Sobriety Handbook: The SOS Way: An Introduction to Secular Organizations for Sobriety/Save Our Selves (Sos) - Softcover

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Sobriety Handbook: The SOS Way shows how you can get sober and stay sober by relying on your own powers in the friendly, down-to-earth atmosphere of secular self-help support groups. The book guides newcomers into the world of SOS, the established alternative to the traditional 12-step recovery groups. It outlines the liberating SOS self-empowerment approach for getting sober. It includes dozens of sobriety tools YOU can use -- or not, as YOU decide.

Sobriety Handbook: The SOS Way explains the basic principles of how SOS works, illustrated with colorful anecdotes from real-life meetings. Learn how to make self-help groups work for you without losing your individuality. Read why SOS positively will not coerce you to follow anybody's Program. Only YOU can get yourself sober!

Sobriety Handbook: The SOS Way explains the SOS meeting process and format, and packs essential reference material in the Appendix. Be prepared when it comes your turn to lead the meeting! Want to start a new SOS meeting? Here's the essential resource kit you'll need to carry the friendly secular message of the SOS Way to your community.

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From Chapter Three: In ancient Greek mythology there was a roadside bandit named Procrustes who had a bed in which he forced all travelers to lie. Those who were shorter than the bed, he stretched until their bones cracked; those who were longer, he cut off their feet. Most alcoholism and addiction programs are like Procrustes and his bed. Everyone has The Program: one size fits all. In AA, everyone does the Twelve Steps. In Rational Recovery, everyone does AVRT. In SMART, everyone does REBT. And so on. Each vendor promises that its particular Program is the Answer. In fact, some people are helped by the Steps, some are not, and the same is true of the others. There is no such thing as one Program that works for everybody, and we doubt there will ever be.

SOS is unique in the alcoholism and addiction movement in deliberately not offering a capital-P Program. We have no Program, no panacea, no one-size-fits-all, no cookie cutter, no miracle cure, no magic pill to sell. We reject the whole dichotomy between Program and alcoholic, in which The Program is the active, knowing, healthy protagonist and the alcoholic or addict is the passive, dumb, sick raw material to be stamped and molded into the desired shape. We think that any approach that acts on the alcoholic over time as an outside compulsion, a Program, is doomed to fail with most of the people most of the time. No program, including the SOS self-empowerment approach, will work if the person doesn't have an inner desire to escape from addiction. SOS rests its entire chance of success on the encouragement and rational nurture of that desire.

We hold that each alcoholic or addict needs to construct their own sobriety based on their own experiences and needs. We think each alcoholic not only needs to, but is able to construct his or her own personal sobriety program, if afforded the support and the tools. The work of putting a program together must be and is done by the newly recovering persons themselves, just as each of us with long-term sobriety has done it for ourselves. We have confidence in the ability of alcoholics and addicts, no matter how serious our history, to pull ourselves together with peer group support. We have seen it work. Conversely, we are quite certain that we cannot get and stay sober unless we construct a sobriety program for ourselves. That is why we say that we have no one (big-P) Program; we have as many programs (small p) as we have participants.

Our main "program construction workshop" consists of the friendly environment of our secular self-help meetings. The protective, non-judgmental atmosphere, the ability to express oneself honestly and frankly, the companionship of other sober alcoholics with their funds of experience and wit, form our principal nourishment and our toolbox. In this environment, the newly sober person soon gains the self-confidence and the commonsense skills to avoid the most glaring relapse traps. In time, we learn that we can unload our painful emotions by sharing them, that we can handle agonizing memories by sharing them, that we can resist the seduction of our addiction by disclosing it at meetings. We learn that we can recover from relapse if we get back "in" immediately and acknowledge it openly. We learn little slogans to help organize our thoughts, such as "we don't drink or use, no matter what," or "Sobriety Priority" and others. We read books and articles and get new ideas about our condition. We read about the personal programs of others, and borrow something, or not. We may practice little helpful tricks, such as daily affirmation exercises, or meditations, or changes in our diet, recreation, or other behavior. We may scavenge a bit of wisdom from other programs, and add it to our construct. And then, one day at a meeting, the topic is "How I Stay Sober." We share with the meeting what exactly we do. We weren't really aware of it until then, but we have constructed our own sobriety program. It is us and we are it. No one else has a program precisely like this one. It works for me because I built it myself; I know it intimately; I own it and I operate it; I made it; it is mine.