GRESHAM’S LAW & ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
by Tom P., Jr.
GRESHAM'S LAW as applied to A.A.
If you are serious about your
program!
GRESHAM¹S LAW - THAT BAD CURRENCY DRIVES OUT GOOD - HAS BEEN OPERATIVE IN
THE LIFE OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. WEAK AA IS TENDING TO DRIVE OUT STRONG AA.
By Tom Powers who was at GSO in the '50s.
Permission was given to reprint.
There are three ways to work the
program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
-
The strong, original way, proved powerfully and reliably effective over
forty years.
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A medium way - not so strong, not so safe, not so sure, not so good, but
still effective.
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a weak way, which turns out to be really no way at all but literally a
heresy, a false teaching, a twisting corruption of what the founders of
Alcoholics Anonymous clearly stated the program to be.
As an eleven year member of Alcoholics Anonymous, I
am still awed by the combination of simplicity, practicality, and profundity
built into the Twelve Steps; the AA recovery plan. This audacious blueprint
for life change was drawn up in 1939 by a former dead-end drunk serving as
spokesman for an unknown, unproven society of 100 reformed problem drinkers,
many of whom were still in the relatively early stages of recovery from
alcohol addiction. Yet for all their boldness of scope, the Steps are so
plainly worded, and so well-explained in chapters five and following
of³Alcoholics Anonymous² the AA ³Big Book,² that they can be done by anyone.
And, therein lies their greatest genius. There is no prior requirement of
purity of life or advancement of learning. Just a willingness to admit
personal defeat and a sincere desire to change.
The Twelve Steps
sharply contradict the secular psychological axiom that where the level of
performance is low you must set a low level of aspiration in order to gain a
positive result in life. By this view, the proper approach
for the early AA's would have been to put together
a program aimed certainly no higher than alcohol abstinence and a return to
life as it had been in the pre-alcoholic days, life as ordinary men and
women of the world. But these newly-sobered-up drunks set out to become
totally committed men and women of God.
The authors of the Big Book
knew that this radical recovery plan was apt to jar many of the newcomers
they were trying to reach with their message and they made two moves to
sugarcoat their pill. First, they put the following disclaimer immediately
after listing the Twelve Steps in chapter five: ³Many of us exclaimed, I
can't go through with it. Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been
able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are
not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines.
The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual
progress rather than spiritual perfection. ² That short paragraph was a
stroke of inspiration, especially the phrase, ³We are not saints. ²It has
eased thousands of new, half-convinced AA members (myself included) past the
fact that we were headed, under the guidance of the Steps, in the completely
unfamiliar direction of spiritual perfection.
Most of us began
practicing the Steps without realizing their full implications. Experience
quickly taught us that they worked. They got us sober and enabled us to stay
sober. From our intensely pragmatic standpoint, that was what mattered. We
were content to enjoy our sobriety and leave all debates as to why the Steps
worked to non-alcoholic theorizers - whose lives did not hang in the balance
if they got themselves confused and came to some wrong conclusions.
AA's founders did something else to keep the spiritual rigor and power of
the Twelve Steps from scaring off new prospects. They put the Steps forth as
suggestions rather than as directives. The sentence which introduces the
Steps in chapter five of the Big Book says, ³Here are the steps we took,
which are suggested as a program of recovery. ²This idea had enormous appeal
throughout the AA movement from the time the Big Book was first published.
We drunks hate to be told to do anything. The freedom to take the Steps at
their own pace and in their own way quickly grew to be deeply cherished
among AA members.
Before we explore the results of this permissive
approach to the Steps, there is one oddity worth noting. AA existed for four
full years before the Steps were put in their final written form. During
that time there was a program and it was sobering up alcoholics. It
consisted of two parts: a Six-step word-of-mouth program, and the Four
Absolutes - absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and
absolute love - taken over from the Oxford Group, the evangelical Christian
movement out of which AA was born. The six steps of the word-of-mouth
program from the early pioneering years of Alcoholics Anonymous as given in
"Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age" are:
-
We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol.
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We made a moral inventory of our defects or sins.
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We confessed or shared our shortcomings with another person in
confidence.
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We made restitution to all those we had harmed by our drinking.
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We tried to help other alcoholics with no thought of reward in money or
prestige.
-
We prayed to whatever God we thought there was for power to practice
these precepts.
In those early days of AA there was no talk of
suggestions. The basic points of the program, were regarded by all the older
members as directives, as indispensable essentials, and were passed on to
newcomers as such.
When Bill first formulated the Twelve Steps, he
conceived of them, too, as instructions, not as suggestions. When the idea
of presenting the Steps as suggestions came up, Bill for a long time flatly
opposed it. Finally - and reluctantly - he agreed. In "Alcoholics Anonymous
Comes of Age" he related how this concession enabled countless AA¹s to
approach the fellowship who would otherwise have been turned off AA - and
back to active alcoholism.
Still, Bill was a man whose watchword was
prudence and who went out of his way to steer clear of destructive
controversy. One cannot help wondering if his feelings on the decision to
present the Twelve Steps in the form of suggestions were not a bit more
ambiguous than he was willing to let on in public once the compromise had
been reached. There is no denying that the paragraphs of chapter five of the
Big Book which introduce the Twelve Steps are full of language that would be
utterly appropriate as a preamble to a set of action directions, but is not
nearly as fitting as an introduction to a group of suggestions. Here is the
beginning of chapter five, with the key words and phrases underlined:
³Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.
Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give
themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are
constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such
unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way.
They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living
which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There
are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but
many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest. Our stories
disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what
we are like now. If you have decided you want what we have and are willing
to go to any length to get it - then you are ready to take certain steps.
³At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier,
softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we
beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have
tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go
absolutely.
³Remember that we deal with alcohol - cunning, baffling,
powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all
power - that One is God. May you find Him now!
³Half measures availed
us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care
with complete abandon. Here are the steps we took. . . ²
Granting that Bill ended up fully reconciled to the
compromise, his initial misgivings may turn out in the long run to have been
prophetic. At the time, however, there were no indications whatsoever that
the permissive, suggestions only approach was anything but a boon to the
movement.
In 1938 and 1939 when the Big Book was being
written, there were 100 members in the fellowship. By 1945 active AA
membership was up to 13,000. The primary reason for this explosive increase
was that the program - the Steps - were a winning formula; they worked, and
there was a big need for them out there in the population. America was boozy
and was spawning a great many alcoholics.
Highly favorable press
coverage of the AA story was also a major factor in the spectacular growth
pattern. A series of enthusiastic articles on AA appeared in the fall of
1939 in the Cleveland "Plain Dealer. "These pieces produced a flood of new
AA members in the Cleveland area. This sudden expansion was the first
tangible evidence that AA had the potential to grow into a movement of major
proportions.
The sequence of events during this period is
significant. The Big Book was published in April of 1939, and in it the
suggestions-only approach to the Steps was disseminated for the first time.
A few months later the "Plain
Dealer" articles ran, and Cleveland AA¹s
found themselves relating to new prospects on an unprecedented scale. It
suddenly became attractive, in away it had not been before when the
fellowship was smaller and more intimate, to ease up a bit on the idea that
all the principles should be practiced all the time by all the members. More
and more emphasis began to be placed on the fact that the Steps were to be
considered as suggestions only. At this time, and through this set of
circumstances, the "cafeteria style" take-what-you-like-and-leave-the-rest
approach to the Twelve Steps came into practice.
And it seemed to
work. It turned out that many newcomers could get sober and stay sober
without anything like the full and intensive practice of the whole program
that had been considered a life-or-death necessity in the early years. In
fact, alcoholics in significant numbers began to demonstrate that they could
stay off booze on no more than an admission of powerlessness, some work with
other alcoholics, and regular attendance at AA meetings.
This is not
to say that all AA¹s began to take this super-permissive approach to the
Twelve Steps. A great many continued to opt for the original, full program
approach. But now for the first time the workability of other, less rigorous
approaches was established, and a tendency had emerged which was to become
more pronounced as time went on.
At first this seemed like an
unmixed blessing. After all, those who chose actively to practice all of the
Twelve Steps were as free as ever to do so. Those who preferred working with
some, or just a couple, of the Steps were staying sober too. And AA was
attracting more and more new members and more and more favorable
recognition. In 1941, Jack Alexander's article on Alcoholics Anonymous was
published in the ³Saturday Evening Post. ²AA membership at the time stood at
2,000. In the next nine months it jumped 400%.
By now it was
possible to distinguish three variant practices of the AA program which we
have labeled the strong-cup-of-coffee, medium-cup-of-coffee, and
weak-cup-of-coffee approaches. Strong AA was the original, undiluted, dosage
of the spiritual principles. Strong AA¹s took all twelve of the Steps - and
kept on taking them. They did not stop with the admission of powerlessness
over alcohol, but went on right away to turn their wills and lives over to
God's care. They began to practice rigorous honesty in all their affairs. In
short order they proceeded to take a moral inventory, admit all their wrongs
to at least one other person, take positive and forceful action in making
such restitution as was possible for those wrongs, continued taking
inventory, admitting their faults, and making restitution on a regular
basis, pray and meditate every day, go to two or more AA meetings weekly,
and actively work the Twelfth Step, carrying the AA message to others in
trouble.
The medium AA¹s started off with a bang, pretty much
like the strong AA¹s, except they hedged or procrastinated a bit on parts of
the program that they feared or did not like - maybe the God Steps, maybe
the inventory Steps, depending on their particular nervousness or dislikes.
But after they had stayed sober for a while, the medium AA¹s eased up and
settled into a practice of the program that went something like this: an AA
meeting a week; occasional Twelfth Step work (leaving more and more of that
to the "newer fellows" as time went on); some work with the Steps (but not
like before); less and less inventory (as they became more and more
"respectable"); some prayer and meditation still, but not on a daily basis
any more (not enough time, due to the encroachment of business engagements,
social activities, and other baggage that went along with the return to
normal life in the workaday world).
The weak AA¹s were a varied lot.
The thing common to all of them was that they left big chunks of the program
totally and permanently out of their reckoning right from the outset -
sometimes the God Steps, sometimes the inventory Steps, often both. Weak
AA¹s tended to talk in terms like, "All you need to do to stay sober is go
to meetings and stay away from the first drink. "Most of the weak AA¹s who
were successful in staying sober were pretty faithful meeting-goers. Since
they were doing so little with the principles, their sobriety and their
survival depended more exclusively than did those of the strong and medium
AA¹s on constant exposure to the people of AA.
The fact is that only
the strong-cup-of-coffee-ers were practicing the program as it had been laid
out in the Big Book. Granting that the medium and weak AA¹s had every right
as AA members to practice the principles any way they wanted (including
hardly any at all), since the Steps were "suggestions only" - still, the way
the first members had done it, and the way the Big Book had recorded it was
the strong-cup-of-coffee way. The medium approach had - and still has - a
real, constructive place in the AA recovery scheme, in that it can be used
as a temporary platform for reluctant beginners. The medium-cup-of-coffee
option enables many who initially are not up to the strong approach to gain
a foothold in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.
But medium AA can, and often does, become a trap.
It is no place for an AA member to try to settle out permanently. People who
stick too long in medium AA pass the point where they might be encouraged to
step up to strong AA and end up sliding back into weak AA.
Weak AA
has none of the redeeming features of medium AA. It is clearly at odds with
the program as outlined in the Big Book. It bases itself on a flat and
nonnegotiable refusal to work with vital recovery principles. Weak AA¹s cop
out and stay copped out on most of the Twelve Steps. They water down the
program to the point where there really is no program in the sense that the
first members of AA understood the program. A more inclusive, more accurate,
and more descriptive term than "weak AA" for this practice is "copped-out
and watered-down AA", or COWD AA for short. With the passage of time, a
definite evolution has taken place in AA in the respective popularity and
acceptability of the strong and COWD approaches.
In the first years
of their existence, the COWD AA¹s tended to feel obligated to defend and
sing the praises of their "heterodox" approaches and even to chide the
strong AA¹s a bit for being rigid and holier-than-thou. The strong AA¹s, for
their part, tended to be more relaxed and tolerant, less strident, less
defensive. After all, their method was obviously safer since it involved
taking more of the medicine. And it was obviously the original and
genuine article as the Big Book eloquently attested But this juxtaposition
of attitudes came to have a peculiar effect in a movement which prided
itself on its good-natured inclination to let all kinds of maverick opinions
and practices have their say and their way. The loudest voices came to be
the voices of heterodoxy, and these came in time to have the greatest impact
on newcomers. Copped-out and watered-down AA came to be the "in" thing, the
wave of the future; strong AA came to be regarded - not universally, but
widely - as a bit stodgy and a bit passé.
The COWD AA¹s had in a
sense proven Bill and the first hundred AA¹s wrong. In the introduction to
the Twelve Steps, the statement: ". . . we thought we could find an easier,
softer way, but we could not. . . " was an unequivocal assertion that it was
necessary to practice all the Steps. But the COWD AA¹s did not practice all
the Steps, and they were staying sober. They had found an easier, softer
way. Human nature being what it is, it was inevitable that the less
demanding, medium-to-weak approach would grow in popularity while the older,
more rigorous approach would decline. Who wants to do things the hard way
when they do not have to? Who wants to drive a car with standard shift when
the model with automatic is a hundred dollars cheaper?
AA has been in
existence now more than forty years. There is still widespread lip service
in the movement to the importance of working all the Steps and practicing
rigorous honesty in all one's affairs. But as a matter of fact, precious few
AA¹s continue to attempt seriously and consistently to DO these things on a
daily basis - not after their first months of sobriety in the fellowship.
Reversion to a lower, more "normal" level of aspiration is the order
of the day. Those who do continue to practice strong AA have to be careful
how they talk about what they are doing in AA meetings. In many places, too
much or too serious talk about God is considered bad form. The same is true
about talk on the subjects of confession, restitution, and rigorous
honesty-especially where they affect such difficult and sensitive life areas
as job applications, tax returns, business dealings, and sex relations.
But if weak AA works - if it produces recovery - what fault is there to
find with it? Maybe this is a case where heterodoxy turns out to be superior
to orthodoxy. Why should anyone go to the extra bother of practicing strong
AA? For one very good reason. Weak AA brings about a far less profound life
alteration than strong AA does. In many cases that relatively superficial
change is not enough to crack the alcoholic pattern. In many other cases, it
results in an apparent recovery which does not last, but sooner or later
eventuates in a relapse into drinking.
What the original AAs were
shooting for - and what they aimed their program at - was not mere sobriety.
That would have been the "common-sense" approach, the way of worldly wisdom,
the reasonable-level-of-aspiration gambit. But the founders of AA were men
moved by inspiration. They were coming at the problem with the uncommon
sense of men under guidance.
The common-sense approach had already
been tried and it had failed. If you set a drunk's level of aspiration at
mere abstinence - "'Why don't you be a good fellow, use your will power; and
give the stuff up² - it did not work. The poor candidate for reform was back
drinking again in short order. The discovery that launched AA in the first
place was that if an alcoholic were somehow to be rocketed into a state way
beyond abstinence, if he were to achieve a real spiritual conversion, an
utterly new relationship with God, then permanent abstinence would
automatically occur as a blessed and life-saving by-product. That was how it
happened with Bill. That was how it happened with Dr. Bob. That was how it
happened with most of the first hundred members. That was how the authors of
the Big Book thought it would have to happen with everyone. Originally, the
Twelfth Step read: "Having had a spiritual experience as the result of these
Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these
principles in all our affairs". Two key phrases were "spiritual experience"
and "as the result of these Steps". The assumption was: no spiritual
experience - no recovery. It was also assumed that there were not a number
of different results from working the Steps; there was one result -"the"
result - and that was spiritual experience. To the first members, spiritual
experience meant that God had touched your life - directly, tangibly - and
turned it around.
Sometime between 1939, when the ³Plain Dealer²
article was published, and 1941, when the Alexander piece ran in the³Post²,
a major shift in philosophy occurred. No one in AA was much aware that it
was taking place at the time, and to this day the process that went on
remains almost totally unacknowledged throughout the fellowship. What
changed was the importance of the roles assigned respectively to the
recovery principles and the recovery fellowship in AA.
Up until 1939, AA was a small, unknown organization
whose success record, though excellent, applied only over a tiny group of
cases, and had not yet stood the test of time. Recovering alcoholics in the
young movement relied upon each other and worked closely with one another.
But the principles were the primary life transformers. The movement as such
was not large enough or well enough established that it could be leaned on
in lieu of faithful work with the Steps.
After AA became big, after
it gained national recognition as a success, a new relationship became
possible with it, one which had not previously been an option, and which the
founders had not really foreseen. It became possible for an alcoholic to
come to meetings and get sober without undergoing a real spiritual
conversion, simply by the process of mimesis, or imitation- by the practice
of something no more spiritual than the principle of
when-in-Rome-do-as-the-Romans-do.
Here is how AA-by-mimesis worked.
The newcomer was joining himself to a big, successful organization, like the
Elks or the Kiwanis. One of the customs of this particular club was that you
did not drink; so if the newcomer liked the people he had met in AA and
wanted to stay associated with them, he gave up drinking. He made AA
meetings and AA people the focus of his social life and his leisure-time
activities and stayed sober, more off the power of the pack than anything
else.
The true nature of this quite other, and quite non-spiritual,
recovery option was never clearly faced and admitted within the fellowship.
Instead, an attempt was made to broaden the meaning of the term "spiritual"
to include both kinds of recovered alcoholics: the sober-by-conversion
alcoholics - those who as the result of working the Steps had had a
spiritual experience and become transformed human beings, seriously involved
with regenerative life and ideas - and the sober-by-imitation alcoholics -
those who had remained essentially the same type of people they had been
before coming into AA, except that they had joined a new organization, made
a new set of friends, and given up drinking in conformity to their new
social setup. There is only one term in the Twelve Steps that has been
changed since the Big Book was first published in 1939. That term is
"spiritual experience" in the Twelfth Step. A member of my home AA group,
who first came into the fellowship in 1941, tells it this way: ³When I first
came in, they were still talking about 'spiritual experience'. A year or two
later they started calling it's spiritual awakening'. ²It was at this time
that the official version of the Twelfth Step was changed to read: "Having
had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps . . . "The term
spiritual experience, which had been perfectly acceptable in the early years
when the fellowship was small and explicitly conversion-oriented, came to be
viewed as too narrow and prejudicial against the less-profound life changes
resulting from mimesis-oriented AA, which were coming to be the majority
recovery pattern in AA. An explanatory note was added to the Big Book, as
follows: ³The terms "spiritual experience" and "spiritual awakening" are
used many times in this book, which upon careful reading, shows that the
personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has
manifested itself among us in many different forms. ³Yet it is true that our
first printing gave many readers the impression that these personality
changes, or religious experiences, must be in the nature of sudden and
spectacular upheavals. Happily for everyone, this conclusion is erroneous.
³In the first few chapters a number of sudden
revolutionary changes are described. Though it was not our intention to
create such an impression many alcoholics have nevertheless concluded that
in order to recover they must acquire an immediate and overwhelming
"God-consciousness" followed at once by a vast change in feeling and
outlook.
³Among our rapidly growing membership of thousands of
alcoholics such transformations, though frequent, are by no means the rule.
Most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the
"educational
variety" because they develop slowly over a period of time.
Quite often friends of the newcomer are aware of the difference long before
he is himself. He finally realizes that he has undergone a profound
alteration in his reaction to life; that such a change could hardly have
been brought about by himself alone. What often takes place in a few months
could seldom have been accomplished by years of self-discipline. With few
exceptions our members find that they have tapped an unsuspected inner
resource which they presently identify with their own conception of a Power
greater than themselves.
³Most of us think this awareness of a Power
greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience. Our more
religious members call it "God consciousness. ²
³Most emphatically we wish to say that any
alcoholic capable of honestly facing his problems in the light of our
experience can recover, provided he does not close his mind to all spiritual
concepts. He can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or
belligerent denial.
³We find that no one need have difficulty with
the spirituality of the program. Willingness, honesty and open mindedness
are the essentials of recovery. But these are indispensable. ²
When
you compare this statement to that which introduced the Twelve Steps in
chapter five, the difference in tone is astonishing. Chapter five rings with
a series of booming affirmations that the goal of the program is a life
given to God and the way is an uncompromisingly spiritual one. In the
later-added appendix there is virtually a full retreat from the earlier
vigor and un-self-conscious joy in God-commitment. The stated purpose of
this appendix is to reassure people that the spiritual change accompanying
an AA recovery need not be in the form of a sudden upheaval. The point
needed making and was well made.
But a further point was also made -
not directly, but by implication - in the defensive, back-pedaling, almost
apologetic treatment of the whole subject of religious experience. That
point was the following: the authors and publishers of the Big Book,
unofficial spokesmen for the movement, were responding to a change in the AA
recovery pattern by lowering the spiritual level of aspiration of the
society, a move they would not have dared to make in the early days but
could, and even felt they must, make now that the society had become large
and gained a reputation for respectability and reasonableness. The facts of
the situation in AA which prompted the rewording of the Twelfth Step and the
adding of the explanatory appendix to the Big Book could have been
summarized in this way:
"It is now possible to recover in one of two
ways in AA. Option one is the original, spiritual experience way which
follows from working all of the Steps. Option two is the way of partial
practice of the Steps, and primary dependence on the social,
fellowship-related aspects of life in AA. This second approach generally
does not produce a spiritual experience as strong, full-program AA practice
does. It also violates our tradition that we should always place principles
before personalities. But in its favor, it requires less commitment and less
work; it involves less in the way of life rearrangement; and it has proven
itself sufficient in many cases to produce lasting abstinence from drinking.
"But no such statement was ever made, and the switch in terms from spiritual
experience to spiritual awakening had the net effect of clouding in
everyone's mind the real nature of the change which had come about.
It was not a matter of conscious deception on anyone¹s part. It was just a
failure to see a dividing into two camps when it had occurred. This would
have been an easy mistake in any case for those living through that period
in AA's history, a quite understandable failure to see a trend developing,
comparable to a mother's inability to notice growth changes in her own
child. But in a movement committed almost before all else to the avoidance
of controversy, blindness to this split was all but inevitable.
The
drawback to the original, rigorous, strong-cup-of-coffee approach to the AA
program was that it required new members to plunge into a drastic program of
spiritual transformation, a course which has never in history had appeal
with large masses of people. Had the original approach remained the only
approach, it is doubtful that AA would have reached anything like its
present size of 850,000 members. (1976)
But the weak-cup-of-coffee practice had even more
serious flaws built into it. The relatively superficial life change which it
produces is sufficient to get some alcoholics sober. It is not adequate --
it is not effective -- it
simply doesn't work -- for a very large number
of others. This is particularly evident with the "hard" cases - the
alcoholics who have been badly beat up physically and mentally before they
arrive at their first AA meeting; the people whose alcoholism is complicated
with drug abuse, perversion, criminal or psychotic tendencies, or a streak
of psychopathology; and the "slippers," those who have developed a pattern
of hanging around AA, staying sober for periods, but relapsing repeatedly
into drinking. (Generally, the slippers are alcoholics with psychopathic
tendencies who keep coming back to AA but are unwilling or unable to work
with root principles, notably rigorous honesty. ) Weak AA does not touch
most of these people. They cannot stay sober that way.
Yet if these
hard cases find their way into an environment where strong AA, and nothing
but strong AA, is being practiced, many of them are able to achieve lasting
sobriety. The East Ridge Community in upstate New York has worked with
hundreds of these tough drunks over the past twelve years. Strong AA is the
standard fare at East Ridge, and they have a recovery rate of over seventy
percent with these so-called AA failures. No success turns to success for
the lion's share of them when weak AA is replaced with strong AA.
There is another, more insidious, danger built into weak AA. In many cases
the "recovery" produced by watered-down approaches to the Twelve Steps fails
to hold up over the long haul. What looked in the beginning like an easier,
softer way to maintain happy sobriety yields progressively less and less
contentment, finally ending in a complete reversal of momentum and a relapse
into serious personal misery. The end result may be a return to active
alcoholism; or, short of that total disaster, it may be a sinking out into a
life of discontented abstinence, marred by some combination of tension,
resentment, depression, compulsive sick sex, and an overall sense of
meaninglessness. Either way, it is a final failure to reap the benefits of
the AA program; it is, in the last analysis, a failure to recover.
Two disturbing tendencies are noticeable in contemporary AA. One is toward a
lower recovery rate overall. For the first twenty years, the standard AA
recovery estimate was seventy-five percent. AA experience was that fifty
percent of the alcoholics who came to AA got sober right away and stayed
sober. Another twenty-five percent had trouble for a while but eventually
got sober for good, and the remaining twenty-five percent never made a
recovery. Then there was a period of some years when AA headquarters stopped
making the seventy-five percent recovery claim in their official literature.
In 1968, AA's General Service Organization published a survey indicating an
overall recovery rate of about sixty-seven percent. The net of all this
seems to be that as AA has gotten bigger and older, its effectiveness has
dropped from about three in four to about two in three. (Note: two in three
was in 1976 - our data shows numbers much LESS in 1997 - 1 in 15 )
The second unhealthy trend movement-wise is not backed by figures, but it is
clear enough to any careful observer of the AA scene. As the fellowship
grows older in time, its class of old-timers, alcoholics sober ten years and
longer, grows. And the question of the staying power of an AA recovery looms
even larger. It is an unhappy fact that growing numbers of these old-timers
find the joy going out of their sobriety, that many of them search around
frantically for ways to recapture the old zest for booze-free living, often
ending up in such blind alleys as lunatic religions, dangerous pop
psychological fads, or chemical alternatives like acid, pot, tranquilizers,
and mood elevators. And far too many end up either back drinking or, what is
almost as sad, sunk in despondency, hostility, bizarre acting-out patterns
of one sort or another, or just plain, devastating boredom.
All of
this is unnecessary. The gradually shrinking recovery rate and the old-timer
blues do not require a complex or an innovative solution. The answer lies in
a return to original, strong AA. The men who wrote the Big Book were, as it
turns out, right after all. There is no easier, softer way. The extra work
and commitment required by the full program approach pay enormous dividends.
They make sobriety fun because they do not make sobriety an end in itself.
Mere non-drinking is a very negative kind of life goal. Even the power of a
world-scale society of non-drinkers can be in and of itself only a temporary
and limited deterrent for most alcoholics.
The majority of those who
become addicted are people with a mystical streak, an appetite for
inexhaustible bliss. We sought in bottles what can only be found in
spiritual experience. AA worked in the first place because its Twelve Steps
were a workable set of guidelines to spiritual experience. Growth of the
movement made possible for a time a kind of parasitism in which partial
practitioners and non-practitioners of the spiritual principles were able to
feed off the strength of those who had undergone real spiritual experiences.
But at this point in time, (1976) the parasites have already drained the
host organism of a considerable portion of its life force.
It is
late in the day to be sounding a call for a return to the original way, the
way of faithful practice of the full program. Still, a great deal of life is
left in the fellowship, and a major revival is possible if enough of us see
our dangerous situation, personally and as a fellowship, in time. What we
need to do is clear enough. It is spelled out in the first seven chapters of
the Big Book. What it all boils down to -- especially for us old-timers --
is a willingness to continue practicing all the principles in all our
affairs today, rather than resting on our laurels, taking our stand on what
we did way back when, in our first weeks and months of sobriety.
But
we must not fail to face squarely the need for change, the need for
re-dedication. Complacency, smugness in our record of success, is our
greatest enemy. If we, as a recovered-addict society, are unwilling to
reverse our present course, the outlook Is clear enough. We stand to
recapitulate in less than a century what the Christian church has spent the
last two thousand years demonstrating: that even the best of human
institutions tend to deteriorate in time; and that size in spiritual
organizations is all too often achieved at the expense of compromise of
basic principles and the progressive abandonment of original goals and
practices.
I owe my life to AA. I hope we have the vision, and the
humility, to change. I know we can if we will. This much is certain: the
Twelve Steps are as inspired, as effective, as un-compromised, and as
practicable now as they were when they were first put in writing
thirty-seven years ago. (1976)
July, 1976 issue of 24 Magazine©