Frequently Asked Questions

Some questions come up again and again when we present LifeRing Recovery at treatment centers and when I read the email to webmaster.  Here are my answers.  Have other questions?  Have better answers?  Send them in.  -- Marty N, webmaster. 

Is LifeRing Recovery like Alcoholics Anonymous?

Yes and No. Like AA, our objective is abstinence. Like AA also, we see the group process as central to our self-help recovery.  We also like some of the folk wisdom and catchy sayings that alcoholics in AA have developed over the years, such as "one day at a time" and "take what you need and leave the rest."  We have borrowed from AA in some of our organizational concepts, such as not charging fees but passing the basket, and other things.    

The basic difference between our approach and AA's is over how people change.  We see a potential for change within every alcoholic and addict, no matter how low they have sunk.  We see that people can turn that potential into a reality through their own efforts with the support of self-help groups.  Over time, and with work, the desire to stay clean and sober that lies within us can grow into the actual power to do it.  We see "Higher Powers" and the rest of the theological material as redundant at best to the recovery process.  

We see alcoholism and drug addiction as basically identical and we welcome alcoholics and addicts into our meetings without distinction.  We also welcome people involved in relationships where alcohol and/or drugs are a problem.

We value confidentiality and protect our members' anonymity, but we permit members to disclose their own participation if they feel that being open will strengthen their recovery.    

We do not require people to quit smoking in order to participate in our groups, but our meetings generally are non-smoking and we provide encouragement, education and support for quitting whenever the member feels ready.

In LifeRing, do you do Steps?  If not, what is your program?

Our only "step" is not to drink or use, no matter what.  In our experience, the process of working any prefabricated capital-P Program such as the Twelve Steps usually fails to engage people's sober energies at a deep enough level to produce a resilient, autonomous recovery.  We provide a safe, supportive, resource-rich environment where participants design and build their own tailormade recovery programs, in accordance with their personality, culture, gender, lifestyle, and history.  This is more challenging than following a "factory" program, but it gives participants a greater sense of ownership, a deeper commitment, more flexibility in adapting to changes, and a greater ability to stay sober on their own.  The fact that our members work up a considerable diversity of different recovery programs is a source of strength and celebration for us.  

Do your members have to write up their personal sobriety programs? 

No.  Writing them is a good idea, though.  I wrote mine, after four years.  If we had 100 people write down their personal sobriety programs it would make an interesting book.  No two programs would be exactly alike, but they could all be good programs.  We could hand it to newcomers and say, "here's some ideas  for starters."   For people who feel overwhelmed by the idea of building their own sobriety program -- Where do I start?  What do I do? -- we offer a 300-p. workbook, Recovery By Choice.  The workbook doesn't give you the answers, that's not its purpose.  Its purpose is to ask questions for you to think about.  It's not a prefabricated structure, it's a scaffolding that helps you build your own structure your way.  If your first attempt crashes, change something and try again.  If you keep working, eventually you'll succeed.  And you'll have self-knowledge and autonomy as a sober person.  

If I attend LifeRing, can I also go to AA/NA? 

No problem.  About a third of LifeRing members nationwide also attend 12-Step groups.  Usually they go there mainly for the social support, and do not get involved in the Steps & Sponsors aspects.  If our members are traveling in areas where no LifeRing meetings exist, we encourage them to go to any other sobriety support group.  LifeRing is not a cult and does not demand that participants forsake all other loyalties; in fact, we welcome imports of ideas from other programs, provided they fit with our "three-S" philosophy.  

 Do you have sponsors?

If you see somebody in LifeRing whose style of recovery specially appeals to you, by all means make friends with them and pick their brains.  Most meetings circulate sign-up sheets and encourage you to take phone numbers and call people between meetings when you need support. Basically, we all collectively sponsor each other. As a newcomer, you may find friendships with other newcomers as valuable as, or more valuable than, friendships with old-timers who have forgotten what their early recovery was like.  We value informal voluntary one-on-one relationships, but we see no reason to erect them into a program requirement.  Since we have no complicated mysterious doctrine filled with paradoxes, you don't need expert guide-interpreters here.  We also feel that vesting our older members with the kind of power over newer members that AA sponsors typically have is corrupting, and we have elected not to go there.

In some circumstances, where an outside authority requires that you have a sponsor or lose your license, go to jail, etc., an individual LifeRing member may be willing to act this role and fill out the required paperwork for you.   Ask.  

What kinds of people are most likely to be successful in LifeRing?

People who have a sincere desire to get clean and sober are likely to be successful in LifeRing, regardless of any other traits.  Our meetings include all kinds of religiously devout people as well as all kinds of agnostics and atheists, and every stripe in between.  Since we're secular, none of that matters.  A few years ago, surveys indicated we were predominantly middle class, educated and affluent, but today our meetings include all classes, nationalities, and levels of education and income.  Survey studies today probably would not find a significant difference between our membership profile and that of the general population of recovering persons.   Our method requires more initiative and motivation than the traditional approach, but our environment also tends to bring those qualities out in people.  

A few kinds of people are not likely to be comfortable in the LifeRing environment:  people who prefer more of a Sunday-school atmosphere, people who resist taking responsibility for their own recovery, people whose goal is control, moderation, or substitution rather than abstinence, and people who are unable to participate in any kind of group process.  

In LifeRing do I have to define myself as an alcoholic or an addict?  

Our primary objective is to support one another in staying clean and sober.  If you find that labeling yourself as an alcoholic or addict helps you do that, then by all means do so.  If you find that your mind only seizes on these labels as excuses to relapse, then by all means stay away from them.  Studies have found no strong correlation between the use of these labels and success at recovery.  It's your choice.  In our meetings, some people introduce themselves as alcoholics and/or addicts, some don't, some go back and forth.  There should be no pressure to conform one way or the other.  Do whichever works best for you to stay abstinent.  

Does LifeRing define alcoholism/addiction as a disease?

Like the "alcoholic" label, the "disease" model is a two-edged sword.  Many people find it tremendously helpful in staying clean and sober.  Others find it a wonderful rationale for chronic relapse.  By all means adopt the disease model if it helps you stay abstinent.  But if you find that the disease model mainly supplies your mind with rationalizations to slip and slide, then dump it and think of yourself instead as having made bad choices in the past, and making better choices today.  LifeRing is not held together by any particular theory of alcoholism/addiction, but by a common commitment to the behavior of abstinence.  Whatever theory works for you to get there and stay there is a good theory.   You can always revisit the issue later. 

The definition of alcoholism as a medical disease is the key to public and private funding of treatment.  There is a large and growing body of evidence that shows neurochemical, molecular changes in the brains of people under the influence and in the brains of addicts.  There is considerable evidence for a genetic predisposition in the most severe cases of alcoholism and in nicotine addiction.  Research with laboratory animals shows that they can readily be made addicted by sustained intravenous administration of the drug.  This and other evidence lends credence to the theory that addiction is a physiological disorder caused by excessive consumption of the substance, or genetic influence, or a combination of the two.  

The evidence that addiction is also a uniform "psychological disease" is unimpressive by comparison.  Although many psychological and psychiatric disorders appear linked with substance addiction to some degree, fifty years of studies have failed to find a consistent personality profile that is common to alcoholics or addicts.  The notion of an "alcoholic personality" has been debunked.

The further notion that addiction is a "spiritual disease" is not a scientific proposition and its presence is a marker of the Twelve-Step religious influence.  The term "disease model" has widely divergent meanings depending on which of these and other elements is thought to be included.

Does LifeRing aim at anything more than helping people get clean and sober?

We do not.  It's not necessary, and it's counterproductive.  

Being an actively drinking or using addict is like carrying a big sack of stones.  Your back gets bent over, your head faces down, and you don't go very far.  When people finally put the sack down, most of them straighten up and look forward, and before long they're striding toward a life's goal.  Some become spiritual seekers.  Some try out for baseball teams.  Some spend time with their grandchildren.  Some go to work on the great American novel.  They need no preaching from us to find their way.  True, there's always a few who stay bent over with head down after the sack is gone.  We may try to nudge them, but it's their life.  We don't sit in judgment.  Most people experience sobriety as liberation.  To be a part of that is reward enough.  

If we were to put sobriety in second place, behind some other goal such as uplifting the human character, we would soon get in a muddle.  Sobriety has little to do with character.  There are addict angels and sober scoundrels.  Methods that may work for uplifting the human character may give little traction toward sobriety, and may even work against it.  

Our meetings discuss whatever comes up in the participants' lives:  work, parents, children, relationships, feelings, sex, books, life, death, money, and much more.  By being there and listening, and offering advice if asked for it, we help each other to deal in a sober way with all kinds of life issues, far beyond basic sobriety skills.  But the only "official" advice that we dispense on all these problems is that you can face them better sober.  

If we feel that the Sobriety Priority doesn't meet the full range of our spiritual needs, that's fine.  We can go to any number of churches, gurus, or other vendors of enlightenment.  We have a division of labor.  They don't do sobriety.  We don't do moral uplift.  By making sobriety our priority, imperfect as we are, we stay focused on what we do best. 

Do you let people who are "wet" (currently under the influence) attend your meetings?

That's up to the meeting to decide.  Most meetings have the rule that a "wet" can be present but can't speak once the meeting starts.  That's what the boilerplate opening statement says.  In practice, it's very rare for a "wet" to attend. 

Do your meetings allow cross-talk? 

Yes, all our meetings allow cross-talk (dialogue, responding directly to what a person said).  Some allow it during the whole meeting, some only during a set period at the end.  Cross-talk helps people understand each other better.  It lets people participate who otherwise might not open their mouths.  We try to make it possible for everyone to speak at some time during the meeting, if they will.  The basic healing principle of "two sober drunks talking" means cross-talk, if it means anything. 

Are there any studies that prove your approach works?

LifeRing works for the people who continue to participate in it.  If you are a social science professional and would like to enlist LifeRing for a double-blind outcomes study with a control group, please contact the LifeRing Service Center.  

Loosely speaking, LifeRing draws its inspiration mainly from the cognitive-behaviorist and motivational schools of thought, and these approaches when used in formal treatment programs have been shown to be equally effective as a Twelve-Step facilitation approach in recent controlled studies by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (Project Match).

But you're not going to pick a program because of studies.  Go to a meeting, sample the atmosphere, listen, talk, see how you feel. If you feel comfortable and motivated, it will work for you. If not, try something else.

Does your unstructured approach work with newcomers?

In our meetings at treatment centers, and in our online groups, there are lots of people who have only a day or a few days clean and sober, and they do very well.  Our approach teaches newcomers from the beginning that only they can get themselves sober, and that the time to start taking responsibility and thinking about how best to do it is now.  From Day One they learn to listen for sober survival clues from their peers, and they share their own day-to-day victories as they go.  From Day One they start building self-confidence and self-esteem as sober people.  The key healing ingredient is not any doctrine, but the companionship of sober peers.  What excuse is there for delaying these live-saving lessons until some later stage of recovery?  

Does your approach work with the "hard cases"?

There are no harder cases than the attempted suicides.  I see them weekly in the dual diagnosis crisis ward of a local hospital.  See Letters of Reference.  It's not news to tell them that they have a fatal disease, that drink and drugs are poison, and that if they keep drinking/drugging they will kill themselves.  That's just what they were trying to do.  Most of them accepted long ago that they were alcoholics/ addicts; that's why they keep drinking and drugging.  Most of them have done the Steps a dozen times, and the Higher Power did nothing for them.  I go in there and try to get them to focus on something positive about themselves.  I ask them whether there is a sober place inside them somewhere, and to talk about that.  Most of them can find such a spot.  I ask them what could be done to make that spot grow.  Many of them have ideas about that.  I ask them whether they see a sober place in the other people in the room.  If I am lucky, they will begin to point out and reinforce the sober potential in one another.  Sparks of hope begin to appear.  What had been a sullen session with depressed would-be suicides sometimes turns into an animated support meeting of people who are rediscovering a reason to live.  Yes, the LifeRing approach can work with the hard cases.  In fact, it was only when I began to spend time with this population that I began really to think about and to understand the power of the LifeRing approach.  

What are the weaknesses of the LifeRing approach?

We are still young and relatively small.  Not enough people know how good we are.  To be more effective, we need to have many more meetings, much better organization, more funds, more literature, more outreach.  You can make a difference here.  

How can I contact LifeRing?

By email: service@lifering.org.  Telephone: 510-763-0779 or 1-800-811-4142.  Mail: LifeRing Secular Recovery, 1440 Broadway, Suite 312, Oakland CA 94612.  

Further Reading

LifeRing Press books and brochures, book reviews on BookTalk page