I kept trying to get sober over and over again, picked up 5 or 6 90-day chips. Every time I’d slip and smoke a little or something and be devastated that I was back at square one, and starting over. I feel that AA and NA instills this cycle 
by counting “slips” as total failures. I know that in these cases I said f-it and just had my fun until hard drugs got me into trouble again.
I’ve been sober years now and I don’t even know or care about my sobriety date. I don’t have to repeat the “one day at a time” mantra to get myself through misery and go to meetings frequently. I don’t even think about it. I think it’s related to me just deciding to be done, and not taking account of the date.
Is it possible that “sobriety dates” have a negative effect on some people’s sobriety’s? What do you guys think? Am I just an outlier?
That's a good question. I like to think of all the amount of Sobriety had, with slips being pauses in the middle that I recovered from so I could get back to here. I guess everyone's different and this different approaches. Some folks are so serious about their method that it's almost like if what's working for me isn't what works for them they feel the need to tell me that my way won't work (out of true concern, but darn it's annoying). Good thought here Nick, thanks.
Holding a sobriety date as precious has worked for me but I can also see it as an arbitrary construct that might do harm for some.
I had a great recovery mentor talk about how being rigid is counter-productive to welcoming ease into our lives.
I believe in early recovery, our mind and body are imprisoned by a cage of addiction. The tiger whispers all kinds of things to us to keep us in the cage. And the 12-step framework is a roadmap to freeing ourselves from the cage. I lost trust in myself in early recovery. I had to externalize my operating manual while detoxing. I had to trust something external, because my tiger was so sneaky. So I did what was suggested and trusted a format with a set of norms that seems to have worked for other people.
But slowly, over time, for me it was about 15months, I realized the tiger wasn’t running the show anymore. She had actually shrunken down to a small figurine. I was outside the cage. Thank you for the roadmap. But now that I can trust myself, now that I can feel my body, now that I can take care of myself…. I trust my own personal pretty and values. My compass is calibrated.