An AAtheist – Calliope Raftis

May 14, 2026

Hi, I’m Calliope and I’m an alcoholic.

I dabbled in AA for the first time when I was 17 during a stay in a residential treatment center where they identified me as having substantial issues with alcohol abuse. I hated attending the meetings. Once a week, I was forced to listen to the head speaker drone on about how alcohol is evil and he was only able to get sober through the power of God. Eye rolls, every single time. In my defense, I was a very sardonic 17 year old trapped in a hospital. Further in my defense, and far more debilitating to the plight of AA, I was an atheist.
        I first started attending AA again after a particularly bad binge-drinking cycle in my mid-20s. I showed up to a local meeting the day after I had gotten out of the ER after drunkenly raving to a crisis hotline that I was going to kill myself (I was). I was so desperate for help that I had fallen back on something I knew I fundamentally could never entirely commit to. I sat in the corner closest to the door, ready to retreat at a moment’s notice. Shaking like a leaf. On the verge of tears.
        That meeting was like a baptism, I had walked in scared out of my wits but left feeling rebirthed. I heard story after story from others in the meeting that I could see parts of myself in, parts of myself I couldn’t see in others that were able to drink normally. It was holy. I was cleansed. I never felt such an overwhelming feeling of belonging. I remember basking in the glow of the feeling after, enjoying every alcoholic’s favorite, the cigarette, when it began to creep up on me. I had this gnawing feeling that the constant return to a higher power in everyone’s stories was going to be a bigger issue for me than I initially wanted to admit. I finally found something, just to watch it start to crumble under the weight of religious overtones.
        I chose to ignore this dichotomy in favor of returning to AA. I was able to look past religious ideals in other aspects of my life, so I figured I could just look past it in AA too. I went back the next day, and the next, and the next, until I had been going every day for almost a month straight. The more I went, the more I uncovered just how integral religion was to the program and the more I found myself getting frustrated. Stories from other alcoholics that I would find respite in would be punctuated by notions such as “God got me to the program, and God got me through the program” or “it took faith to find faith,” immediately jolting me back to the reality that I was somewhere that I didn’t fully belong. I couldn’t even drum it up to anecdotal annoyances, the second step of AA is we “came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” and most meetings ended with everyone holding hands and reciting the “Our Father.” It made me want to drive my head through a wall or at least drive my car to my local liquor store.
        I kept finding myself reminded of being forced into Catholicism when I was younger. From as early as I can remember, I could not reconcile the feeling that there was nothing else out there. No higher power. No God. Nothing. It was an all-consuming feeling that led me to many breakdowns, pleading with myself to just believe. I would sit through these AA meetings seeing how truly healed these people were with the help of their faith, and I would once again, sit and plead with myself to just believe in something, anything. I wanted what they had so desperately, I was willing to go against everything I didn’t believe in in order to just begin grasping at it, because despite the tension I felt, I was staying sober for the first time in years.
        There was one meeting where the topic of discussion was a reading from the Big Book (page 62 in the Fourth Edition, if you’re curious), “…the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must or it kills us! God makes that possible. And there often seems no way of entirely getting rid of self without his Aid.” I immediately popped another nicotine pouch in my mouth after hearing that. I sat and tried to genuinely take something from people’s thoughts, but there was no instance where anyone described friction with the notion of God. Until I was called on to share. Much like with my Catholic peers in my past, I found myself filtering my true thoughts in order to not out myself. I described, with a wavering voice, how I liked the idea of a god to lead me through this struggle but had yet to find something that worked with my own personal beliefs. After the meeting, I had an older woman come up to me and just flat out asked me if I was an atheist. On the verge of tears, because I felt like I had been caught red-handed, I barely managed a small no, looking at the floor in shame. She grabbed my hands and told me, “It’s okay, I don’t believe in God either.”
        I stood there and just stared at her for longer than socially acceptable. She smiled at me and explained how she’d been sober for over twenty years and never once believed in a higher power, how she just ignored all of it, took what she needed from the program and left the rest for others. I finally snapped out of it and we were able to swap stories about our road to atheism and what it’s been like in a program that doesn’t inherently make room for us. She explained that some meetings will be harder to sit through than others and how she’ll just leave halfway through sometimes if it becomes too religious for her. I drew a steady, real breath in an AA meeting room for the first time.
        I don’t think I will ever be able to read the Big Book without having to set the book down in exasperation at least several times, nor will I ever likely attend a meeting where I don’t have to remind myself that the story of the majority does not negate mine. But, I do still read the Big Book and I do still go to meetings, because AA is the only place that offers me the relief that alcohol once did.