starting the steps over with a new sponsor because a, b, or c I thought "really?"

I wrote this blog because I got an email asking me "What would you suggest to someone who wants to move away from 12 step". The simple answer would be to log all the time you currently schedule out every week/month/year to devote to 12 step. Then find something that you are passionate about, something you have always wanted to do, something you have always wanted to learn, a new language, a new skill, a passion project, etc. Then replace the time spent on 12 step with time spent improving yourself... upgrading yourself so to speak. Don't just stop going to meetings and spend that time sitting at home watching TV. I think people would be amazed at what they can accomplish with that kind of time, at least I was. 🙂 Thank you so much for reading.