It Wouldn't Work For Us
 

A misconception we all hear about recovery before any of us get here is that recovery is a religious program. This keeps a lot of us from even wanting to have anything to do with recovery, and this keeps us from finding out what it's really about, or what it might do to help all of us with this problem of ours. If this were true about recovery then all that any of us would have to do in order to get over this problem would be for us to join a religion. This has been tried before recovery was around, and is still tried today by some of us and the results are always all the same. This doesn't work for most of us. In fact it usually makes matters worse for all of us who try to do this. What does work for all of us is how recovery uses the ideas that go into making religions what they are, in a way that we all can use them without any of us having to belong to one. This turns out to be a good thing for all of us because, if we had to belong to a religion for us to be in recovery, then most of us wouldn't be here. Yes, there are those of us in recovery who do belong to a religion, and yes, sometimes they can become get a little over zealous about the fact that they belong to one, but that okay for all of us, as long as we all remember that we don't have to be in one for us to be in recovery, and that most of us in recovery are not in one, and for good reason because somehow all of us know it wouldn't work for us, if we were.