“The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety” by Bill Wilson

 I think that many oldsters who have put our AA “booze cure” to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA — the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.

Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance — urges quite appropriate to age seventeen — prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven or fifty-seven.

Since AA began, I’ve taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up, emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very painful to discover finally, that all along we have had the cart before the horse! Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.

How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy, and good living — well, that’s not only the neurotic’s problem, it’s the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all our affairs.

Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That’s the place so many of us AA oldsters have come to. And it’s a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious — from which so many of our fears, compulsions and phony aspirations still stream — be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want! How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden “Mr. Hyde” becomes our main task.

I’ve recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones — folks like you and me — commencing to get results. Last autumn [several years back — ed.] depression, having no really rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I’ve had with depressions, it wasn’t a bright prospect.

I kept asking myself, “Why can’t the Twelve Steps work to release depression?” By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer…”It’s better to comfort than to be the comforted.” Here was the formula, all right. But why didn’t it work?

Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence — almost absolute dependence - on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.

There wasn’t a chance of making the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away.

Because I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what Grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed, upon any set of circumstances whatsoever.

Then only could I be free to love as Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life.

Plainly, I could not avail myself of God’s love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn’t possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.

For my dependency meant demand — a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.

While those words “absolute demand” may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of the return to me.

This seems to be the primary healing circuit: an outgoing love of God’s creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the current can’t flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.

Spiritual calculus, you say? Not a bit of it. Watch any AA of six months working with a new Twelfth Step case. If the case says “To the devil with you,” the Twelfth Stepper only smiles and turns to another case. He doesn’t feel frustrated or rejected. If his next case responds, and in turn starts to give love and attention to other alcoholics, yet gives none back to him, the sponsor is happy about it anyway. He still doesn’t feel rejected; instead he rejoices that his one-time prospect is sober and happy. And if his next following case turns out in later time to be his best friend (or romance) then the sponsor is most joyful. But he well knows that his happiness is a by-product — the extra dividend of giving without any demand for a return.

The really stabilizing thing for him was having and offering love to that strange drunk on his doorstep. That was Francis at work, powerful and practical, minus dependency and minus demand.

In the first six months of my own sobriety, I worked hard with many alcoholics. Not a one responded. Yet this work kept me sober. It wasn’t a question of those alcoholics giving me anything. My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.

Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God’s help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love; we may then be able to Twelfth Step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety.

Of course I haven’t offered you a really new idea — only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my own “hexes” at depth. Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine.

(c) Copyright, AA Grapevine, January 1958

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My Truth (click-through to read all)

Something I often say in meetings is, I don’t want to die from alcoholism.  That I don’t want drinking to kill me. That I won’t let a liquid control my life. My greatest fear has been repercussions from drinking. And it is all true, valid and understandable to anyone. One of the main reasons I came back to A.A. is I knew it worked. I knew alcoholics were able to stop drinking alcohol and to be happy through the program. Another reason for my returning is knowledge of the existence of benefits beyond my comprehension available through honest recovery. I always knew these people had something invaluable that they actually wanted me to have. Yet I couldn’t tell you what it was. I just wanted to not die. I knew there was more, and that little bit of knowledge from years in and out and the desire to stop drinking brought me back into the rooms.

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Is It Time to Take the Anonymous Out of A.A.?(Controversial)

Charleen: “REALLY?!?! Comparing the anonimity to gay rights?!?! Please…”

Is It Time to Take the Anonymous Out of A.A.?

Anonymity is a bedrock tradition that once protected alcoholics from stigma. But cloaking ourselves in strict secrecy seems like an odd strategy in the modern world. Of course, any individual is entitled to maintain his or her anonymity. But as public perception of alcoholism and addiction begins to change, shouldn’t A.A. change as well? By Susan Cheever

By Susan Cheever

04/07/11

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A reporter from The New York Times called me the other day to ask about the continuing necessity of anonymity in Alcoholics Anonymous. We had a very strange conversation. We both wanted to abide by A.A.’s Tradition Eleven: “We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.”  I have always taken this to mean that I should not discuss with the media what I know from personal experience about the organization.

Nevertheless, I wanted to help him. We are in the midst of a public health crisis when it comes to understanding and treating addiction. A.A.’s principle of anonymity may only be contributing to general confusion and prejudice. When it comes to alcoholism and A.A., the problem is very public, but the solution is still veiled in secrecy.

Despite pop culture’s glut of celebrities rehabbing and relapsing right before our eyes, an astonishing number of people still believe that drinking too much is a failure of will power—forget all this talk of genes, heredity, early psychological issues, self-medication for depression and anxiety. “Even when many people say they believe alcoholism is a disease, they still think it is a moral problem,” says Pat Taylor of Faces and Voices of Recovery, a recovery nonprofit dedicated to public education. “We need to do a better job of informing the public about the fact that people can and do get well.”

Many others believe that granting someone the label of “alcoholic”—a different version of the disease metaphor—means that they cannot be held responsible for their behavior. Many of the terrible stories reported in the media as domestic abuse, horrific traffic accidents, even atrocities of wartime are in fact crimes committed by someone in the grip of addiction, although that fact often goes unmentioned. There is scant money for research on addiction, whose annual toll in lost productivity and healthcare costs is in the billions.

Anonymity is a hot topic these days. A recent SAMHSA survey shows that a majority of Americans have a positive attitude about people in recovery—so the argument that anonymity protects people from being stigmatized seems less and less germane. But within A.A. anonymity is still sacred—after all, it is written into the Twelve Traditions. Bring it up in almost any A.A. meeting, and you will be frowned at and probably given lots of unwanted, emphatic advice by the meeting’s self-appointed vigilantes.

Two A.A. traditions deal with anonymity: Tradition Eleven’s “always anonymous” recommendation and Tradition Twelve, which counsels people in A.A. to place principles above personalities. In other words, when you come to A.A., you check your accomplishments, your bank account,  your police record and even your last name at the door.

When Bill W. and his fellow A.A. members wrote the traditions, they left as many loopholes as possible. There are no rules in A.A.: the traditions and the steps are described as “suggestions.” A.A. never tells anyone what to do. Nevertheless, it seems to be human nature to tell other people what to do. As a result, while the program itself has no rules, many individual alcoholics act as if it did.

Anonymity makes a lot of sense. It protects people at a meeting from gossip on the outside, or it tries to. In a small community, like the town of Akron, Ohio, where A.A. began in 1935, anonymity shielded professionals from the public shame that might attach to their alcoholism, although in small communities someone’s active alcoholism is not exactly a secret. The silliness of this aspect of anonymity is embodied in a photograph of an early Ohio meeting in which everyone wears a black party mask, as if that were an effective disguise.

Anonymity protects, but it also hides. For the gay community, the act of coming out has been critical to ending negative stereotypes and stigma. Could the same kind of pride and public exposure transform prevailing blame-the-addict attitudes? Because A.A. membership is secret and many meetings are not open to those who don’t have a desire to stop drinking, the group has taken on the air of a of cult, with secret language and rituals. Over the years, a few brave souls have broken their anonymity and written frankly about what it takes them to stay sober, including what happens in their.A. meetings—for example, Clancy Martin in a brilliant essay, “The Drunk’s Club: A.A., The Cult That Cures,” in the January Harper’s.

Many people in A.A. will do everything but break their anonymity outright, identifying themselves only as a “recovering alcoholic” or even as being “in a twelve-step program.” I am still one of those hedgers, trying to write about recovery without violating the tradition—and all the while wondering if that’s like pretending to be a little bit pregnant.

But these are all only baby steps. What if it was widely reported that a significant percentage of U.S. senators are in A.A. or that there are A.A. meetings in the West Wing of the White House? What if hundreds of the movers and shakers in recovery—doctors and lawyers and airline pilots, the Fortune 500 businessmen and ministers—stood up and were counted as members of A.A? It would go a long way toward clearing away the misunderstanding that still surrounds us. 

Susan Cheever, a regular columnist at The Fix, is the author of many books, including the memoirs Home Before Dark and Note Found in a Bottle, and the biography My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson—His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous.

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“We talked of intolerance, while we were intolerant ourselves.”

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