When Recovering Alcoholics Tear Each Other Down

Just because someone quit drinking, it doesn't mean that they're a nice person.

Photo by Benjamin Fay on Unsplash

Most of the sober people that I’ve met are nice. I’ll even go so far as to say that some of the most compassionate and empathetic people I’ve met have been fellow recovering alcoholics.

We all know how badly an addiction can ruin your life, and we all know how hard it is to overcome an addiction and turn our lives around. This shared experience fosters a sympathetic and supportive community.

Unfortunately, there are also sober people who break this pattern. There is a small, but loud minority of people in the recovery community who are downright nasty to their peers.

I’ve met these people in face-to-face recovery meetings and I’ve encountered even more of them online.

The kind of people that I’m talking about are the ones who show up to a recovery space with nothing but arrogance and a chip on their shoulder. They believe that they are right about everything related to sobriety. (And perhaps everything else too!) They talk down to other recovering alcoholics and seem to be more interested in making people feel bad than helping them.

The trademark of this type of person is their condescension. They treat nearly everyone else in the room like an idiot, and wouldn’t in a million years even consider that they themselves still have a thing or two to learn.

Often, they disguise their meanness as tough love. They say that they are “telling people what they need to hear.” However, to most of us listening to them, it’s obvious that they are just jerks.

If anyone is fooled by their act, I can only imagine that it would end up hurting their sobriety efforts. Any advice they receive would be outweighed by the feelings of shame and guilt after getting lectured every time they try to open up.

I suspect that the jerks of the recovery world, however small a minority they might be, have been responsible for driving away many addicts from recovery spaces. They were absolutely a factor in my decision to stop attending in-person meetings years ago.

Why do they act like this?

Let me play armchair psychologist for a moment.

My suspicion is that these are people who are basically not doing well in their lives. That wouldn’t be surprising, because that’s how a lot of us were when we first got sober.

However, while most of us use sobriety as an opportunity to grow, some folks continue to flail. As the rest of their life falls apart, they put all of their self-worth in sobriety. I’ve certainly gone down that path myself.

The question, from that point, is whether they keep working toward self-improvement, or simply let themselves linger with a crappy life. When it’s the latter, they end up turning to meetings and recovery spaces as a chance to feel better about themselves at the expense of others.

Instead of building their self-esteem by lifting others up, they choose to do it by tearing others down. They feel a constant need to prove that they are the sobriety experts, and they do that by talking down to everyone else.

Or maybe I’m over-complicating it.

Maybe these people are simply jerks. Maybe they like being mean to other people.

In any case, it leaves the rest of us in a conundrum. How do we deal with people who are ruining the recovery world for the rest of us?

It wasn’t until a couple of years after I started blogging that I realized there was an incredibly easy way for me to deal with these jerks. I could block them.

Almost every modern communication platform has a block feature, and it works incredibly well.

When someone says something rude, whether it’s to me or someone else, I block them and forget their existence. It’s painfully simple, and it has massively improved the quality of the time that I spend in online recovery spaces.

When it comes to in-person groups, I’ll admit that it’s harder. There is no convenient way to block someone in real life. We can switch to different groups, but there’s a decent chance we’ll run into a jerk there too.

I think one potential solution is to not give them any of our energy. We can let them speak, and then move on and focus on the people who are there to support one another. The people who deserve our time are the ones who want to help themselves and others, not tear everyone down.

I believe in second, and even third, chances. I’m not saying that we should go banning people from recovery groups just for acting like jerks. I think that unless someone is actually a threat or actively harming others, we shouldn’t shut them out.

However, we also don’t need to waste our efforts who aren’t willing to simply be nice, or at least bearable. I’ve seen far too many people waste their time trying to engage with these jerks in good faith, not realizing that no matter what they say, they’re only going to be met with condescension and arrogance.

Some of these sober jerks will grow out of it. When they’re ready to be nicer, we should welcome them. Until then, let’s do our best to ignore their meanness.