What Happened to Me
April 1967
The sign “THINK” is often seen on the walls of our AA meeting places. Although I seldom hear speakers hold forth specifically on the importance of thinking as an aid to recovery, I have noticed that during the first stage of sobriety there is likely to be a period lasting for some months (or, with some people, forever) when the neophyte is bursting with thoughts upon which he will talk endlessly. He has ideas, theories, speculations about the nature and causes of alcoholism, about the reasons why and the ways in which the program of Alcoholics Anonymous works, about Life and Society and the Meaning-of-It-All.
In a veritable explosion of thought set off by recognition of previous stupidity, old philosophical concepts are revived or new ones acquired. Often a note of preaching, of advice-giving creeps into the talk of those so affected.
I first became aware of this phenomenon when I found myself inexplicably impatient with certain speakers. Slowly I began to detect what it was that produced a deadening effect, and what, on the contrary, held my attention and lifted my spirits. The speakers who left me feeling stronger and calmer were those who simply and earnestly told their own personal experiences, either of drinking, or of how they happened to come to AA, or of the problems they had since encountered in daily living. The more the speaker seemed simply to be reporting the facts about himself as best he could see them, without embellishing them with general conclusions and moral judgments that the rest of us had better profit by if we knew what was good for us, the better was the effect on me.
It was the simplest little things people told that lightened and cleared the air inside me. For instance, a fellow named John happened to remark one evening in his talk that he had been upset about the previous day’s events and hadn’t been able to get to sleep that night. He said, “In the old days, I’d have been drinking and stamping around the house all night, telling my troubles to my wife.”
This made me smile with an inward glow that comes even now from remembering. I used to stamp, too; and my husband’s chief complaint about my drinking was that it interfered with his sleep. John is a big man, and I felt a light moment of envy at the thought that, although I stamped as hard as I could, he must have been able to do so much more resoundingly.
Slowly it dawned on me that in speaking I, too, was inclined to share great thoughts, about Life and Love and Humility and responsibility and—you name it. In short, I had a tendency to Talk Big.
I also began to notice that I constantly used the word “you”—not meaning a definite other person as when one asks, “Are you ready to go?” but as one would say (meaning “any of us”), “You have to quit drinking if you want to live.” I was always saying things like, “You feel just terrible when you realize how you behaved when you were drunk,” instead of, “I felt terrible. I was drunk.”
I talked about myself enough, God knows; I dodged the “I,” hiding among “we” or this catch-all “you.”
Lifelong social conditioning accounts for some of this. In social gatherings, it is not considered good form to talk exclusively about oneself. The worst bores are people who never get off the personal and on to general concepts and objective consideration of facts or ideas.
It took me a while to realize that AA is different. This is not a tea party or an intellectual discussion group (which are excellent and enjoyable and have their place). An AA meeting is something else again.
Egotistical as it seems, and distasteful as such conduct would be at a dinner party, when I speak in AA I must learn to tell what I did, what I was like as far as I can see it, what happened to me, and what I think I am like now, without even unconsciously implying, “You’d just better learn something from my experience and do likewise.” I must try to forget about “we” and “you” and “them,” not even being concerned about whether what I say is going to help “You.” If I speak about what I think, my opinions, my philosophical views, I should do so as one reporting events of a particular nature that pertain only to me, not to you, just as some people will report, “I was in jail thirty-six times” or “I spent six months in a mental hospital.”
Contradictory as it seems, and whether I fully understand it or not, I escape my own egocentricity by the inevitable identification that takes place with someone else when he talks about himself. So when I get up and talk about myself, others are finding release from their own self-centeredness in observing mine, with the result that all of us will go out feeling better, and therefore perhaps with less need to drink in order to escape the intolerable tyranny of our own egos.
Anonymous, Calif.
Tradition Two
For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.
December 1969
Shortly after I returned to the office from lunch, the phone on my desk rang. It was a late autumn day during my first sober AA year.
“Did you know J.B. got drunk?” asked the AA acquaintance on the line.
Such momentous news overwhelmed me. J. was the chairman of our group. I had considered him Mr. AA. Now I felt that the whole movement would soon totter under this disastrous blow, unless someone rushed to the rescue. A brilliant new leader would have to be found, quickly.
Well, how about me? I had been a club president a couple of times in school. Surely, my ability would be a great boon to the Fellowship.
“But he’s so young!” I could hear someone exclaim. (I was chronologically twenty-seven, emotionally minus one.)
“Yes, but he’s really brilliant,” a wiser voice would reply.
By this time, I had tidied up my desk, made some excuse to the boss, grabbed my briefcase, hat, and coat, dashed to the subway, and ridden halfway to the old church building we used as a clubhouse for AAs in Manhattan in 1945. I carried with me about as much sense as a flea plotting to run a kennel.
Surprisingly, everything seemed calm when I arrived. No doubt some committee somewhere was already, privately, trying to find someone who could save AA. How could I let them know I was willing? Even if it was a tough job, with low salary, I’d make the sacrifice out of gratitude and love for AA. I could already hear my inaugural address after the swearing-in ceremony: plenty of laughs, plus enough heart stuff to bring tears to the eyes of the old folks (everybody over thirty); then a ringing peroration of rededication that would bring ’em to their feet roaring, as I turned modestly from the rostrum to take my seat of honor. (Just as in drunken days, I could still out-Mitty James Thurber’s Walter M.)
At the clubhouse, though, all I could do was smile graciously at everyone around, cheerily reassure some new wretch from my lofty eminence of ten sober months, and chin a bit with other seedy statesmen. I even, for the first time, sprang for several cups of coffee.
Throughout the afternoon and evening, however, no one mentioned the vacant chairmanship. So, finally, I brought it up over coffee after the meeting. “Isn’t it too bad about J.?” I brightly blurted.
Only one old-timer paid attention. His look seemed to probe uncomfortably close to my deepest secrets, but his voice was kind as he said, “Well, just because J. got drunk doesn’t mean you have to drink.”
The idea was so breathtaking, I just shut up.
But
