“You don’t have a drinking problem. You have a thinking problem.”
My AA sponsor said that to me more than 30 years ago. At the time, I thought it was just another one of those AA sayings. Today, after decades in recovery, I hear something much deeper in it.
In many ways, AA was talking about the relationship between thoughts, feelings and behaviors long before most of us in those rooms had ever heard the term Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
CBT teaches us to examine our thinking: identify distorted or automatic thoughts, challenge beliefs that aren't serving us, recognize patterns, and practice different responses.
Sound familiar?
AA asks us to do an inventory. Look honestly at our resentments, fears and behaviors. Recognize recurring patterns. Talk them through with another person. Make amends where appropriate. Catch ourselves when old thinking returns. Practice new principles. Repeat.
That isn't identical to CBT, and AA was never intended to be psychotherapy. But the parallels are difficult to miss.
Even the Serenity Prayer contains a remarkable cognitive framework: What can I change? What can't I change? Can I learn to recognize the difference?
AA sometimes gets reduced to meetings, slogans and “just don't drink." I think that misses much of its depth.
For me, recovery was never simply about removing alcohol. Alcohol was a symptom of something much larger. Recovery required me to examine the way I thought, reacted, rationalized, blamed, feared, resented, avoided and related to other people.
Stopping drinking gave me the opportunity to live. Changing my thinking taught me how to live.
Maybe my sponsor wasn't a therapist. Maybe he didn't know the language of cognitive restructuring, automatic thoughts or behavioral patterns. But 30 years ago, he understood something enormously important: If I changed only what I drank but never changed how I thought, I wasn't going to change very much at all.
AA may be nearly a century old, but some of the psychology embedded in its practices was remarkably ahead of its time. And after more than 30 years on this journey, I'm still discovering just how much those old-timers understood.