The AA question as a non-religious man
It was a Tuesday in February, half past six in the evening, and I was sitting in my car in the car park of a Uniting Church in Hawthorn, twenty minutes early, with the heater on and a cup of takeaway coffee going cold in the cup holder. I was about to walk into my first AA meeting and I had been talking myself out of going for ninety minutes. Not because I did not need it. I needed it. I had been talking myself out of going because I am not religious, have not been since I was about fourteen, and the higher power language in everything I had read about AA had been doing my head in for a fortnight. I did not want to walk into a room and have to perform a belief I did not have.
I went in. I sat in the back. I listened for an hour. I did not say anything. I left and sat in my car for another fifteen minutes thinking about it. What I had heard was not what I had expected, and the conversation in my head about whether AA was for me started over from the beginning that night. It is a conversation I have had with myself many times since, and a conversation I have had with at least a dozen other men, and it deserves a clear-eyed treatment.
This is a piece for the secular Australian man who has multiple failed attempts at quitting alcohol behind him, who is wondering whether AA could be the next step, and who is hung up on the higher power.
What AA actually is, in practice
Alcoholics Anonymous is a community of people who have stopped drinking, who meet weekly or more often, who use a twelve-step programme based on Bill Wilson's original 1939 framework, and who provide each other with a peer-led support structure that is, by some distance, the largest and longest-running mutual aid programme in human history.
In Australia, there are over a thousand meetings a week, in every capital city and most regional centres. Meetings are free. They are confidential. You do not have to identify yourself by your full name. You do not have to share. You can attend as a newcomer indefinitely. Most meetings run for one hour. Most cities have multiple meetings every day, in multiple suburbs, at multiple times.
The meetings have a structure that is broadly similar everywhere. There is a chair, a reading from the AA literature, a topic or a speaker, and then open sharing where members talk for two or three minutes each about their experience with the topic. Coffee is usually involved. The meeting closes with the Serenity Prayer or another reading.
The programme outside the meeting is the twelve steps, ideally worked through with a sponsor (a more experienced member who acts as a mentor). The steps are a sequence of self-examination, reckoning with past behaviour, making amends, and ongoing practice. The sponsor relationship is a key active ingredient. The meetings are the visible part. The sponsor and step work is the structural part.
That is what it actually is. It is not a religion. It is a peer-led mutual aid programme with a particular tradition of language.
The higher power question, plainly
Here is where most secular men get stuck. The third step says we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. The eleventh step talks about prayer and meditation. The literature, written in 1939 by a Christian man, uses the language of God liberally.
The honest assessment, after talking to a lot of secular AA members and reading the literature carefully, is this. The higher power, in operational AA practice, can mean almost anything that is not the self. The most common interpretations I have heard from non-religious members include: the group itself (Group Of Drunks, as the joke goes), the accumulated wisdom of the programme, the man's own deeper or future self, the principles the programme is built on, nature, science, fate, the universe, or simply the recognition that the man's own willpower had not worked and that something other than his own ego had to be in charge of the recovery.
I have heard the higher power described, by men in AA meetings I have attended, as: my dead grandfather, the bushwalk I do every Sunday, the truth, the room I am sitting in, the future me who will thank present me, and the simple fact that I am not the centre of the universe. None of these were objected to by the meeting. AA in practice has a much higher tolerance for theological flexibility than its 1939 literature suggests.
The phrase you will hear is, fake it till you make it. The phrase you will hear from secular members is, the higher power is anything bigger than my drinking. That is broad enough that almost any honest man can find something in it.
If the language is too uncomfortable, you do not have to say the prayers. You can stand silently while others say them. You can substitute your own words. Nobody at any meeting I have ever attended in Australia has policed this. The community is too pragmatic. They know what works.
The real medicine
The active ingredients in AA, after twelve months of attending and observing, are not theological. They are these.
The community. You sit in a room every week with people who have done what you are trying to do. The mere presence of men with two, five, ten, twenty years sober changes what is possible in your own head. Recovery becomes a thing real men have done, not an abstraction.
The ritual. Same time, same place, same opening readings, same closing words. The ritual is the spine. The man's week now has a fixed point in it, weekly, and the fixed point is a meeting where he is reminded of what he is doing and why.
The honesty. The shares are honest in a way most men are rarely honest with each other in modern Australian life. You hear a man at a Tuesday meeting describe, calmly, the worst night of his life. You hear another man describe what his daughter said to him when she found him passed out on the kitchen floor. You hear a third man describe how he is six days sober for the eleventh time and how he is still here. The honesty rewires what you can say to yourself.
The sponsor. One man who has done it, who knows your story, who you ring when the urge arrives. The relationship is a small but daily structural piece of the recovery. You do not have to be friends. You have to be honest. The sponsor is the technology that converts the weekly meeting into a daily programme.
The service. Eventually, you start helping someone newer than you. Setting up chairs. Making the coffee. Sponsoring a man with thirty days. The service is part of the medicine, because helping someone else helps the helper at least as much as it helps the helped.
These are the active ingredients. The higher power language is the cultural packaging. The medicine itself is community, ritual, honesty, sponsor, service. None of those require theology. All of those work regardless of what the man believes.
When to try AA
The honest case for trying AA, as a secular man, comes down to a few specific situations.
You have tried solo two or more times and failed. Solo here means willpower, apps, online communities. Three failed solo attempts is the threshold I would suggest. AA is most powerful for the man who has demonstrated to himself that solo does not work for him.
You are a relational person who needs in-person contact. The community piece of AA is most of the medicine, and the community is in-person. If you are someone who works better in groups than alone, this is for you.
You can spare ninety minutes a week, ideally more in the first ninety days. The dose-response curve in AA studies is real. Men who attend three or more meetings a week in the first ninety days have substantially better twelve-month outcomes than men who attend one a fortnight.
You can hold the higher power language with some flexibility. If the language is going to be a permanent obstacle that you cannot work around, AA may not be the right fit. If you can hold it as cultural packaging while you receive the medicine underneath, it works.
You are willing to try a sponsor. The sponsor relationship is the bit most secular men skip, and it is the bit that does most of the structural work. If you go to meetings but never get a sponsor, you are getting maybe sixty per cent of the available benefit.
When to try alternatives
The honest case for not trying AA, or for trying alternatives first, is also real.
SMART Recovery, as I have written elsewhere, is the closest secular equivalent. It is free, in person and online, available across Australia, and built on cognitive-behavioural therapy rather than twelve-step language. For the man who is structured, cognitive in style, and who finds higher-power language too much of an obstacle, SMART is genuinely good. The evidence base is smaller than AA's (because the programme is younger) but the outcomes in head-to-head studies are broadly comparable.
LifeRing Secular Recovery is another peer-led alternative, smaller in Australia but growing, and explicitly secular. Refuge Recovery and Buddhist Recovery use Buddhist frameworks for those who find that more congenial than the AA tradition.
Online communities (the various subreddits, Daybreak, Hello Sunday Morning) work for men who are not yet ready for in-person, who travel a lot, or whose schedules cannot accommodate weekly meetings. They are weaker on community depth and sponsor structure but stronger on accessibility.
CBT with a psychologist who specialises in addiction, covered partially by Medicare, is the right move for the man who wants individual structured work over group work, who has specific co-occurring issues (anxiety, depression, trauma) that benefit from individual treatment, or who simply functions better in one-on-one than in groups.
The honest answer is that there is no single right tool for the secular man. There is the tool that fits this particular shape of man, and the only way to find out is to try one for ninety days.
What I would tell my younger self
If I could write a note to the version of me sitting in the car park in Hawthorn that February evening, it would be a short one. Walk into the room. Listen for an hour. Do not say anything if you do not want to. Come back next week. Try it for ninety days before you decide. The room is more pragmatic than the literature suggests. The medicine is in the people, not the prayer. The men in there are not what you think they are. They are men exactly like you who decided, for whatever reason, that this particular route was the one that worked, and the route worked.
If after ninety days the language is still in your way and the medicine is not landing, leave with my blessing and try SMART Recovery instead. Both are real. Neither is the only answer.
ENOUGH. Walk in the room. See what is there.