I have come to believe that God is to sobriety what diet pills are to weight loss.

The diet pills I’m referring to are the over the counter supplements you see on non prime time commercials on cable TV or obscure channel infomercials. As a rule, these supplements have little pharmacologic value for weight loss.

Nevertheless diet supplements are promoted as essential ingredients for weight loss. So you plunk down some hard-earned cash to get this miracle product. The pills arrive in the mail along with a brochure. It tells you these supplements are meant to work in conjunction with an exercise and food restriction program. So the simple math is Eat Right + Exercise + Diet Pills = Weight Loss.

In AA the equation is Go to Meetings + Participate in Fellowship + Believe in God = Sobriety. In the diet pill analogy the food restriction and exercise are the essential components of weight loss and the diet supplements are basically functioning as placebos. Placebos can be effective. Nearly half of people who take what they think is a pain pill will report a reduction in pain. If you think a diet supplement will decrease your appetite you may actually experience a reduction in appetite. Moreover, when you pay money for some diet pills you are more likely to be compliant with all aspects of the program. So, in that sense, the supplements are working.

For many in our society belief in God is much more deeply ingrained than the belief in pharmacology that results in the placebo effect. Functional MRI studies have shown that, in a believer, the areas of the brain affected during prayer are the same areas affected when interacting with another person. So God is real in the praying persons brain if you’re a believer. The non-believer does not activate these areas of the brain if saying the same words to himself. [1] I’ve commented to my home group that the religious person probably does have an advantage in maintaining sobriety in AA. The religious person who comes to AA is very likely to believe that the God in AA is the essential ingredient in sobriety. This attitude is held to as tightly as religious beliefs are in general and is fostered by the AA literature and the sharing at most meetings.

This poses a challenge for agnostics in AA.

For most agnostics fellowship, participation, and being of service are the essential components to sobriety in AA. Yet at the same time our personal philosophical outlook makes us less likely to relate to the group and to be shunned.

One solution is to have “We Agnostics” meetings. AA sanctions several other speciality meetings and a few agnostic ones, although some agnostic meetings have been delisted. [2] I’m fortunate to have one agnostic meeting near me but it’s still a 40 mile drive and only once a week. I also participate in a Life Ring meeting, but that is also only once a week and about a 40 mile drive. I live in a densely populated area. There are hundreds of AA meetings a week within that 40 mile radius of my house. Most AA members do not have the option of attending an agnostic oriented meeting.

Another thing that can be done is the agnostic can talk about her or his belief or lack of belief with shares and in one-on-one sessions with other alcoholics. When I am open and honest about my opinions with shares in meetings people may not agree but they can’t stop my words. For every five or six people who shuns me someone will come up to me after a meeting and thank me for my share and may say something along the lines of “I’m agnostic too but I just don’t talk about it.” I think there are more closeted atheists and agnostics in the fellowship than we realize, although data on this is obviously hard to come by.

The fifth tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous states: “Each group has but one primary purpose – to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.” I’ve done an informal survey of several AA members asking if my contrarian sharing is violating this tradition. Am I poisoning the message with my shares? Everyone, even the majority of religious members, seem to think I’m not in violation. Diversity of opinion may not be completely welcome but with the attitude of “take what you need and leave the rest” the primary purpose is not violated. Believers are free to ignore my sharing.

I’ve been in 12 Step programs since 1990. I made the mistake of not sharing my opinions and keeping silent about my atheism while I went to meetings for about 12 years. I therefore was dishonest with the group and not participating in the fellowship. I’m not blaming AA or claiming I was victimized by the fellowship. I was dishonest. I dropped out of meetings but managed to stay sober for about five years before relapsing. I’m now back in the program and have about 20 months sobriety. I’m not being silent this time around. I’d much rather be rejected for who I am than accepted for someone I’m not. I’m in the rooms of AA to stay sober, not to make friends. But, by being open and honest, the friends have materialized.

I encourage agnostics, atheist, freethinkers, and skeptics to share openly at meetings. I know this may be more of a challenge in red states versus blue states and in smaller towns with less diversity. Even there though are people who will relate to you and those are the ones you want to be friends with or to have as sponsors. I believe there are many people in AA who don’t feel comfortable going along with mainstream Big Book philosophy. By letting them know it’s OK to not be an AA mainstreamer in order to stay sober you are being of service to a substantial minority of people in the room. As one AAer told me, “I’ve seen a lot more people leave AA because of all the God stuff than leave because of all those damn atheists in the group.”

Unless the Alcoholics Anonymous WSO amends the Third Tradition to read “The only requirements for membership are a desire to stop drinking and a belief in God,” they can’t kick you out.

[1] Highly religious participants recruit areas of social cognition in personal prayer

[2] Does religion belong at AA? Fight over ‘God’ splits Toronto AA groups

———-

Steve has been in recovery since 1990. Presently retired and living the good life in sunny southern California, he has  a particular interest in the neuroscience of addiction and how this affects treatment programs. He is also interested in the neuroscience of religious beliefs and non-critical thinking. He has just finished reading “The Believing Brain” by Michael Shermer. Another one of his passions is comics, from the Golden Age to contemporary off the shelf. He is active in the Facebook group: Agnostics and Atheists in AA.

“You’ve got a higher power problem,” my old AA sponsor told me.

It’s something he’d asserted on a number of occasions when the subject of God and the Steps and my atheism came up. He repeated it when we were working on my Fifth Step. I had just informed him that Chapter Four – We Agnostics was on my resentment list. He decided that my finding Bill Wilson’s rather lame version of the cosmological argument irksome represented a serious higher power problem.  He was wrong, of course; I didn’t have a higher power problem. I had a God problem, and it’s not the same thing. Not a bit.

The truth is I was perfectly okay with all the salient points and actions that we’d been discussing together. I both wanted and thought I really needed a higher power, and I was ready to surrender to it. It was clear to me I didn’t run the universe, and that I had been behaving as if I did. That had to stop. I was also convinced it would be a good idea to turn over my warped decision making process (particularly regarding getting loaded) to a more reliable source of truth and direction. However, I’d tried before to imagine that as God, or a Power, or a Being, or some vague Cosmic Energy and it flat out didn’t work.

What I wasn’t willing to do anymore was to keep repeating this same theistically-oriented approach over and over again while expecting a different result. They have a word for that in recovery.

*****

It’s widely accepted in the rooms of AA that you can effectively use just about any good source of direction for your higher power in doing the Steps. Just please call it “God.” This is essentially the psychological approach to recovery (with a little accommodationist bone thrown in) that James Burwell and others have used from before the Big Book was a gleam in Bill Wilson’s eye. And it works.

That is not, however – even with its muddy and humanistic version of the God concept – what Bill believed was going on here. And it is not how AA’s basic texts describe our quasi-supernatural Program of recovery, with its numerous prayers for miraculous intercession by (and psychically transmitted instructions from) an all-powerful Heavenly Father.

Of course the psychological view of recovery doesn’t have to square with Wilson’s conversion experience theory [1]. AA as a fellowship is not defined by its historical texts – to which we have never been required to pledge our allegiance. We are to some practical extent, though, limited by those same books. And that ought to be remedied in an appropriate manner, one that recognizes the historical value of our literature while incorporating our growing experience as a fellowship. I’m going to suggest one way to do that right here, and it is by following the example of a bunch of little girls.

*****

On October 23, 1993, the Girl Scouts of the USA voted 1,560 – 375 to permit individuals to substitute another word or phrase for “God” in their promise. This is from the motion itself:

For some individuals, the word “God,” no matter how broadly interpreted, does not appropriately reflect their spiritual beliefs. Since the belief in a spiritual principle is fundamental to Girl Scouting, not the word used to define that belief, it is important that individuals have the opportunity to express that belief in wording meaningful to them.” [emphasis added]

And this is what the Girl Scout National President had to say: “Affirming that the belief in a spiritual principle is fundamental to Girl Scouting, Girl Scouts USA recognizes that some religious groups such as Buddhists… use words other than ‘God’ to express their spirituality.” (B. LaRae Orullian)

So there it is, a quite simple solution to the “God problem” as faced and met in a very similar context. No changes have been made to the original Girl Scout Oath, it’s still there for anyone to take in the traditional form. But an option has been added. And by doing this, Girl Scouts of the USA has recognized officially that spirituality, one of their organization’s defining values, is broader than theism. It should be noted that this is not a theory, this is just recognition of an historical fact of the world and its peoples. It is simply coming to understand, as Bill Wilson did later in his own life [2], that spirituality and God-belief aren’t necessarily the same thing. You can actually have either without the other. Imagine that.

*****

My old sponsor would have an objection to this approach that we’d do well to address here, I think. He often said to me, “God is just the word we all agree to use to describe this thing which we can’t really define. You could call it anything. We just call God by convention.” And he’s absolutely right. Most folks in AA are talking about the very same thing when they speak of that intangible Power that governs the universe, and which can be accessed through prayer, and then used as a guiding light.

And many of us are talking about something else altogether.

That’s why it makes no sense to use the same word here. It is at best confusing and at worst fatal. Because this de-facto theism can lead unintentionally to the abandonment of a meaningful spiritual life for those of us with more naturalistic bents. No, the God idea is not just a word. It has practical ramifications related to prayer and study and philosophy of life and more.

Many religious or non-religious spiritual and humanistic groups (and their followers) not only use words other than “God” to describe a healthy and true relationship to reality, they use ideas that can in no sense be correctly identified with the God concept. For example, a Buddhist alcoholic might use “the teachings of awakened ones” the Dhamma, as her higher power. Only in AA would someone try to call a practical set of wisdom teachings “God” in some ad hoc attempt to rescue orthodox 12 Step recovery theory.

As a practical example, it isn’t effective to ask in prayer for the Dhamma to “take away” your obsession or character defects. The instruction manual for accessing the Dhamma is not the same one a theist would use to form a conscious contact with God.

The truth is that some of us use God and some of us use totally non-theistic systems of spirituality in our recoveries and we accomplish exactly the same ends. [3] I heard someone say once that this was like comparing a milkshake to a soy shake. Without milk (God) it’s not really a milkshake, is it? That is, he meant to say, it’s not really AA.

Well, analogies can’t prove, they can only illustrate. So here’s mine: AA is more like teaching a man who’s freezing in the dark woods without any matches how to build a fire. He’s not going to think his way warm, he needs to access a power that is in a real sense greater than himself. But it doesn’t matter whether he does it by clacking two rocks, rubbing two sticks, or applying a bow and a spindle. It doesn’t matter what he uses for tinder and kindling either – as long as it catches fire.

*****

In conclusion let me say there’s no need, as far as I can see, to rewrite the Big Book and take out the word “God.” I don’t think that would be very honest of us. That book and the Twelve and Twelve are historical records of the actions and thoughts of some, not all, of AA’s founding members. We cannot alter our past, but we can recognize today, officially as a fellowship, that the spiritual path of recovery is wider than our founders imagined. In doing so we will be honoring our own Fifth Tradition of maximizing our service to the alcoholic who still suffers. We will be doing what is in a very real sense our duty.

When AA does this, officially recognizes the fact that the God concept – no matter how vaguely you wish to define it – does not encompass all effective forms of spirituality and belief, it will have finally caught up with tens of thousands of girl scouts.

It’s about time.

———-

[1] See Wilson’s letter to Carl Jung, January 30, 1961: ”If each sufferer were to carry the news of the scientific hopelessness of alcoholism to each new prospect, he might be able to lay every newcomer wide open to a transforming spiritual experience. This concept proved to be the foundation of such success as Alcoholics Anonymous has since achieved. This has made conversion experiences – nearly every variety reported by [William] James – available on an almost wholesale basis.”

Dr. William Silkworth (1873 - 1951) was the Medical Director at the Towns Hospital and treated Bill W and other early members of AA. He was the first 20th century physician to advocate that alcoholism is an illness, rather than a vice or moral failing. He, probably more than anyone else, is responsible for Step 1 of the 12 Steps (The Origins of the 12 Steps). He also wrote “The Doctor’s Opinion” in Alcoholics Anonymous. This article was first published in 1947 in the AA Grapevine.

By Dr. William Silkworth

THE mystery of slips is not so deep as may appear. While it does seem odd that an alcoholic who has restored himself to a dignified place among his fellow-men, and continued dry for years, should suddenly throw all his happiness overboard and find himself again in mortal peril of drowning in liquor – often the reason is very simple.

People are inclined to say: “There is something peculiar about alcoholics. They may seem to be well, yet at any moment they may turn back to their old ways. You can never be sure!”

This is largely twaddle. The alcoholic is a sick person. Under the techniques of Alcoholics Anonymous he gets well, that is to say, his disease is arrested. There is nothing unpredictable about him any more than there is anything weird about a person who has arrested diabetes.

Let’s get it clear, once and for all, that alcoholics are human beings just like other human beings – then we can safeguard ourselves intelligently against most of the slips.

Both in professional and lay circles, there is a tendency to label everything that an alcoholic may do as “alcoholic behavior.” The truth is, it is simply human nature!

It is very wrong to consider many of the personality traits observed in liquor addicts as peculiar to the alcoholic. Emotional and mental quirks are classified as symptoms of alcoholism merely because alcoholics have them – yet those same quirks can be found among nonalcoholics, too. Actually they are symptoms of mankind!

Of course, the alcoholic himself tends to think of himself as different; someone special, with unique tendencies and reactions. Many psychiatrists, doctors and therapists carry the same idea to extremes in their analyses and treatment of alcoholics. Sometimes they make a complicated mystery of a condition which is found in all human beings, whether they drink whiskey or buttermilk.

To be sure, alcoholism like every other disease does manifest itself in some unique ways. It does have a number of baffling peculiarities which differ from all other diseases. At the same time, many of the symptoms and much of the behavior of alcoholism are closely paralleled and even duplicated in other diseases.

The alcoholic “slip,” as it is known in Alcoholics Anonymous, furnishes a perfect example of how human nature can be mistaken for alcoholic behavior.

The “slip” is a relapse! It is a relapse that occurs after the alcoholic has stopped drinking and started on the AA program of recovery. “Slips” usually occur in the early stages of the alcoholic’s AA indoctrination, before he has had time to learn enough of the AA technique and AA philosophy to give him solid footing. But “slips” may also occur after an alcoholic has been a member of AA for many months, or even several years, and it is in this kind, above all, that one finds a marked similarity between the alcoholic’s behavior and “normal” victims of other diseases.

No one is startled by the fact that relapses are not uncommon among arrested tubercular patients. But here is a startling fact – the cause is often the same as the cause which leads to “slips” for the alcoholic. It happens this way:

When a tubercular patient recovers sufficiently to be released from the sanitarium, the doctor gives him careful directions for the way he is to live when he gets home. He must be in bed every night by, say, 8 o’clock. He must drink plenty of milk. He must refrain from smoking. He must obey other stringent rules.

For the first several months, perhaps for several years the patient follows directions. But as his strength increases and he feels fully recovered, he becomes slack. There may come the night when he decides he can stay up until 10 p.m. When he does this, nothing untoward happens. The next day he still feels good. He does it again. Soon he is disregarding the directions given him when he left the sanitarium. Eventually he has a relapse!

The same tragedy can be found in cardiac cases. After the heart attack, the patient is put on a strict rest schedule. Frightened, he naturally follows directions obediently for a long time. He, too, goes to bed early, avoids exercise such as walking up stairs, quits smoking and leads a Spartan life. Eventually, though, there comes a day after he has been feeling good for months, or several years, when he feels he has regained his strength and has also recovered from his fright. If the elevator is out of repair one day, he walks up the three flights of stairs. Or, he decides to go to a party – or do just a little smoking – or take a cocktail or two. If no serious after-effects follow the first departure from the rigorous schedule prescribed he may try it again, until he suffers a relapse.

In both cardiac and the tubercular cases, the acts which led to the relapses were preceded by wrong thinking. The patient in each case rationalized himself out of a sense of his own perilous reality. He deliberately turned away from this knowledge of the fact he had been the victim of a serious disease. He grew overconfident. He decided he didn’t have to follow directions.

Now that is precisely what happens with the alcoholic – the arrested alcoholic, or the alcoholic in AA – who has a “slip.” Obviously he decides again to take a drink sometime before he actually takes it. He starts thinking wrong before he actually embarks on the course that leads to a “slip.”

There is no more reason to charge the “slip” to alcoholic behavior than there is to lay a tubercular relapse to tubercular behavior or a second heart attack to cardiac behavior.

The alcoholic “slip” is not a symptom of a psychotic condition. There’s nothing “screwy” about it at all. The patient simply didn’t follow directions.

And that’s human nature! It’s life! It’s happening all the time, not merely among alcoholics but among all kinds of people.

The preventative is plain. The patient must have full knowledge of his condition, keep in mind the facts of his case and the nature of his disease and follow directions.

For the alcoholic, AA offers the directions. A vital factor, or ingredient, of the preventative, especially for the alcoholic, is sustained emotion. The alcoholic who learns some of the technique or the mechanics of AA but misses the philosophy or the spirit may get tired of following directions – not because he is alcoholic but because he is human. Rules and regulations irk almost anyone, because they are restraining, prohibitive, negative. The philosophy of AA, however, is positive and provides ample sustained emotion – a sustained desire to follow directions voluntarily.

In any event, the psychology of the alcoholic is not as different as some people try to make it. The disease has certain physical differences, yes, and the alcoholic has problems peculiar to him, perhaps, in that he has been put on the defensive and consequently has developed nervous frustrations. But, in many instances, there is no more reason to be talking about “the alcoholic mind” than there is to try to describe something called “the cardiac mind” or “the t.b. mind.”

I think we’ll help the alcoholic more if we can first recognize that he is primarily a human being – afflicted with human nature!

Copyright © The AA Grapevine Inc. January 1947. Reprinted with permission.

Whoa. This book knocked the air right out of me. Drunk Mom chronicles one party girl’s head-on collision with motherhood. But Jowita Bydlowska is not your average party girl. She is a self-defined addict.

The memoir begins with Jowita, a new mother on a rare night out, finding a baggie of cocaine in a public washroom. She’s powerless to resist this temptation, and the opening twelve pages tell us where that cocaine takes her. Even in these early pages, the careful reader will begin to suspect that our dear Jowita might have an itsy-bitsy problem.

The book launch for Drunk Mom is this coming Wednesday (May 1) from 6 to 8 PM, at Ben McNally Books, 366 Bay St (south of Queen), Toronto. Get your autographed copy of the book on Wednesday.

But then we read that cocaine is not, in fact, Jowita Bydlowska’s problem. Alcohol is Jowita’s problem: “I prefer drinking to anything in the world: sex, food, sleep. My child, my lover, anything. I love to drink. Sometimes I think: No, I am drink. It’s like my blood. Even before I get it, I can feel it in my veins. I’m not being poetic – I can actually feel it in my veins. It’s gold. It’s like little zaps of gold going through me, charging me, starting me up. When I drink, I fill with real gold and become god-like. So I’m not a cocaine addict. I’m a drunk.”

Jowita Bydlowska, to steal a phrase from Hemingway, writes hard and clear about what hurts. And man oh man can she write!

Let me digress for a moment to pose a question: Why should we read? My answer comes in one word: empathy. A book like Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance can put me (a middle class white North American woman) into the skin of a legless homeless Indian man in the streets of Mumbai. This is a man I might have crossed the street to avoid, someone whose suffering I would think had nothing to do with me. By the end of Mistry’s book, I am him. In that way, by creating empathy, good literature can make the world a better place.

I love Drunk Mom for some of the same reasons that I love A Fine Balance. Like Mistry, Bydlowska knows how to immerse a reader fully in created experience (I use “created” deliberately – yes, Bydlowska has lived these events, but a whole lot of artistry is involved in the making of the book). This raw account of the indignities of a chronic drunk put me right in Jowita Bydlowska’s skin through some of the worst years of her life. I lived the pain of her hangovers, the weight of her guilt, the shame of each pump-and-dump, the unrelenting pull of her addiction. It’s not pretty. There is no glamour. She sits in the back of a movie theatre and drinks wine out of a box until she barfs on herself. She repeatedly hurts those who love her most. Why? “Because I wanted a drink. Because the wanting was stronger than me.” There are places in the book where readers might lose hope for her, might even hate her, but never as much as she hates herself. Drunk Mom is a memoir born of profound remorse. Jowita Bydlowska dedicates the book to her son – but she explains “This is not ‘to’ or ‘for’ Hugo but because I’m sorry, Hugo.”

It’s long after last call here and someone has done away with the mood lighting. Jowita Bydlowska takes a hard, fearless look at herself under the fluorescent lights. Her unflinching gaze and stark honesty get a standing ovation from me. Drunk Mom is a book that sticks.

Jowita met recently with Dr. Gabor Maté and the result is a wonderful interview: Drugs, Guilt and Recovery with Dr. Gabor Maté – A Therapy Sesson Disguised as Q & A. (Click on the picture to read the interview.)

In the acknowledgements, Bydlowska explains that she wrote Drunk Mom for three reasons. One is to help others who have similar struggles. Although she never claims to have the answers (“This is no self-help book,” she writes), I do think Drunk Mom will help. Reading about the binges, the blackouts, the lies, and the constant struggle for recovery, many will know they are not alone.

In my decades as a lover of books, I’ve written only two fan mails. One of them went to Jowita Bydlowska. Thank you, Jowita, for Drunk Mom – for its rawness, for its clarity, for its bravery.

You can get a copy of Drunk Mom here: Recovery 101.

———-

Angie Abdou is the author of several novels, including Anything Boys Can Do and The Bone Cage.

A Nameless Group of Drunks

In the 1930s the whole concept of “anonymity” was very simple.

Bill Wilson’s “nameless group of drunks,” helping themselves by helping each other, were progressing into unprecedented months, and even years of sobriety. The admission of alcoholism, so vital to recovery, could, at a public level, bring career and social consequences, as devastating as those from active drinking. It was vital that “prospects” be able to come and try this new therapy with the explicit assurance that they could do so with absolute confidentiality. Wilson recounts for us the thoughts of this time period:

Anonymity was not born of confidence; it was the child of our early fears. Our first nameless groups of alcoholics were secret societies. New prospects could find us only through a few trusted friends. The bare hint of publicity, even for our work, shocked us. Though ex-drinkers, we still thought we had to hide from public distrust and contempt.

When the Big Book appeared in 1939, we called it “Alcoholics Anonymous.” Its foreword made this revealing statement: “It is important that we remain anonymous because we are too few, at present, to handle the overwhelming number of personal appeals which may result from this publication. Being mostly business and professional folk, we could not well carry on our occupations in such an event.” Between these lines, it is easy to read our fear that large numbers of incoming people might break our anonymity wide open. (Twelve and Twelve, p. 184-5)

The actual impact of the book was initially crushingly disappointing, but tremendous growth did come, albeit somewhat later. The earliest anonymity concerns were the least complex, and the most important. “Clearly, every AA member’s name – and story too – had to be confidential, if he wished.” (Twelve and Twelve, p. 185) Though the social stigma attached to alcoholism has diminished significantly, each person’s right to decide his own level of privacy remains paramount. As the new society experienced explosive growth in the early forties, lessons were learned, and the initial simple “anonymity” idea morphed into a broader “tradition,” incorporating principles of humility, unity, equality, sacrifice, and responsibility.

The Yellow Card

The “Yellow Card” is read at many meetings: “Who you see here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here.”

In the early days of AA, when more stigma was attached to the term “alcoholic” than is the case today, this reluctance to be identified – and publicised – was easy to understand. As the Fellowship grew, we came to realize also that many problem drinkers might hesitate to turn to us for help if they thought their problem might be discussed publicly, even inadvertently, by others; and that much of our relative effectiveness in working with alcoholics might be impaired if we sought or accepted public recognition. (Alcoholics Anonymous in Devon)

The Oxford Group

Several reasons propelled the “nameless group of drunks” to disassociate themselves from the Oxford Group. One motivation involved the contradictory views of the two societies regarding publicity:

Because of the stigma then attached to the condition, most alcoholics wanted to be anonymous. We were afraid also of developing erratic public characters who, through broken anonymity, might get drunk in public and so destroy confidence in us. The Oxford Group, on the contrary, depended very much upon the use of prominent names—something that was doubtless all right for them but mighty hazardous for us. (AA Comes Of Age, p.75)

The Cleveland Indians

The eyes of America were firmly fixed on the sport of baseball in 1940. It was a way of celebrating an economic recovery that had been such a long time coming, and it provided a distraction from the escalating problems in Europe. Baseball excitement was especially feverish in Cleveland, Ohio, where Indians’ fans were electrified by the performances of future Hall of Famer, “Bullet” Bob Feller. The Iowa farm boy had pitched his first game in 1936 at the age of seventeen, and struck out an astonishing fifteen batters. To provide guidance and support to Feller, the team’s manager and owner hired an experienced catcher, and an alcoholic, Rollie Hemsley.

Hemsley had talent and experience with a variety of teams. However, “wherever he had played, the catcher’s bizarre behavior revealed him to be the team drunk.” (Ernest Kurtz, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 86) Rollie Hemsley’s fame as personal catcher, and mentor to the young “phenom,” exponentially escalated on opening day of the 1940 season when he caught Feller’s no-hitter.

In a Chicago hotel news conference of 16 April 1940, Rollie Hemsley, erratic star catcher for the Cleveland Indians baseball team, announced that his past eccentric behavior on and off the diamond had been due to “booze,” that he was an alcoholic who had been dry now for one year “with the help of and through Alcoholics Anonymous.” (Not-God, p. 85) Newspaper stories about this event were sensational and they brought in many new prospects. Nevertheless this development was one of the first to arouse deep concern about our personal anonymity at the top public level. (AA Comes of Age, p. 24-5)

The Hemsley publicity continued, and it was nationwide. Although not always decorous, the exposure was effective in drawing problem drinkers into AA. Hemsley’s status as a “spokesperson” for AA provoked a reaction in Bill Wilson: certainly jealousy, and perhaps a bit of resentment. “Soon I was on the road, happily handing out personal interviews and pictures,” Bill wrote. “To my delight, I found I could hit the front pages, just as he could. Besides he couldn’t hold his publicity pace, but I could hold mine… For two or three years I guess I was AA’s number one anonymity breaker.” In fact, Wilson may have over-sold his own misbehavior “to illustrate how baser human emotions such as competitiveness and envy can be disguised as motives of altruism and desire for the highest good.” (Pass It On, pp. 237-38)

Explosive Growth in Cleveland

Cleveland had become the hot-bed of AA, six months prior to the Hemsley media hype, and that had everything to do with a series of articles in the local newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Clarence Snyder was the driving force behind the phenomenon that was Cleveland AA. A highly successful car salesman, Clarence had skills that were the result of hard work and very innovative marketing approaches. He brought these skills to AA, and was an aggressive recruiter and a publicity seeker. Clarence told everyone that Elrick B. Davis, a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, had been plunked off a bar stool and was attending AA meetings “as a customer.” But was he?

According to early member, Warren C., “Clarence sneaked a Plain Dealer reporter into one of the meetings. He posed as an alcoholic. He wasn’t really. He was a writer…. Whatever his status, the articles Davis wrote set off an unprecedented wave of growth for AA in the Cleveland area.”

“On 21 October 1939, Cleveland’s most prestigious newspaper, the Plain Dealer, published the first of an editorially supported series of seven articles by reporter Elrick B. Davis. Both the articles and the editorials calmly and approvingly described Alcoholics Anonymous, emphasizing the reasonable hope this new society held out to otherwise hopeless drunks.” (Not-God, p.84)

As Bill described the series: “In effect the Plain Dealer was saying, ‘Alcoholics Anonymous is good, and it works. Come and get it.’” Hundreds did; by the following year, the city had 20 to 30 groups and several hundred members. Said Bill, “Their results were…so good, and AA’s membership elsewhere…so small, that many a Clevelander really thought AA had started there in the first place.” (Pass It On, p. 224)

Clarence, Rollie, & Marty – Beneficial Breaches

The story of Rollie Hemsley, recounted in detail above, was used as evidence of the danger of a public relations policy which employs “promotion,” i.e. celebrity endorsement. Without debating its reality as a problem, there were unquestionable corresponding benefits. Hundreds of thousands of people came to know of the existence of Alcoholics Anonymous as the result of the Hemsley interviews, and it is unimaginable that this celebrity endorsement did not lead to a significant spike in membership numbers and sales of the Big Book.

The most dramatic positive outcomes EVER produced by an anonymity breach, were those that resulted from Mrs. Marty Mann going public as a person who had recovered from alcoholism through participation in AA. This tale was told in some detail a week ago on this website (Marty Mann and the Early Women of AA). Tremendous benefits came from disregarding AA’s pro-anonymity position, a stance which had recently been codified. With the blessing of Bill Wilson himself, the opposite of our “official policy” was done to “serve the greater good.” Clarence Snyder had taken it upon himself to do the same seven years earlier, with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The explosive growth of AA in Cleveland witnesses the upside to his “wrong” actions.

The 12 Traditions

Everywhere there arose threatening questions of membership, money, personal relations, public relations, management of groups, clubs, and scores of other perplexities. It was out of this vast welter of explosive experience that AA’s Twelve Traditions were first published in 1946 and later confirmed at AA’s First International Convention, held at Cleveland in 1950. (Twelve & Twelve, p. 18)

These then are the long form traditions developed in the early years of AA that deal with the issue of anonymity. “Our AA experience has taught us that:”

Tradition Eleven. Our relations with the general public should be characterized by personal anonymity. We think AA ought to avoid sensational advertising. Our names and pictures as AA members ought not be broadcast, filmed, or publicly printed. Our public relations should be guided by the principle of attraction rather than promotion. There is never need to praise ourselves. We feel it better to let our friends recommend us.

Tradition Twelve. And finally, we of Alcoholics Anonymous believe that the principle of anonymity has immense spiritual significance. It reminds us that we are to place principles before personalities; that we are actually to practice a genuine humility. This to the end that our great blessings may never spoil us; that we shall forever live in thankful contemplation of Him who presides over us all.

Anonymity in the 21st Century

The stories of Marty Mann, Clarence Snyder, and “Rollicking Rollie” Hemsley have specific relevance to the recovery world of 2013. That there has been a recent spate of anonymity breaches by celebrities is nothing new, but of late, AA’s very principles of anonymity themselves have been called to question. David Colman, a writer for the New York Times, broke his own anonymity as a 15 year sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous, with the May 6, 2011 article “Challenging the Second ‘A’ in AA:” “More and more anonymity is seeming like an anachronistic vestige of the Great Depression, when AA got started and when alcoholism was seen as not just a weakness, but a disgrace.”

Colman then lists a few of the numerous memoirs of recent years from recovered/recovering 12 steppers from Eric Clapton and Nikki Sixx to Nic Scheff and Augusten Burroughs. James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” fabricated in part though it was, took an significant segment of the North American public to the worlds of addiction, treatment, and Oprah. Ironically, Frey is not an anonymity breaker from AA’s perspective as he rejected AA, and is not a member.

Eminem (“Recovery”) and Pink (“Sober”) have been very public about their enthusiasm for sober living which they achieved and sustain through participation in 12 Step recovery. “I think it’s extremely healthy that anonymity is fading,” says Clancy Martin, a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri, who had recently broke his own anonymity in “Harper’s” magazine.

The violations by ordinary members of Facebook, and other social media, are legion. Maer Roshan’s excitement about sobriety led to his becoming editor of The Fix, a Web magazine directed at the recovery world. “Having to deny your participation in a program that is helping your life doesn’t make sense to me,” he offers. Author and AA member Susan Cheever wrote an essay in “The Fix” entitled “Is It Time to Take the Anonymous Out of AA?” She writes, “We are in the midst of a public health crisis when it comes to understanding and treating addiction.“ She’s sees AA’s anonymity policies as contributing to the public’s lack of insight into these problems and their solution.

Congressmen Patrick Kennedy and Jim Ramstad acknowledged their own membership in AA while actively campaigning for a bill to get insurance companies to provide better coverage for addiction treatment. “The personal identification that Jim and I brought to this issue as recovering alcoholics gave us a place from which to speak about this. Stigma here is our biggest barrier, and knowledge and understanding are the antidote to stigma.”

Comedian and late night talk show host, Craig Ferguson, on the occasion of his 15th year sobriety anniversary, talked for about ten minutes about his addiction and recovery from alcoholism. Without explicitly saying that he was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, he cleverly and clearly made the disclosure advising anyone with a problem with alcohol to seek help from an tremendous organization that is listed “at the front of the phone book, the VERY front!” Years before, a different celebrity told Johnny Carson that “he was attending a 12 Step program that dealt with alcohol.”

Such word games are addressed by Cheever. “I am increasingly uncomfortable with the level of dishonesty. This dancing around and hedging, figuring out ways of saying it that aren’t saying it… all the ‘code words.’ I am sure this is not what Bill intended.”

My name is Roger, and I’m an alcoholic

Chicago Sun-Times film critic and television personality, Roger Ebert, died Thursday, April 4, 2013, ending a lengthy battle with cancer. On August 25, 2009, Ebert had gone very public in a well-read blog – My name is Roger, and I’m an alcoholic –  about his “other” disease, alcoholism, and his 30 years of recovery as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. (Friends from Chicago assure me that he was a real member, and a good one.) The blog, of course, is a horrendous violation of AA’s eleventh tradition, but it is done magnificently – a glowing tribute to Alcoholics Anonymous. The piece is well-written, respectful, accurate, and dripping with gratitude. I see NO attempt at self-aggrandizement or attention-seeking.

This is a ‘good-bye’ letter from a dying man.

Here are Ebert’s own words in answer to the obvious question.

You may be wondering, in fact, why I’m violating the A.A. policy of anonymity and outing myself. AA is anonymous not because of shame but because of prudence; people who go public with their newly-found sobriety have an alarming tendency to relapse. Case studies: those pathetic celebrities who check into rehab and hold a press conference.

In my case, I haven’t taken a drink for 30 years, and this is God’s truth: Since the first AA meeting I attended, I have never wanted to. Since surgery in July of 2006 I have literally not been able to drink at all. Unless I go insane and start pouring booze into my g-tube, I believe I’m reasonably safe. So consider this blog entry what AA calls a “12th step,” which means sharing the program with others. There’s a chance somebody will read this and take the steps toward sobriety.

The 1,400 + comments BEFORE his death indicate that he very likely did reach some folks, and his recent passing will surely add to the numbers who will read the essay. With AA’s admonition to “Keep an Open Mind,” I urge you to read Ebert’s blog. It is difficult to imagine any harm done by this exceeding the good.

Good or bad, right or wrong, the pathway for these anonymity breakers was forged many years ago by Mrs. Marty Mann. Time will tell if disaster is to befall us. Thus far, the sky is not falling.

A tremendous change has taken place over the past few generations in the way alcoholics are viewed in our society. Although it is undeniable that some level of unawareness and misunderstanding remains, substantial improvements have been effected since the 1930s. We have cause to be grateful.

The once virtually universal stigma that besieged alcoholic men was exponentially greater for women. “Nice women” didn’t drink to excess. This made it extremely difficult to admit to a drinking problem in the first place. As our pioneers battled not only for their own sobriety, but for some level of “respectability,” their reluctance to associate themselves with “beggars, tramps, asylum inmates, prisoners, queers (sic), plain crackpots, and fallen women,” (12 & 12, p. 140), can be looked on with some degree of sympathy.

Of course, many men failed to get sober, but were able to come and go without fanfare. The women drunks seemed more disruptive. Explosions took place over “out-of-bounds” romance and the arrival of alcoholic women at the early gatherings. According to Bill Wilson, “Whole groups got into uproars, and a number of people got drunk. We trembled for AA’s reputation and for its survival.” (Dr. Bob & the GO, p. 241)

It did not help that AA’s earliest efforts to rehabilitate women did not go well. When Caroline, ex-wife of Hank Parkhurst, called her sister Dorothy, the wife of Cleveland AA member Clarence Snyder, to tell her that she was bringing a woman to Akron from Chicago for “the cure,” Dorothy was nervous about telling Dr. Bob. From Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers we know that her trepidation was warranted: “Dr. Bob threw up his hands and said, ‘We have NEVER had a woman and will NOT work on a woman.’ But by that time, Caroline was on her way with Sylvia K.” (p. 180)

Sylvia K.

Sylvia K

Sylvia arrived in the late summer of 1939, and the men of AA were immediately tripping over themselves in their efforts to talk to her. By all accounts, the drunken divorcee and heiress from Chicago was stunningly beautiful, and in an era when America was still feeling the effects of the Great Depression, Sylvia was getting alimony of $700 per month. A comparison to Dr. William Silkworth’s rather paltry salary of forty dollars a week as a psychiatrist at Towns Hospital puts proportion to the enormity of this stipend.

All too soon after her arrival in Akron, Sylvia began tripping over herself. Clearly, the “little white pills” that she was taking were NOT “saccharin” as she was claiming. A nurse was flown down from Chicago to take care of her.

After talking to Bob, Sylvia decided to live in Akron. This caused great consternation, since her presence threatened to disrupt the whole group. But someone told her it would mean a great deal more if she could go back and help in Chicago. This appealed to Sylvia, so the members put her and her nurse on the train. Sylvia headed for the dining car and got drunk. (Dr. Bob & the GO, p. 181)

This tale has a happy ending as she sobered up when she got back to Chicago and contacted Earl T. They both worked diligently to grow AA in Chicago, and to this very day remain revered and legendary figures in Illinois AA. Sylvia’s personal story “The Keys of the Kingdom” appears in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th editions of our book. Sylvia K. was the first woman to achieve long term sobriety in AA, although that distinction is often erroneously conferred on Bill Wilson’s close friend, Marty Mann.

“Lil”

Dr. Bob’s concerns about women in AA pre-date Sylvia’s 1939 arrival. The first woman, ever, to seek help from the folks who were not yet, but would one day be, AA is identified in Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers only as “Lil.”

There was a man we’ll call “Victor,” a former mayor of Akron, and a lady we’ll call “Lil,” who was the first woman to seek help. Together, Victor and the lady known as Lil started out to write the “thirteenth step” long before the first twelve were even thought of. What is more, they say it began in Dr. Bob’s office – on his examination table – while he was at the City Club engaged in his sacrosanct Monday night bridge game. In any case, Victor decided it was time for him to go home – but Lil was loaded. (p. 97)

Lil wouldn’t leave so Victor called Ernie G., (AA #4), for assistance. Lil grabbed some pills from Dr. Bob’s medicine chest and was trying to gobble them while the two men chased her around the examination table in what must have appeared like a scene from “Benny Hill,” or “The Keystone Cops.”

Ernie recalled, “Then she made a dive for the window. I caught her halfway out. She was strong as a horse and used some profanity I have never heard before or since. I got her quieted, and Doc came. We took her out to Ardmore Avenue (the Smith home) and put her in a room in the basement. She stayed there two or three days, and then her people took her home. Of course, they were never too kind about it and thought we didn’t handle her right.” (Dr. Bob & the GO, p. 98)

This tale also has a happy ending, as well as a message of open-mindedness. According to Sue Windows (Dr. Bob’s daughter), “Lil” straightened out after a few years – but NOT through the AA program – got married, and had kids. AA isn’t the answer for everyone. “They say that Dr. Bob was leery of anything to do with women alcoholics for a long time thereafter, although he still tried to help as best he could with any who came along.” (p. 98)

Florence R.

Some consideration that was being given to the name “One Hundred Men,” as the title of what would become the Big Book, was squashed by the presence of Florence Rankin, whose story “A Femine Victory” appeared in the Big Book’s First Edition. At the time Florence had been sober for a little more than a year. Florence’s hard-drinking ex-husband, who knew Bill Wilson from Wall Street, brought Lois to talk with her. This was in March of 1937. She reports having great difficulty in seeing herself as an “alcoholic,” but after some slips she got sober in early 1938.

Again, this is another tale of AA’s early women that does not end well. Florence moved to Washington D.C. where she tried to assist Fitz Mayo (“Our Southern Friend”) in getting AA off the ground in and around the nation’s capital. One of the prospects drew her romantic interest and they married. The bridegroom was unable to stay sober and after a time, Florence got drunk as well and disappeared. When Fitz finally located her, it was at the morgue – she had committed suicide.

Jane Sturdevant

Women who joined the Akron group in the earliest days had adequate, if not impressive social credentials. Jane was married to the vice-president of a large steel company, and Sylvia was an attractive heiress. (Silkworth.net)

Dr. Bob’s February, 1938 list of ‘successes’ showed Jane S., 12 months. Jane was making the 35 mile trip from Cleveland to the meetings at T. Henry Williams’ house from early 1937. Described as “colorful and vivacious, with a fine sense of humor, Jane was the first woman to “have attained any length of sobriety – meaning a few months.” (Dr. Bob & the GO, p. 122) That she has no story in the First Edition is evidence that she relapsed, AND by the time of Sylvia’s arrival in September, 1939, she remained only as a bad memory for Dr. Bob, prompting the previously-cited “we have never had a woman, we will not work with a woman” remark.

Others came from the opposite end of the social strata. There is brief mention of an “Indian waitress,” and early member Warren C. recalled one woman who sought help but was “thrown out of AA by the wives. She was so bad that they wouldn’t allow her in their homes.”

Dr. LeClair Bissell

Bissell was an M.D., an addiction researcher with an “inside knowledge” of the malady, and the co-author of the 1987 book, Ethics for Addiction Professionals. Joining AA in 1953, at the age of twenty-five, she stayed sober until her death in 2008. William L. White, who interviewed Dr. Bissell in 1997 described her as “an unabashed atheist, a vocal lesbian, and a visible woman in addiction recovery before such openness was in vogue.” Dr. Bissell’s specific relevance to this essay is that she was personally acquainted with Mrs. Marty Mann, and was able to relay to us Mann’s own experience of AA in 1939:

Marty shared with me that when she went to her first AA meeting at Bill and Lois’ home in Brooklyn, the men were very afraid.  The experience of some of the earlier women was that the men were very threatened by them, and didn’t want them in the group.  That is what happened with Marty Mann… It was Lois Wilson who made her welcome, and pretty much insisted the men behave themselves. (White, William, Reflections of an addiction treatment pioneer: An Interview with LeClair Bissell, MD (1928-2008), conducted January 22, 1997)

Marty Mann

Born in 1905, Margaret “Marty” Mann grew up in Chicago, where her wealthy family provided her with every advantage including the finest boarding schools and finishing school in Europe. In her Big Book story “Women Suffer Too” we are told “My family had money – I had never known denial of any material desire.” An attractive and popular debutante, Marty’s circle was a young, privileged and fast-moving crowd. It was the “roaring twenties,” after all.

Following her own “debut” in 1927, at the age of twenty-one, Marty eloped with a handsome New Orleans “party boy” from a socially prominent family. Both bride and groom were considerably “high on alcohol” at the time. The young husband’s dubious “claim to fame” was being his town’s “worst drunk.” In her words, “My husband was an alcoholic, and since I had only comtempt for those without my own amazing capacity, the outcome was inevitable. My divorce coincided with my father’s bankruptcy, and I went to work (1928), casting off all allegiances and responsibilities to anyone other than myself.” (Women Suffer Too)

Marty Mann, Image from Barefoots World

Described by those who knew her as “favored with beauty, brains, charisma, phenomenal energy, and a powerful will,” she merged these with strong social connections to forge a successful career in Public Relations. “I had my own business, successful enough for me to indulge most of my desires.” She even “went abroad to live.” That her life of success, hedonism, and fulfilled desires left her “increasingly miserable,” is reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s insightful dictum – “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” The fun and frolic of the late 20s had become something altogether different ten years later.

Hangovers began to assume monstrous proportions, and the morning drink became an urgent necessity. ‘Blanks’ became more frequent… With a creeping insidiousness, drink had become more important than anything else. It no longer gave me pleasure—it merely dulled the pain—but I had to have it.

A return to America and her “drinking grew worse.” The one-time debutante, then PR whiz kid, found herself on the charity ward of first Bellvue Hospital and then the Blythewood Sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Mann’s psychiatrist, Harry Tiebout had been given a manuscript of the book Alcoholics Anonymous which he gave her to read.

The first chapters were a revelation to me. I wasn’t the only person in the world who felt and behaved like this! I wasn’t mad or vicious—I was a sick person. I was suffering from an actual disease that had a name and symptoms like diabetes or cancer or TB—and a disease was respectable, not a moral stigma. (Women Suffer Too)

Spreading the message expressed in the previous quotation would eventually take Marty Mann far beyond the rooms of AA.

Meeting Bill Wilson

In spite of not being happy with “the number of capital ‘G’ words” present in the manuscript, in April 11 of 1939, Marty was driven by Popsie M. to the Clinton St. meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. The occasion must have been somewhat somber as the government-imposed moratorium on foreclosures had been recently lifted, and the Wilsons were about to lose their home. At the gathering of “this group of freaks or bums who had done this thing” a surprising thing happened: “I went trembling into a house in Brooklyn filled with strangers… and I found I had come home at last, to my own kind.”

In spite of this auspicious debut, and a somewhat secular “awakening” about the need to let go of anger, Ms. Mann did not go deaf to the siren call of fermented beverages. Several relapses preceded her achieving a long term sobriety well into 1940 – possibly just one more illustration of the insidious nature of the malady.

The Yale Plan for Alcohol Studies

When Dr. E.M. Jellinek, America’s premier researcher into alcoholism, joined Dr. Howard Haggard (medicine) and Dr. Sheldon D. Bacon (sociology) to form “The Yale Plan for Alcohol Studies,” they had a problem. In order that they not be viewed as “Ivory Tower” types with only a superficial, academic knowledge of “real” alcoholism, they needed a “real” alcoholic, “Exhibit A.” Of course, this issue was not unrelated to fund-raising. Marty Mann joined these men in their noble cause of bringing change to public attitudes toward the disease and its sufferers. She felt the calling to work in the field of alcoholic education, and in particular she desired to help women alcoholics who were cursed with a “double stigma.”

The National Committee for Education on Alcoholism, Inc., the organization Marty founded, opened its offices on October 2, 1944. N.C.E.A. – eventually to become the National Council on Alcoholism – received an enthusiastic endorsement from the Grapevine, itself only four months old. It also received the support of many prominent (and some not so prominent) people, whose names, including those of Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, appeared on the committee’s letterhead… The AA co-founders’ names on the letterhead gave the impression that the two groups were connected. To confuse matters further, Marty, as she spoke across the country on behalf of her new organization, was breaking her own anonymity. (Pass it On, p. 320)

Ultimately, Wilson and Smith withdrew from N.C.E.A. and became persuaded that total non-affiliation was the only answer, as they had inadvertently associated AA with the plea for public funds by Mann’s organization, a solicitation that went out at some point to AA members. Additionally, Marty agreed to discontinue publicly identifying herself as an AA member. This was not entirely satisfactory, as the public was becoming aware that only AA members tended to refer to themselves as ‘alcoholics’ after becoming sober through the fellowship, while those who had gotten sober by any other means typically referred to themselves as “ex-alcoholics.”

Published in 1950 as the Primer on Alcoholism and republished in 1958 as the New Primer, Mann explained both the AA program and the goals of the National Council on Alcholism in this widely-read book.

Anonymity issues aside, the N.C.E.A., with Mrs. Mann as spokesperson and ‘Exhibit A,’ was quite successful in communicating the three tenets of its core message:

1. Alcoholism is a disease, and the alcoholic is a sick person;
2. The alcoholic can be helped, and is worth helping;
3. Alcoholism is a public heath problem, and therefore a public responsibility.

These ideas are so universally accepted today, that it can be difficult to imagine that they were both revolutionary and counter-intuitive at the time.

In the 1950s, famous journalist and newscaster (he was HUGE, young people), Edward R. Murrow included Marty Mann on his list of the ten “Greatest Living Americans.” (Murrow is brilliantly portrayed by Canadian David Strathairn in the 2005 film “Good Night and Good Luck,” directed by George Clooney and nominated for several Academy Awards.)

Mann’s breach of her own anonymity “for the sake and good of others” clearly had mostly positive outcomes. It is hard to know the causes leading to her relapse at twenty years sober. Perhaps the aggrandizement of ego that is at the core of AA’s fears for members who “go public” was a factor. AA also warns of the dangers of being a “secret keeper,” and Mann was an “in-the-closet” lesbian for decades. Her close friends knew the truth, but she shielded this additional “stigma” from the public to the point of retaining and using the title “Mrs.” her entire life, in spite of returning to the use of her maiden name. Her volatile love affair with “the Countess” may have also been a factor – all matters of speculation.

People have also speculated that later in her life she had been drinking at times when she was representing herself as sober. Regardless, she is an iconic character in the history of AA, and at a far broader level in the worldwide treatment and understanding of alcoholism. Mrs. Marty Mann died in 1980 shortly after suffering a stroke. She was seventy-five years old.

There are few things that have changed more since these earliest days than the position of women within the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.  From this less than auspicious debut and a mere token presence in 1939, women now comprise fully thirty-five percent of our society.  Young women, arriving new to AA in the twenty-first century, may well be surprised and even displeased with the male-dominant language of the Big Book, but it is a reflection of a different era, fully three generations in the past.  Much is owed to these intrepid female pioneers, for blazing the trail for the women of today.

My wife thought I would get up and walk out from my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. The meeting started with a recitation of the 12 Steps suggested as a programme of recovery and six of them mention God or “Him” or “Power.”

I was a surly, cynical agnostic and my wife, sitting beside me, thought, “This won’t work.” But I was a week away from having attempted suicide. I’d survived by the skin of my teeth and was in no state to engage in theological wrangling. I listened with laser-like attention to anything that would keep me alive, and staying alive meant not drinking.

My last binge had not been that spectacular; in fact I thought I deserved a pat on the back for arriving home before the pubs closed. But my wife took one look at me as I reeled through the front door and fled out of the back door with our daughter. As they drove off into the night I cursed them for being so unkind. I then turned the place upside down, wreaking my frustration and resentment on the furniture.

The next morning as I surveyed the wreckage I knew this could not go on. I’d never smashed the place up before and was appalled and horrified.

It finally dawned on me that while I kept on drinking my life just got more chaotic. Despite all my well-meaning and strenuous efforts I could not stop drinking. I couldn’t face another ten, 20 or 30 years of that living hell so I decided to end it all. As an alcoholic, loneliness was a way of life. I felt despised and rejected, shunned like a leper; I despised and rejected myself. But that morning I felt as though the cosmos itself had rejected me. I no longer belonged here. The pain of being alive was impossible to bear. Words diminish it.

As I left the house, my wife and daughter arrived home. I muttered, “They shoot mad dogs, don’t they?” and pushed past them.

I went to a chemist’s (pharmacy) and tried to decide how many aspirins would do the job, 25, 50 or 100. I bought 100 just to be sure, along with a bottle of orange juice. I walked into nearby woods, left the path so I wouldn’t be found, sat under a tree and gulped down the aspirins in handfuls. I then lay down and waited to die.

I was saved by luck and ignorance. I thought I would swiftly lapse into unconsciousness and the oblivion I craved; I didn’t know how long the tablets would take to work. I was aware of an insect scratching away next to my ear. I felt woozy but that passed, as did the ringing in my ears. I watched the sun passing through the branches. At one point I began to panic and struggled to get up. But I forced myself to stay there and told myself I had to go through with it.

Baffled that nothing seemed to be happening, I thought, “You haven’t killed yourself but you haven’t done yourself any good so you’d better get help.” A cynic might say, “Well, why didn’t you put your head on a railway line?” I don’t know the answer to that. All I know is that I was confused and bewildered – I wasn’t thinking straight; maybe the instinct for self-preservation had kicked in.

I walked back into the town and gave myself up to the police. Two young Police Constables rushed me to an Accident & Emergency room with the car siren blaring and lights flashing. One of them said, “Don’t you be sick in our car.” He added, “You’re not going to like what they’re going to do to you.” I found out what he meant when I was pumped out. I really did think then that I was going to die.

My wife refused to visit me; here was yet another disaster caused by my drunkenness. The kids persuaded her to come but she just sat at the end of the bed, quivering with rage, refusing to speak to me.

Before I was discharged a psychiatrist told me, “If you’d left it any longer before getting help, all they could have done was watch you die.” I didn’t plan to cut it that fine; I just wanted off the planet. He told me I would need to arrange psychiatric aftercare with my doctor  - and suggested I attend AA.

I’d turned my nose up at AA years before but now I was terrified that if I drank again I would die; and I just knew I would drink again because that’s what I always did. In AA I often hear members say they lacked the courage to commit suicide. It seems a perverse sort of courage that enables someone to die but not to live. I didn’t want to die but didn’t know how to live; I lacked the courage to live. I’ve seen suicide described as a supremely selfish act. In my case morality didn’t come into it; I just couldn’t take any more. Depending which statistic you believe, a third of male suicides are drink-related.

When I got home I phoned AA and my doctor. He encouraged me to go to AA and arranged an appointment with the consultant psychiatrist at a National Health Service addiction treatment centre. That evening two AA members visited me and told me their stories. They invited me to an AA meeting, which I went to with my wife. She had put me on probation. She thought going to AA was just another one of my “tricks”; I was always making solemn promises not to drink again.

At that first meeting I got hope that my alcoholism was no longer my unique problem; that there was help if I was prepared to use it. A few days later I met David Marjot, the psychiatrist at St Bernard’s hospital, West London. He listened to my story and said, “Well, I confirm the diagnosis. You’re a chronic alcoholic and from now on things can only get worse.” I thought, “I’ve just tried to kill myself – how much worse can it get?”

He went on, “I’ve seen hundreds of men like you. You’re in your mid-40s, still employed and married – it will all be gone if you carry on drinking, and with your pattern of binge drinking you’re in danger of having an oesophageal haemorrhage and bleeding to death.” He offered me an inpatient bed but said there was a seven-week waiting list. He added, “I’ll keep a place for you but in the meantime keep going to AA.”

That was in September 1984. I still have his letter of appointment; I hope I never have to use it.

In AA there’s a saying which I found immensely consoling: “I’m not a bad person trying to get good – I’m a sick person trying to get well.” I always blamed myself for not being able to control my drinking. I didn’t realise I was very sick. The illness theory is controversial but I find it a useful metaphor. If not scientifically exact it works for me as experiential verification. And it doesn’t let me off the hook. I had to try to put right the damage and hurt that I’d caused others in my alcoholic descent.

As soon as I felt well enough I went to the police station and thanked the two PCs who had rushed me to hospital. I wrote to the hospital and thanked them too. Those people saved my life. I’ve tried to be the husband to my wife that I’d denied her while in my alcoholic wilderness. I’ve made amends to our lovely kids.

Laurie was the editor for Share and Share Alike, a book celebrating the diamond jubilee of AA in Great Britain.

The AA group that I began attending met at a Quaker meeting house. There was a poster on the notice board that said: “A silent Quaker meeting for worship can be a quiet process of healing and a journey of discovery.” I plucked up courage one Sunday and went to my first Quaker meeting. I was not judged for my belief or lack of belief and welcomed.

I was attracted by the similarities between Quakerism and AA. Here in Britain both are practical, non-hierarchical, egalitarian and non-creedal.

Unlike some Quaker meetings in North America, British Quakerism has no priests or pastors, nor liturgy, sermons or hymns. Meeting houses are unconsecrated and bare of ornament. Meetings for worship are held in silence from which arise occasional, spontaneous, spoken contributions which anyone present can offer if so moved. When AA began in Britain in the late 1940s British members discarded the Lord’s prayer. Most meetings end with the Serenity prayer, but it’s optional and as an agnostic I stay silent.

Both Quakerism and AA say the spiritual life is not a theory – we have to live it. I am more open-minded and tolerant than I have ever been and I’m still an agnostic.

I thought the worst thing that could have happened to me was to become an alcoholic; it turned out to be the best thing. If I hadn’t found AA and the Quakers I would never have found myself. I drank for limitless expansion, but that thirst was never satisfied.

Today it is one day at a time.

 Laurie A. is a retired national newspaper and BBC journalist in the UK. His sobriety date is 8/10/84. He served on the Great Britain AA literature committee and edited Share, the British fellowship’s national magazine,  and Share and Share Alike, a book celebrating 60 years of AA in Britain in 2007.

I’d like to let you all know that we have a fully formed agnostic AA group that meets every week on Sundays in South West London.

It has been an interesting journey for me.  I started out in Putney & Chelsea about 12 years ago and moved to South America for five of those years.  Upon my return to Purley in South London, I discovered that the face of recovery had changed entirely in my area. There seemed to be a growing influx of groups with circuit speakers imported from the US, a blind fanaticism towards Joe & Charlie and a dogmatic adherence to the Steps which I had never encountered before. The cult of sponsorship disturbed me – the message now was that the ONLY way to recover is to find the Higher Power – when my own experience as an atheist in AA is that it is entirely possible to live a fulfilled, happy and sober life without having to invoke any kind of Deity or supernatural power whatsoever. It was now to me an unrecognizable recovery environment.

I felt isolated within AA and found it hard to meet anyone who shared my lack of spiritual belief in my part of the world – I craved the fellowship, love and tolerance that I had found many years previously when I had first started on my journey.

To that end I started up a new agnostic AA group. “To thine own self be True” carried me during the difficult early days. I can now share that we have a small but thriving group of men and women, some who were already sober and found our meeting, and some who GOT sober in our meeting. Please see our website Agnostic AA London.

Our first meeting was on a Sunday in early February 2012 in Purley. Since then we have grown and moved out of the Church at Purley and into a YMCA in Surbiton, SW London.  It’s a lovely space for us with less religious iconography and comfy leather sofas! It’s also nice to distance ourselves geographically from the more dogmatic meetings and enjoy a more relaxed and nurturing atmosphere.

 The thing that thrills me most is that we can be of maximum service to our fellows, EVEN those of us who reject any kind of supernatural thinking, or those of us who just can’t seem to get the hang of having a God in their lives. The only requirement to come to the meeting is a desire to stop drinking, we don’t ask anyone to believe in anything at all. Everyone is welcome.

Jude Core interview on BBC’s Beyond Belief

As a result of having our website, the BBC contacted me to add my thoughts to a religion and ethics programme about addiction and alcohol, orginally broadcast on March 18. The programme asked a very current question in AA: how do atheists or agnostics navigate their way through such a religious/spiritual programme? My part in this BBC radio show, which perhaps ironically is called Beyond Belief, can be accessed by clicking on the link on the right.

(You can listen to the entire programme on the BBC Radio 4 website here: Religion and Addiction.)

The support from that interview has been overwhelming, and it has made me feel like I did a good thing in setting up this meeting a year ago. Despite the name calling, the ostracism from other members and the like, I have been overwhelmed with messages of support from others who, like me, lack a belief in God but STILL value the great things that AA has to offer, including the 12 steps which can be accessible to us all with just a little bit of creativity. The BBC interview has galvanised me and brought me into contact with many, many AAs who are supportive and proud of our small, but growing voice as agnostics/atheists in AA.

I can’t explain sufficiently how grateful I am to have had the support each week from other atheists and agnostics that come along to share their experience, strength and hope – we are all sober without God and it is true freedom. Our meeting now has it’s own group conscience so it was wonderful to hand the group over to the group itself. The pioneering spark came from me, and it did take a lot of courage in the Primary Purpose heartland I found myself in, but I give thanks to all of the pioneers who came before, who had already done most of the work, and who showed me that a truly wonderful, sober God-less existence is possible.

I’ve met some inspirational people on my journey, both believers and non-believers, many that I now call friends from all over the world. Our online Facebook group has also been a lovely place to pop into to help support others and show that resoundingly YES! A life beyond our wildest dreams is possible, with no need for prayer or ritual. I feel positive about the future for atheists/agnostics in AA, there is so much GOOD in the Big Book and in our meetings that it is a wonderful thing to be able to be part of Alcoholics Anonymous but yet not be subjected to dogma and judgement.

If you would like more information or if you would like to be added to the Atheists & Secular Humanists AA group on Facebook, you can contact Jude Core (this name is a pseudonym) here: www.facebook.com/judecore or info@agnosticaa.org.uk.

It’s nearly three years since Brent P. finally got clean and sober.

I say finally because he was first introduced to AA thirty years ago. Back then he went to meetings believing AA might have some preventative benefits. He was young and liked using alcohol and drugs but he didn’t want them to become  problems to the degree that he might one day be compelled to abstain. The idea was not to quit but to learn what mistakes others had made and avoid them.

So it came as little surprise to him some twenty years later, after having done a couple of stints in rehab, the odd night in jail, blown a marriage and alienated a few friends and family, that, in the absence of the preventative strategies he’d so sincerely sought in AA, he had indeed become the alcoholic and drug addict he’d set out not to become.

Now clean and sober, Brent has embarked on a web series that mirrors what he was looking for when he started out thirty years ago. Called The How Not 2 Guide 2 Getting Clean & Sober, it is less a how-not-to-become-an-alcoholic guide than it is a how-not-to-fool-yourself-into-thinking-you-don’t-have-a-problem-when-you-really-do guide.

You really should view the episodes below, currently running on YouTube, to fully appreciate the interview that follows…

A few days ago I sat down to talk to Brent about this enterprise and what he hopes to accomplish with it.

Roger: First off, is this a joke?

Brent: Anything but.

Roger: Having seen the three episodes you have out now and enjoyed them, I thought some people might conclude that you’re having fun at the expense of people we both know have a problem that could kill not just them but others too.

Brent: The goal of the project is to wake people up, particularly young people, to the types of behaviour that often indicate they have a potentially lethal problem. Using humour to do that seemed the most effective way to get their attention. The goal is also to disarm them and the defensive reflexes that are activated when drug and alcohol problems are raised. Besides, the logic that justifies anybody’s drinking or using drugs, when the problem is obviously out of control, is without a doubt so absurd, it’s funny. It deserves to be laughed at. And so do the people who believe it.

Roger: So the humour is a device in a serious effort to educate?

Brent: That’s a good way to put it. When I first attended AA and learned that abstention was the only real solution to alcoholism and addiction, I balked. The prospect of stopping drinking was so unattractive to me that it likely was the first indication that I was headed for trouble. Most normal drinkers don’t go to AA to begin with, and only alcoholics would go searching for the answer to their alcoholism, have the answer presented to them in the clearest possible terms, and then say,  “Thank you, no.”

Roger: Why is that?

Brent: Well if they’re anything like me and just about every other alcoholic I’ve ever met, the last thing they want to do is stop. They want whatever trouble it was that first drove them to AA to go away, but damned if they’re prepared to actually quit drinking.

Roger: Now you’re talking about an alcoholic’s relationship to alcohol. And of course this would also apply to an addict’s relationship to drugs.

Brent: Exactly. I mean the problem is defined as an abnormal, progressive dependence that, if continued long enough, will lead to addiction to alcohol or drugs. So when a person who has come to rely on alcohol or drugs to, I don’t know, help them handle social situations, cope with stress and tension, ensure hilarity and good times, hell, even make a football game more interesting, then they are not going to easily accept the prospect of stopping.

Roger: You’ve said that the How Not 2 Guide is, or was inspired by your own experience. Is what you just said a description of you?

Brent: For sure, but I know I’m not unique. I went to AA and had my problem defined as“powerlessness over alcohol” and I was told that my life “had become unmanageable.” In those early days, I could argue with that definition but what came to haunt me was the promise that, if I indeed was in the early stages of a lifelong problem, my problem would get worse until finally I would not be able to deny it.

Roger: But you set about to prove that wrong, to show that you did in fact have some control over your drinking.

Brent: I think that’s what most alcoholics do unless their first exposure to AA or treatment comes after they’ve seriously harmed themselves or others. I mean I’ve heard of people waking up in jail or hospital to learn they’d killed somebody or broken their own back or neck in a car accident or a fall. If alcohol was the reason for that then it typically doesn’t take a great deal of convincing for that person to accept they need help. But I’ve also seen those same people hobble out of the hospital in a neck and back brace and head straight for the liquor store.

Roger: But without a definitive experience like that, you suggest that most alcoholics, because alcohol is so central to their lives, are going to do everything in their power to control or manage their drinking.

Brent: Right. And that’s when the rationalizing, strategizing, justifying, theorizing and so on comes in to play. It’s when alcoholics go searching for the flimsiest alternative explanations of their problem and give in to absurd misconceptions, all in an effort to not have to stop. And that, essentially is what the How Not 2 Guide is all about.

Roger: Identifying those rationalizations, strategies, justifications and so on, to expose them as nonsense: that’s what the Guide is about?

Brent: That’s a big part of it. But I’d elaborate a bit more.

Roger: Please do.

Brent: AA talks about alcoholics “hitting bottom.”

Roger: That’s the shorthand that’s used to describe the moment when we consciously or unconsciously realize, “This is it, I’m done.”

Brent: Right. It’s a life changing moment, even if you don’t recognize it that way at the time. Yet in reflecting on my experience, especially as a chronic relapser, I didn’t experience a bottom. For several months after my last drink, I had no idea if  I was finished or not. It wasn’t until I’d reached about seven or eight months, by far the longest I’d gone in the previous decade, that I realized that not only was I staying clean and sober, but I was entirely free of  the obsession and the compulsion to drink or use drugs. While I couldn’t say for sure why this was the case this time, I did make an informed guess.

Roger: And that was?

Brent: That I’d finally reached my threshold for self inflicted pain at the same time that I’d run out of the lies and strategies to justify drinking or doing drugs “just one more time.”

Roger: So rather than hitting bottom, you just kind of ran out of rope?

Brent: I couldn’t come up with one more good reason to put myself through the horror show that drinking and using were certain to inflict on me.

Roger: So how does that relate to your How Not 2 Guide?

Brent: Because prior to the end I must have justified my drinking and using a million different ways. It was like moving men on a chess board. “Oh I haven’t tried the mix-alcohol-with-cocaine gambit yet, so lets see how that works.” That sort of thing. The How Not 2 Guide is really a collection of the strategies I employed, strategies that inevitably led to more and more epic fails.

Roger: AA’s Big Book talks about that, all the different strategies that alcoholics use to gain some control over their drinking, and says that some alcoholics will chase the illusion of control to the gates of hell.

Brent: It does. But what it doesn’t address, at least to my satisfaction, is the thinking that allows these illusions to persist. That’s the insanity of addiction. And I’m certainly not the first to identify that. In fact A&E’s Intervention has done a great job of portraying just how hopeless and tragic the alcoholic/addict can become. But I frankly think that show works against enlightening those who may be in the early stages of  alcoholism and addiction. I mean if I’m 17 and quaffing beers with my friends on the weekend, and maybe sparking up some dubes, I am not going to relate to what I see on Intervention. Furthermore it’s a bit of a buzz-kill.

Roger: A buzz kill?

Brent: Yeah. I mean unless you’re a fan of  the human train wreck, you know, seeing bodies mangled in the machinery of seriously damaged brains, it’s hardly something you’re going find fun or entertaining, especially if you’re high.

Roger: So the How Not 2 Guide is meant as entertainment for people who are high?

Brent: High or not, if they are entertained, then they will watch it to the end. They may or may not identify with what they’ve seen. But if indeed they do have a problem, the day will come when they either do the same thing they’ve seen on our show or something similar. That’s when it comes back to them and there’s a sort of uncomfortable shiver because they know they’ve done something that was clearly identified as symptomatic of someone who has a problem.

Roger: And you think that will stop them?

Brent: No but I do believe that we will have robbed them of at least one of the multitude of excuses people use to keep going. So we will have moved them at least one step closer to the truth.

Roger: You said “we” a couple of times there. Are there more people involved in this than you?

Brent: I have four partners. One who financed the project so we could hire really good actors. Another who did the editing, camera work and handled all the technical stuff. One who directed each episode and another who will handle the sales end of things. And I came up with the idea and wrote each episode.

Roger: Okay. So I take it there’s more to come. What we’ve seen so far is just a taste, a preview of the real thing.

Brent: What we have now are really condensed demos. We expect to get a TV series out of it while the long term goal is a comprehensive website that will house these episodes but also include a place for people to send in their own stories, whether filmed or written. We are associated with a very well known addiction counselor who himself has been on television many times and will provide the clinical perspective. There’s more, but you get the idea.

Roger: So you’ve done your homework as well. You’re working with professionals in the field of recovery.

Brent: Without their support and encouragement then I think we are simply making fun of addicts and alcoholics. Our objective for this has always been “edu-tainment”. But if experts look at it and don’t see any value in it, if they don’t see the validity in either the approach or the content, then we’ve failed.

Roger: I like it, Brent, very much. I was at an AA meeting a few days ago and the group was doing a particularly quaint reading from the Big Book. I thought, to myself, “What are the chances anyone under 50 could relate to this reading?”  I think your approach is fresh and I think the humor is relevant. It just might get through to a tough audience: younger people, boys and girls, if you will, younger women and men. If you have the opportunity to expand on it on the web and TV and get it out to a wider audience, I believe you will be contributing to the growing body of our knowledge and understanding of addiction and recovery.

Brent: Thanks for that. And I do want to say that despite the seeming irreverent tone, I have taken this very seriously. We call it the comedy before the tragedy, because we’re all aware of the horrors that await when addiction and alcoholism aren’t addressed before an individual is truly trapped. I wished that I had been better informed when I was young. I’m not saying that would have stopped me but if something like this had been presented to me when I was in my earliest stages, then I think I would have felt more comfortable talking openly about the insanity of alcoholism and addiction. Ultimately, if you’re going to get anywhere with young people, they have to feel they can talk openly without fear of any sort of reprisal and in their own language.

Roger: Many thanks for this interview, Brent. Best of luck with this project and please do keep us informed about any new developments.

Brent: Thanks, Roger. Will do.

William White is the author of Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America and co-author with Ernest Kurtz of The Varieties of Recovery Experience. He conducted this interview the summer of 2012, some six or seven months ago.

Introduction

Some years ago, the noted historian Ernest Kurtz, author of Not-God:  A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, shared with me that if he was to ever write another book about AA, its title would be Varieties of AA Experience.  In the years that followed, Ernie and I delved into the varieties of recovery experience both within AA and within its secular and religious alternatives.  One branch of such varieties that has always been of interest to me is the experiences of atheists and agnostics in AA and the development of agnostic groups in AA.  In July of 2011, I began communicating with Roger C., a member of the Beyond Belief AA group in Toronto, Canada, who was writing a history of agnostic groups in AA (see The History of Agnostic Groups in AA posted on this site).  Roger has done an excellent job of pulling together the strains of this history, and in August of 2012, agreed to an interview to discuss his research. 

Bill White:  Roger, describe the roots of your interest in agnostics’ participation in AA.

Roger:  I am a recovering alcoholic in AA and an agnostic myself, and I have a Master’s degree in Religious Studies from McGill. While working on my PhD, for a period of three or four years, I taught ordinands, people preparing for the ministry in the United, Anglican, or Presbyterian Church. I was the resident atheist at McGill, and I was very well regarded in that role. That was certainly not the case when I entered the rooms of AA. There were days I thought some of the AA members were trying to kill me with their bullying – passive-aggressive, but bullying nonetheless – about God.  I frankly wasn’t sure I could make it.  About four months into sobriety, I stumbled across a Beyond Belief meeting, an agnostic AA meeting in Toronto. At the time, the group was on the online AA meeting list. My reaction after the meeting was complete relief. I thought to myself “I’m saved!”

Bill White:  How did you go from that initial experience of relief to your commitment to researching and writing A History of Agnostic Groups in AA?

Roger:  At the end of May 2011 when the two Toronto Groups got booted off the GTA regional list of AA meetings and out of Intergroup, I thought it would be useful to see how agnostic groups in AA had fared in the past, how they had been accepted or not within AA, and write a short history.  I thought it would take a weekend, a long weekend maybe, and that I would find all the stuff I needed on the Internet and copy and paste my way to a full history. In fact, it took three months and was very hard work. Virtually everything in the history is original. The many archive offices in AA were of no help whatsoever. The Chief Archivist at the GSO genuinely wanted to assist, but her office also had very little information, at least about agnostics and atheists. There was also very little online or anywhere else about the history of agnostics in AA, and no one had ever undertaken to write such a history.

It became clear to me that agnostics and atheists in AA were a bit of a secret, certainly something that wasn’t supposed to be treated seriously or officially acknowledged. This state of affairs would eventually inspire me to write my favorite blog ever, “The Don’t Tell Policy in AA,” in which I compare the treatment of agnostics and atheists in AA to the treatment of gays in the U.S. military, as a consequence of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy.

William L. White
Senior Research Consultant
Chestnut Health Systems

Bill White:  How did you respond to the challenges of this research? 

Roger:  The harder it was to write, the more determined I was to write it. It was intriguing and fascinating. I got to talk to some wonderful people, like Charlie P., the founder of the first We Agnostic meetings in LA in 1980. It became so inspiring to write this work. And I also discovered that something that occurred in the past isn’t history – nobody who wasn’t there will ever know it happened – until someone writes it down on paper. So, I like to think I made history, so to speak.

Bill White:  Could you summarize some of the major conclusions you drew from your research?

Roger:  First, there is plenty of room in AA for atheists and agnostics; all we have to do is claim it as our own.  Second, there are a lot of unfortunate misunderstandings out there about AA, and that’s especially true within AA.  What is AA?  AA is one alcoholic helping another. Period. Full stop. It’s what Bill did with Dr. Bob between May 12^th and June 10^th, 1935.  AA has somehow morphed in people’s minds into the 12-Step program. AA is not the 12 Steps, which are only “suggested” as a recovery program, just like the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, says. Do them, don’t do them. Interpret them and rewrite them. Do something else to stay sober. It’s up to the recovering alcoholic in AA to make up his or her mind. Make an effort to stay sober: have a desire to stop drinking, as it’s put in Tradition Three, and you are a member, or a group, in good standing in AA.  There is much more that is not well understood in today’s AA about AA, but that is hardly within the scope of this interview. However, it all points to a final major conclusion to be drawn from A History of Agnostic Groups in AA: agnostics and atheists in AA need a voice. They need to be heard. It is apparently difficult for anyone with a religious orientation to understand the difference between attraction and promotion, as described in Tradition Eleven. Many will take up as much space as they think is available to them, and some now think they have a lien on the rooms of AA. Thus the website, AA Agnostica. But more on the website later.

Bill White:  Are there any recent updates on the events catalogued in the paper?

Roger:  Back in 2011, of course, the GTA Intergroup booted two agnostic groups – Beyond Belief and We Agnostics – off the official regional AA meeting list and out of its monthly meetings. That decision has been reviewed since and, unfortunately, confirmed.  In a fellowship that has no rules, the GTA Intergroup thought it wise to invent a rule just in case recovering alcoholics decided in the future to form AA agnostic groups. In March 2012, there was a motion that an AA group needs to adopt the 12 Steps, 12 Traditions, and 12 Concepts of AA in order to be recognized as an AA group by Intergroup.

The motion was put to a so-called “referendum” and the results announced in June. The final tally was 832 for the Motion and 286 against. (Out of the 330 groups in the GTA, 72 voted, and the tally reflects the number of members in each group present for the business meetings in which the vote was held.)  So there is now a rule regarding who can belong to AA in the Greater Toronto Area. One could certainly argue that Intergroup ought to boot itself out of itself because the rule is clearly a violation of several AA traditions.

It immediately reminds me of a quote from Bill, way back in 1946, reflecting on roughly ten years of AA experience:

The way our “worthy” alcoholics have sometimes tried to judge the “less worthy” is, as we look back on it, rather comical. Imagine if you can, one alcoholic judging another.  At one time or another most AA groups go on rule-making benders… Gossips gossip and righteously denounce the local Wolves and Red Riding Hoods. Newcomers argue that they aren’t alcoholics at all, but keep coming around anyway…Others refuse to accept all the Twelve Steps of the recovery program. Some go still further, saying that the “God business” is bunk and quite unnecessary. Under these conditions our conservative program-abiding members get scared. These appalling conditions must be controlled, they think, else AA will surely go to rack and ruin.

Bill concludes, as at least some of us in AA know:

Our AA door stands wide open, (We) sign nothing, agree to nothing, and promise nothing. We demand nothing. (We) join on our own say-so. Nowadays, in most groups, (we) can join AA on the mere suspicion that (we) may be alcoholic… We do not wish to deny anyone the chance to recover from alcoholism.

The GTA Intergroup is misguided. Somewhere in the not too distant future, this silliness will be addressed and corrected. In the meantime, of course, we agnostics are actually not too upset. Indeed, some agnostics were inspired by Intergroup’s behaviour to start their own AA groups. Certainly no real new damage has been done. Indeed, maybe it’s just as well that this long-festering wound in AA has finally been exposed. Besides, we all seem to agree with the co-founder of AA that “every group has the right to be wrong,” including the GTA Intergroup.

Bill White:  What has been the response to A History of Agnostic Groups in AA and the related papers on the website?

Roger:  There is a slogan in AA that a lot of agnostics didn’t understand until A History of Agnostic Groups in AA: “You are not alone.” In that sense, it has been very liberating, very inspiring for many people who frankly did not feel that comfortable in the rooms of AA.  The history and the response to it made it abundantly clear that agnostics in AA needed a voice, a forum to share “our experience, strength and hope,” as it were. The most important result of the history to date is the AA Agnostica website, an international forum for agnostics in AA, and a true archive for all that pertains to our place and history in AA.

I offer an example here of how the history and the website, AA Agnostica, work together to support the recovering alcoholic who may happen to be a bit short on belief in a deity. Misguided as it may be, there are those who will tell the newcomer in the rooms of AA that he or she has to find God in order to maintain his or her sobriety.  A History of Agnostics in AA tells the story of a wonderful man who co-founded the very first AA group ever to be called “We Agnostics” in 1980 in Los Angeles.  At the time, Charlie P. was 66 years old and had been sober for 9 years. He would go on to found another We Agnostics meeting in Austin in 2001. Today, there are six AA meetings for atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers in Austin, no doubt inspired by Charlie P. All of that story was told in the first version of A History of We Agnostics in AA.

In March of this year [2012], a very moving eulogy was posted on AA Agnostica: Father of We Agnostics Dies. It was a wonderful tribute – written by one of his many sponsees – to Charlie P. who had lived another 32 years after founding the first We Agnostics AA meeting in LA. He was 98 years old. He had been sober for 41 continuous years. An AA meeting had been held in his room to celebrate his anniversary. In the last weeks before his death, AA meetings had been held at his bedside. Tributes were held for this wonderful man by AAers in both Austin and Hollywood.

To date, the tribute to Charlie remains one of the most popular posts on the AA Agnostica website. Why do people read it? Because it is an inspiration. Because it allows them to hear someone say that an interventionist God is required to stay sober and understand that that is utter nonsense. And the history is full of stories like that: Ada and John and David who started the We Atheists meeting in New York City in 1986… And on and on…

Bill White:  Roger, describe the further development of the AA Agnostica website.

Roger:  We have seen a new post every week! In its first year, forty-six articles were published, written by twenty-two different people from two continents (Europe and North America), and over a dozen cities such as London (England), New York, Toronto, Minneapolis, Austin, and Los Angeles. It turns out it’s not just the odd agnostic here and there who manages to stay sober in AA, but a whole army! A whole world of recovering agnostic men and women in AA!

The response to the history and the website reveals a sentiment well-known in AA: gratitude. People are grateful for both. There is a responsibility declaration in AA: “When anyone anywhere reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA always to be there, and for that I am responsible.” Agnostics in AA do not place qualifications on a person’s access to AA: all are truly welcome in spite of their belief or lack of belief. Our only wish is to ensure suffering alcoholics can find sobriety in AA without having to accept anyone else’s beliefs, or having to deny their own. Unless you are a truly troubled human being, it’s hard not to respect that, and that’s how most respond to the history and website.

Bill White:  What suggestions would you offer to agnostics and atheists seeking recovery mutual aid support?

Roger:  Given my background in Religious Studies at McGill, my first suggestion to atheists and agnostics in AA is biblical: Go Forth and Multiply! And that’s been happening. Since the two groups [in Toronto] were booted out by Intergroup back in May 2011, the number of agnostic groups in Canada has gone from two to five. Not that many yet, but the trend is in place. AA is self-correcting. If agnostics and atheists don’t feel comfortable in some of the rooms of AA, that’s understandable. But change is inevitable. AA is for all with a “desire to stop drinking.”

Having said that, it’s also important to state that an alcoholic should do whatever is necessary for her or him to get sober and to maintain that sobriety. An alcoholic is powerless over alcohol, but not over his or her own choices and decisions as to how to best take care of himself or herself. We all have “concurrent” problems. In the most recent survey of AA members, over sixty percent access resources outside of AA in order to manage their lives in sobriety. Nobody should ever be told that there is only one way that works to recover from alcoholism. If the 12-Step recovery program is helpful, that’s all well and good. If the Eightfold Path of Buddhism works better for an individual, then that person should do the Eightfold Path.

We agnostics are here to help in AA.  We certainly believe in mutual aid support, of course, and that’s why we are members of AA. I don’t know how often I have heard someone new to an agnostic AA meeting say that the agnostic meetings are “more spiritual” than more traditional AA meetings. I don’t know what “spiritual” means, but the sharing at these meetings is often very honest, very personal, and very moving. I love those meetings. I need those meetings. Mutual aid support is an essential element of recovery. It’s the sharing circle. It’s being in a room with someone who knows what you’re talking about and doesn’t hate you for it. “One alcoholic helping another,” may not be absolutely essential to recovery from alcoholism, but as far as I can tell, it’s as close as it gets.

Finally, I am always impressed with how tolerant agnostics and atheists can often be toward others, including those of a religious persuasion, and that’s exactly how it should be. The religiously inclined, of course, have a right to their beliefs as well. I mentioned the We Atheists meeting that was founded in 1986 in New York. I think it’s appropriate to end this interview with a principle that is, at least in my opinion, central to AA, but which sometimes proves to be elusive, and not just in Toronto. It’s the slogan the atheists used in New York to end each and every one of their meetings: “Live and Let Live!”

Bill White:  Roger, thank you for all you have done to unearth this hidden history of agnostics in AA and all you and AA Agnostics are doing to widen the doorways of entry into recovery.

Bill White wrote the Foreword to The Little Book: A Collection of Alternative 12 Steps, written by Roger C. and published in February. The support provided to the author by both he and Ernie Kurtz is highlighted in the acknowledgements at the beginning of the book. In the Foreword, Bill White describes The Little Book as “a celebration of the varieties of recovery experience.” This interview is posted on his website Selected Papers of William L. White. It is reposted here with Bill White’s permission.