Some comments I wrote about a draft pamphlet about non-theist recovery in SLAA
First I referred to my non-theist affirmations
https://annalisse-mayer.blogspot.com/2023/09/proposed-secular-affirmations-for-non.html
Then I sent these remarks:
SLAA was not my first program. OA was.
After joining OA, I had some dramatic emotional mystical experiences. I had dim visions, not exactly like hallucinations, but transformative images in my mind, which I felt came from HP.
I also had peculiar sensations in my brain. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of a limb falling asleep. Then when sensation comes back, for me, it often feels like fluid flowing into the limb. I had a sensation like that in my brain. A feeling of fluid flowing — circulation returning.
Something like this happened to Bill W, the founder of AA. He saw a flash of light. He felt wind blowing on his face.
I have been interested in the research on ketamine, which induces hallucinations — something a bit like the mystical experiences I had after joining OA.
I have been abstinent in OA for 20 years. I absolutely believe that these mystical experiences I had changed my brain, neurologically, and allowed me to become & stay abstinent.
There has been some research on what happens in the brain during ketamine hallucinations — also what happens in the brain during prayer and meditation.
Ketamine researchers seem to feel that the drug actually somehow erases patterns in the brain and rearranges things into new patterns. https://360info.org/ketamine-helps-change-thinking-patterns-in-people-with-treatment-resistant-depression/
Dr Jung in the AA Big Book p. 27
“Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences.
To me these occurrences are phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them.”
This is very much the way researchers describe the effect of ketamine on the brain.
I have not had such dramatic experiences in SLAA as I had in OA, so my recovery hasn’t been as good, I feel. Also, my OA program was directed to stopping something — compulsive Overeating—while my SLAA program, directed at sexual & emotional anorexia, is more oriented towards starting something. But also I have huge step 2 problems in SLAA. I wonder if my desire for a relationship is selfish, whether it’s wrong to pray for it. I wonder if HP maybe doesn’t want me to have a relationship. Maybe I should surrender to that.
Here is a blog I wrote, under a different pseudonym, in 2012 about some of the research I was reading about then and how it related to my recovery. https://annalisse-mayer.blogspot.com/2012/07/musings-on-neurology-of-12-step.html
In any case, tho, with respect to the spiritual experiences I have had, I have no idea whether they come from an external God, or whether they are just an interesting neurological phenomena. I have read that atheists do tend to have different neurology from religionists, so they possibly cannot have mystical experiences.
Yet, I feel that an explanation of program that does not mention this type of experience is not giving the whole picture. I have spoken with several people in program who, like me, traced their recoveries to mystical experiences.
