Reddit mentions of Introduction to Learning and Behavior (PSY 361 Learning)

In my completely unprofessional opinion, the two things AA has going for it are the structure of the meetings (ritual), and the community of people who want to drink less (tribe).


However: AA’s position of hardline abstinence makes your sobriety brittle. If you fuck up and have a (1) drink, you tend to feel that you’ve committed some catastrophic fuck up, and go on a hard bender. The goal for me was to make my relationship with alcohol less neurotic. Trading “compulsively drinking” for “compulsively not-drinking” didn’t accomplish that.

Additionally, most people irritate me most of the time. So the idea of having a sponsor never appealed to me. Having to listen to people talk about their problems so I can make people listen to my problems, also did not appeal to me. If AA works for you, I’m peanut-butter-and-jealous, but it definitely didn’t work for me.

Around the third time I “flunked out” of AA and the second time I legit flunked out of college, one of the psych classes I was taking in college used This Book. It covers Experimental Analysis of Behavior, the science of getting animals to behave the way you want them to behave. Reducing behavior, your behavior, down to scientific terms helps you define what, exactly, you’re doing wrong. It taught me a lot about the process of addiction, and how to gradually change my habits and environment so as to dramatically reduce my alcohol intake.
That book was the only book that semester that I didn’t sell back to the book store, I would go down to the library every day (ritual) and be around the other library-people (tribe). We didn’t talk much, and that’s great, because I don’t really like talking to people anyway. I considered it my second job.

Granted, that was a pretty labor intensive approach, and it's definitely not for everyone... But if you’re thinking about tolerating AA for the rest of your life, you’re already past the point of fucking around.