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HOW DO YOU WANT YOUR CUP
OF TEA ? STRONG?-MEDIUM?-WEAK? GRESHAM’S LAW - THAT BAD CURRENCY DRIVES OUT GOOD - HAS BEEN OPERATIVE IN THE LIFE OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYOUS.WEAK AA IS TENDING TO DRIVE OUT STRONG AA.
There
are three ways to work the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.(1)
The strong, original way, proved powerfully and reliably effective over
forty years.(2) A medium way - not
so strong, not so safe, not so sure, not so good, but still effective.And
(3) 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 of “Alcoholics Anonymous”
the AA “BigBook,” 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 AAs 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 theymade two moves to sugarcoat
their pill.First, they put the following
disclaimer immediately after listing the Twelve Steps in chapter five:
“Many 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.” That
short paragraph was a stroke of inspiration, especially the phrase, “We
are not saints.”It 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,
“Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery.”This
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: 1.
We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol. 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 AA’s 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: “Rarely
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. “At
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. “Remember
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! “Half
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...” 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
AA’s found themselves relating to new prospects on an unprecedented scale.It
suddenly became attractive, in a way 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 AA’s 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 “Saturday Evening
Post.”AA 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
AA’s 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 AA’s started off with a bang, pretty much like the strong AA’s,
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 AA’s 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 AA’s 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
AA’s 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 AA’s 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 AA’s 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 AA’s 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 unnegotiable refusal to work with vital recovery
principles.Weak AA’s 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 AA’s tended to feel obligated
to defend and sing the praises of their "heterodox" approaches and even
to chide the strong AA’s a bit for being rigid and holier-than-thou.The
strong AA’s, 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 AA’s had in a sense proven Bill and the first hundred AA’s 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 AA’s 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 AA’s 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 up” - 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 “Plain Dealer” article was published,
and 1941, when the Alexander piece ran in the “Post”, 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: “When I first came in, they were still talking about
'spiritual experience'.A year or
two later they started calling it 'spiritual awakening'.”It
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: “The
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. “Yet
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. “In
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. “Among
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. “Most
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.” “Most
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. “We
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.” 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 anyone’s 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 Communityin upstateNew
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)
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