For quite a while, I felt like a bit of a phoney for calling myself an alcoholic in AA and an addict in NA. I finally got to the point of figuring that, at least for me, they are just two words for the same thing.
As an alcoholic, I am an addict, and, as an addict, an alcoholic. In something read out in most NA meetings, it states clearly that many run into trouble by seeing alcohol as different from other drugs, that alcohol is a drug. It is just a liquid barbituate that happens to be legal, mostly for historical reasons. I know of nobody who has been successful in maintaining real sobriety in AA while continuing to use other drugs to get high. Marijuana maintainence programs don't work even if one is NOT DRINKING, and staying clean while trying to drink socially doesn't work either. I now tend to think of AA and NA as the same program for the same disease. There is a bit of a difference in flavour, and I see that as a good thing as variety is the spice of life. One difference is that it seems like more AA members like me have pretty much given up on sex and relationships as not worth the bother, while a lot of NA members seem to drift from relationship to relationship with relative ease, perhaps having had all that experience with scoring. |