Why I Left AA After 10 Years
Why I Left AA After 10 Years
What if the thing that saved your life… is now what’s keeping you small?
You know the feeling. You left the rooms, but the rooms haven’t left you.
There’s a lingering guilt. A whisper that says you’re being selfish. A fear that if you stop “doing the work,” you'll lose everything. A quiet knowing that you'll be shunned by people you once called friends.
What if leaving AA isn't selfish or dangerous—but the most courageous thing you'll ever do?
What if the work now is unlearning the program?
I want to share with you why I left AA after 10 years—and what I've learned since stepping away.
I was an AA True Believer
I got sober in 2009. I spent 10 years in AA. I wasn't dabbling. I wasn't half-in. I was ALL IN.
I was a true believer.
- Toured the tavern where Bill Wilson was born.
- Sat at the infamous table where Bill spoke with Ebby.
- Went to Bill's office and sat at his desk where he wrote the 12 & 12.
- Cried hard at Bill Wilson’s grave, overwhelmed with gratitude.
- Prayed with a sponsee at the foot of Dr. Bob’s bed.
- Went to Dr. Bob's grave in Akron, OH.
- Been to Founders Day. ICYPAA. WACYPAA.
- Meetings in Australia, Bali, Europe, Thailand, Nepal, India and the US
- "Carried the message" in jails, institutions and hospitals.
- Chaired meetings. Made coffee. Greeted newcomers.
I loved AA. I believed in it. I thought I’d be there for life.
But underneath it all—before recovery, before identity, before any ideology—I've always had one core truth:
We're souls inside bodies here to evolve.
I've believed that since I was 16 years old, when I took a large dose of psilocybin mushrooms—accidental hero's dose. I wasn't just high, I was gone.
I experienced myself as pure consciousness, floating through space—not a body, not a girl, not a personality.. just awareness. A soul.
And from that moment on, I knew—in my bones, in my cells, in my spirit—I'm here to evolve.
That we are here to evolve. And that knowing never left me. Not even during my deepest devotion to AA.
And then, it started stirring again.
I left AA because something
deeper inside me started waking up.
My spirit. My soul. My higher self. It was calling me to evolve. That stirring led me to start thinking critically about AA.
And once I saw it… I couldn't unsee it.
I left AA on April 6th 2020.
That's five years ago today.
I'm officially five years sober from recovery.
And I’m finally ready to tell the truth about why I left.
Warning:
If you're in AA and want to stay in AA, please stop reading this now. This isn't for you.
This is for those who've left and are now deprogramming the dogma.
I'm not here to change minds.
I'm here to tell the truth—to share my story—for those navigating one of the most difficult things you can ever do:
Outgrow a high-control ideology that convinced you you'd die without it.
The Unspoken Fear of Leaving AA
Most of us were taught: To leave AA is to die.
But… what if that's make believe?
What if AA ideology isn't inherently true?
Even if it helped you get sober—what if it became a cage that holds you back long after you're ready to move on?
What if the programming was designed to keep you dependent on the system—using your emotions against you so that when you leave, you feel flooded with guilt?
You wonder if you're being selfish.
You question your gratitude.
You're scared to say out loud what you've been feeling for a long time.
- “I stayed long after it helped me.”
- “I don’t actually believe I’m powerless anymore.”
- “I don't want to identify as an alcoholic forever.”
- “I don’t trust a program that teaches me not to trust myself.”
- “I no longer believe it's true—and I won't pass the script down to anyone else."
- “I outgrew it. And that terrifies me.”
You've cracked the cognitive dissonance. You see the BS. And you no longer want to participate.
Here's the truth.
You're not crazy.
You're not selfish.
You're not ungrateful.
You're waking up.
But it’s not easy to wake up from an ideology—especially one wrapped in gratitude and fear.
Inside the rooms, you were taught:
- “Your best thinking got you here.” (Translation: Don’t trust yourself.)
- “If you leave, you’ll drink.” (Translation: Don’t ever walk away—or else.)
- “There’s no graduation.” (Translation: You’ll always be broken.)
These aren’t just beliefs. They’re dogma. And for a true believer, waking up is a rude awakening.
Because suddenly you see the unseeable:
AA isn't inherently true.
It's an ideology.
But we can't see that when we're in it.
When you're trapped inside an ideology that pathologizes self-trust and treats critical thinking like a threat—or death threat—you don't dare think for yourself.
You don't even know you're allowed to.
You don't know you've been programmed to fear your own mind.
You don't know you've been emotionally manipulated to believe that your very survival depends upon your obedience.
Like a fish in water—you can’t see the ideology you’re swimming in.
You can’t see that it’s possessed your mind… and is still running your life.
The Invisible Cost of Long-Term Recovery Dogma
You're not naive. You saw it coming. But they taught you to laugh it off.
Maybe you even joked when you joined about being “brainwashed.” And honestly, it helped… for a while.
You got sober.
You stayed sober.
Your life started to grow.
But you never stopped to look at the cost of that brainwashing.
So let’s talk about that now.
Forget the lifetime sentence.
Forget the free labor for Bill’s idea.
The deeper cost is cognitive.
Psychological.
Soul-level.
- It’s the erasure of your internal authority.
- The limiting of your potential.
- The belief that wanting something for yourself is selfish.
This is mind control—subtle, spiritualized, socially reinforced.
AA conditions you to fear your own mind. To stay tethered—long after you’re free.
There’s a fable about elephants.
When they’re babies, they’re tied to a stake in the ground.
They pull. They strain. They fight.
But they can’t break free.
Eventually… they stop trying.
Even as full-grown adults—strong enough to break free in seconds—they stay tethered.
Why? Because they’ve been conditioned to believe they can’t move.
This is called learned helplessness.
And it's exactly what AA does to the mind. It teaches you:
Not to question.
Not to trust your own thinking.
Not to leave the group.
It trains you to doubt your thoughts.
To stay small.
To be afraid of life outside the rope.
Learned helplessness isn’t just passivity—it’s the internalized belief that nothing you do will change your outcome.
So you stop trying.
You stop questioning.
You surrender—not in a spiritual way, but in a defeated way.
It sounds like:
- “I can’t trust myself.”
- “I can't trust my thinking.”
- “If I don’t go to meetings, I’ll drink.”
- “If I try to leave, I’ll relapse.”
- “This is the only way.”
But these aren’t facts.
These are conditioned beliefs—rooted in Bill’s unverified, unscientific ideology.
Here's the truth:
- You’re allowed to be grateful for what helped you and still walk away.
- You’re allowed to evolve.
- You’re allowed to reclaim your mind.
Leaving the rooms isn’t selfish.
It’s sacred.
It’s a reclamation.
It’s a return to self-trust, critical thinking, and freedom.
The rope was never the problem.
The belief in a limiting rope you no longer need is.
Bill Wilson Was Selling An Idea—Not A Truth
The moment I began thinking critically about AA, everything started to unravel.
It was early pandemic days.
And it felt like I was watching a mass hypnosis in real time—overwhelming emotional manipulation that instantly reshaped peoples thoughts, feelings, behaviors and worldview.
Regardless of how serious the virus was or wasn't, what I couldn't stop noticing was the psychological mechanics:
Coercive control.
Mass messaging.
Fear-drive obedience.
People turning on each other.
And it dawned on me—everyone felt vulnerable AF.
Just like I did when I got to AA.
And when we're vulnerable, we're more susceptible to high control.
Then I remembered something that had never sat right. Years earlier, I'd been touring Bill Wilson's house—Stepping Stones. And the guide said something casual that hit me sideways:
"When Bill wrote the opening line of the Big Book—'We of Alcoholics Anonymous are more than one hundred men and woman'…it wasn't true.
It was closer to 82.
But he rounded up—because it sounded better.
Because Bill was a salesman."
That detail had always stuck with me, like a red flag.
But now I saw it in a whole new light:
Bill was a salesman.
It was like the blinders flew off.
If Bill was a salesman… what exactly did he sell me?
So I did something wild.
I picked up a book on how to write a great sales letter.
And as I read, I mapped out Bill's sales pitch—step by step.
I dissected the Big Book like it was sales copy.
And what I saw changed everything.
I didn't believe what Bill was selling.
The program I'd devoted a decade of my life to… no longer felt true.
It was like the day in 3rd grade when the teacher said, "Now that we all know Santa is not real…" and I just sat there, squirming in my chair, ashamed, horrified, grief-stricken.
All the other kids seemed fine.
Their calmness only confirmed it.
How did they all know?
How did I not?
But the moment the illusion shattered, there was no going back.
Despite the nibbled cookies, the handwritten tags, the whole world playing along—Santa wasn't real.
Even the coercive control part of it: "Be good. Santa is watching."
It was comforting… until I saw the truth. Then it became creepy as hell.
And that's what happened with AA.
No matter how much it helped me at one point—no matter how much I loved it—once I saw that it wasn't true, I couldn't unknow it.
And I couldn't preach something I no longer believed in.
Critical thinking broke the spell.
I had to white knuckle my way out of an ideology I no longer believed in because nobody around me would talk about it.
Leaving AA was harder than joining.
I used to joke that walking into my first meeting was the hardest door I ever walked through.
But leaving?
That was harder.
There's no welcome committee.
No support.
No language.
Just silence. Guilt. And fear.
And the professionals? The ones with the microphones and credentials? The influencer-therapists and addiction gurus with massive platforms?
They won't say it either.
They won't say what's obvious to anyone paying attention:
What once saved us can eventually drown us.
Maybe they see it.
How could they not?
But AA is a cultural sacred cow.
And saying, "it's safe to leave" is the modern-day heresy.
It’s as if they’re cheering us on when we first get sober—but once we’re stable, once we start to grow,
evolve, ask deeper questions…they disappear.
It’s safer for them to let us rot in church basements for the rest of our lives than to risk saying the liberating words:
- “You don’t have to stay forever.”
- “Recovery is not a life sentence.”
- “Your healed brain doesn’t need to live like it’s still broken.”
Because the truth is:
Our many-years-sober brains are not
the same brains that needed recovery in the first place.
The damage alcohol did to our impulse control?
Healed.
Our trauma?
Processed.
Our nervous systems?
Regulated.
We are not broken anymore.
And we deserve a life beyond survival.
AA was the life preserver—not the destination. You weren't meant to
live in fear of dying forever. That's not living. That's survival.
And if the same addiction gurus can't see the long-term cost of staying in a system built on powerlessness?
Then yes—they're part of the problem.
Not because they're evil. But because they're complicit in a silence that keeps people stuck.
It's hard to do it alone.
When I left AA I went deep.
Addiction. Trauma. Neurodivergence. Nervous system regulation. High-control groups.
I'd been studying addiction and the nervous system for years—decades, really.
But this was different.
I wasn't just studying for my knowledge.
I was studying for survival.
It felt like my life depended upon understanding what was real.
It was like I became as a scientist testing a hypothesis:
Is it okay to leave AA?
And I had to find out for myself what the current science actually says about recovery.
Why No One Tells You It's Safe To Leave AA
So you are left to fend for yourself in the dark—guided by your intuition, while navigating heavy psychological terrain.
Your identity? Shattered.
Your "purpose"? Gone.
Your community? Disappeared.
You're deep in exit trauma—but you don't even know that's what it is.
Because you didn't know you were in a high-control group.
You don't speak that language.
It's isolating AF to leave a system the world treats as sacred.
Because there's no one to turn to.
No cultural permission.
No map.
But learning the language of high control groups helped me heal.
It was like finding a secret playbook.
Once I saw the tactics—once I could name them—I couldn't unsee them.
Reading about manipulation cracked open my own story.
And piece by piece, I reclaimed my mind.
But coercive control is everywhere.
Media. Religion. Recovery. Spirituality. Even wellness self-help.
Once you here the pattern, it's everywhere.
The script is predictable:
- Create fear.
- Offer safety.
- Punish disobedence.
- Enforce silence.
And once the script is in your nervous system? You don't just obey it—you start enforcing it on others.
This isn't just about AA.
It's not even about recovery.
It's about any system that pathologizes self-trust.
Any belief that punishes your questions.
Any culture that fears your freedom.
Emotional manipulation is the tool. Fear is the tactic. Obedience is the result.
And the cost…is you.
Your mind.
Your spirit.
Your life.
Coercive control is a mindf*ck with a halo.
Leaving AA Was More Transformative
Than Getting Sober
I didn’t leave recovery—I evolved.
I started learning how to think for myself.
To trust my own mind.
To rebuild my nervous system.
I found new frameworks, new science, new ways to support my brain and body.
I found freedom on the other side of fear.
And one of the biggest revolutions?
- I got diagnosed autistic.
- And ADHD.
- AuDHD.
Deprogramming AA allowed me to understand my brain for the first time.
I was no longer self medicating with alcohol.
And I was no longer self medicating with AA ideology.
So I started to understand myself better.
- My sensory sensitivity.
- My pattern recognition.
- My monotropic thinking.
The truth is AA had me pathologizing traits
that were actually just how my brain works.
What I'd been told were "character defects," "alcoholic thinking" and other AA nonsense was more about my neurology.
This realization has been liberating AF.
It's not about doing daily inventories on my hard wired traits.
It's about accepting myself and getting support where I need it.
Ultimately I left AA because I would not live a lie.
And that's how I saw it.
My evolution out of recovery when through several phases.
To deprogram and reclaim my life, I had to:
- Understand high control systems
- Recover from mind control
- Understand emotional manipulation
- Reclaim my power
- Build new connections
- Rediscover purpose
And learning about neurodivergence sure as sh*t helped!
If you’re here—one foot out, or maybe both—but still tethered by fear,
I see you.
I was you.
I know what it feels like to wonder if you just made the biggest mistake of your life…
To feel like your identity, community and safety just vanished.
Like you're drifting alone with no map.
That’s why I created Evolving After Recovery.
It's an 8 week deprogramming experience for those who've left and are struggling between what once saved them and what's next. Click here to find out more (we start soon!)
If you're like me—and you're here to evolve—you've got to keep questioning.
Because unchallenged beliefs become invisible cages.
You're not in a cage anymore.
You're free.
And now.. you get to choose what freedom looks like.
Critical thinking liberates you.
Think critically— set yourself free.
Start Your Transformation Today.
Liberated in Sober Skin is your path to feeling at home in your skin, emotionally free and soul-level confident—get free from the inside out.
Terms Privacy Disclaimer
©2025 Sobriety Bestie LLC