Why I stopped attending AA meetings—and what my body had been trying to tell me for years.
There is a truth I am only now beginning to fully understand:
I did not stop attending AA meetings because I stopped valuing my sobriety.
I stopped because my body no longer felt safe.
That is a difficult sentence for me to write.
AA was an important part of my early recovery. It gave me language, structure, community, and somewhere to go when I was learning how to live without alcohol.
My sobriety remains one of the most sacred commitments of my life.
And yet, I can honour what AA gave me while also telling the truth about what happened to me there.
What happened between eight and ten years sober?
A two year journey of accusations. I was accused of using AA groups and relationships with women in the fellowship to recruit clients for my coaching business.
I was made to feel that coaching women who struggled with alcohol was wrong.
As though my lived experience, my professional training, my sobriety, and my desire to support women were evidence that I was doing something harmful.
The accusations were serious.
They rocked my world.
I felt shamed, judged, and unsafe within a community that had been deeply connected to my recovery and sense of belonging.
More seriously, the experience threatened my sobriety.
The place that was supposed to help protect my recovery had become a place where I felt I had to protect myself.
I became careful
After that experience, I became careful.
Careful with my voice.
Careful with my story.
Careful when speaking about my work.
Careful about telling women that I was a coach who could support them with alcohol, addiction, habits, grief, relationships, and the deeper patterns underneath their coping.
I began questioning myself.
Was I allowed to speak openly about being sober?
Was I allowed to tell women that I could help them?
Was it wrong to use my lived experience alongside my professional training?
Was supporting women outside of AA somehow a betrayal of the program that had once supported me?
I had absorbed the belief that AA was the only legitimate path to sobriety—and that helping women find freedom in another way was somehow inappropriate.
I confused anonymity with invisibility.
I confused humility with hiding.
I confused service with self-erasure.
I kept going
Even though something no longer felt right, I kept attending.
I kept going because AA had once helped me.
I kept going because sobriety mattered so much to me.
I kept going because leaving felt frightening.
Perhaps some part of me believed that a “good sober woman” continued attending meetings no matter how she felt inside them.
So I kept overriding the discomfort.
I continued showing up even when my body tightened.
I continued attending even when I did not feel free to speak honestly about my life and work.
I continued questioning myself instead of questioning whether the environment was still right for me.
I knew something was off.
I knew I no longer felt safe.
But I kept going until I could no longer ignore what my body had been telling me.
It has now been approximately two years since I attended an in-person meeting and six to eight months since I attended online.
Recently, someone reflected to me, “That was shaming. No wonder you don’t attend.”
Another person said, “Maybe you’ve outgrown it?”
A beautiful Ishtara friend said, “is it time to leave the rooms you no longer belong in?”
Both comments gave language to something I had felt but had not yet fully understood.
When staying became self-abandonment
My work with emotional self-abandonment has helped me see this experience differently.
Self-abandonment happens when we override what we know, feel, need, or want in order to preserve belonging, avoid conflict, maintain stability, or remain acceptable to others.
And that is what I had been doing.
I was continuing to belong to a space where part of me no longer felt safe.
I was silencing my truth to avoid being accused again.
I was hiding meaningful parts of my work because I feared being judged.
I was managing other people’s perceptions while leaving myself behind.
Not sharing what was true for me had become one of the ways I abandoned myself.
That realization is enormous.
AA did not create self-abandonment for every person who attends.
I am not claiming that my experience represents everyone’s experience.
But I can now see that my experience within AA began to feed my own pattern of self-abandonment.
The shame I experienced went underground.
It stayed in my body.
It influenced how visible I allowed myself to be, how confidently I spoke about my work, and how freely I offered support to women struggling with alcohol.
My body knew before I had the words
Through Ishtara, I have learned to listen differently.
My body often knows the truth before my mind is ready to accept it.
My body knew that I did not feel safe.
My body knew that I was making myself smaller.
My body knew that I was no longer attending from genuine connection or desire. I was attending from obligation, fear, and an old belief about what I was supposed to do to remain sober.
Eventually, the feeling became too strong to ignore.
Leaving meetings was not an impulsive rejection of my sobriety.
It was a gradual return to myself.
It was my body saying:
You do not have to stay somewhere that requires you to hide.
You do not have to keep proving your humility through silence.
You do not have to abandon your voice to protect your recovery.
AA was part of my story
This is not a declaration that AA is wrong.
It is not an argument against anyone who finds safety, freedom, community, and lifelong support there.
It is not an invitation for another woman to abandon what is working for her.
This is the truth about my experience.
AA was part of my story.
It helped me during an important season of my life.
But it is not the whole of my story.
I can be grateful for what supported me and honest about what harmed me.
I can honour the woman who needed those rooms and honour the woman who eventually needed to leave them.
I can cherish my sobriety without continuing to attend a space that no longer feels right for me.
There is more than one path to freedom
I have lived alcohol-free for many years.
I am a trained coach.
I am a licensed Ishtara teacher.
I have spent thousands of hours supporting women as they navigate alcohol use, addiction, grief, trauma, relationships, identity, emotional regulation, and the patterns that keep them separated from themselves.
My work is not a betrayal of my recovery.
It is one of the expressions of it.
I know now that there is no single path that will serve every woman.
Some women find what they need in AA.
Some find support through coaching, therapy, medication, trauma healing, body-based practices, spiritual community, or a combination of approaches.
Some identify as alcoholic.
Others do not.
Some want lifelong abstinence.
Others are simply beginning to question the role alcohol plays in their lives.
Women deserve support that honours the fullness of their story—their body, grief, relationships, survival strategies, choices, needs, longings, and truth.
They deserve help without being shamed into someone else’s version of recovery.
What freedom means to me now
Freedom is not pretending that the past did not matter.
Freedom is being honest about how it shaped me.
Freedom is recognizing where I stayed too long because I was afraid to trust myself.
Freedom is no longer hiding the work that has come through my own recovery, healing, training, and lived experience.
I am no longer willing to make my voice smaller to prove that I am humble.
I am no longer willing to confuse belonging with obedience.
I am no longer willing to hide the truth that has healed me.
My body is not here to be hidden.
My truth is not here to be negotiated.
My light is not here to be dimmed.
AA was part of my story.
It is not the whole of my story.
And telling the truth about that is part of my liberation.
If you are a woman questioning your relationship with alcohol—or questioning whether the recovery path you have been given truly fits you—you are not wrong for listening to yourself.
You deserve support that honours the whole of who you are.
You do not have to abandon yourself in order to become free.