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Gresham's Law and
Alcoholics Anonymous
by Tom P., Jr.
Part Four of Four
That term is “spiritual experience” in the
Twelfth Step. A member of my AA home group, who first came into the
Fellowship in 1941 tells it this way: “When I first came in, they were
still talking about “spiritual experience”. A year or two later they
started calling it “spiritual awakening”. It was at this time that the
“official version” of the Twelfth Step was changed to read: “Having
had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps....” The term
spiritual experience, which had been perfectly acceptable in the early
years when the Fellowship was small and explicitly
conversion-oriented, came to be viewed as too narrow and prejudicial
against the less-profound life changes resulting from the
mimesis-oriented AA, which were coming to be the majority recovery
pattern in AA.
An explanatory note was added to the Big Book,
as follows:
The terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual
awakening” are used many times in this book which, upon careful
reading, shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about
recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many
different forms.
Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the
impression that these personality changes, or religious experiences,
must be in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals. Happily for
everyone, this conclusion is erroneous.....
When you compare the above statement to the
statement which introduced the Twelve Steps in chapter five of the Big
Book, the difference in tone is astonishing. Chapter five rings with a
series of booming affirmations that the goal of the program is a life
given to God and the way is an uncompromisingly spiritual one. In the
later-added explanatory note there is virtually a full retreat from
the earlier vigor and joy in God-commitment. The stated purpose of the
explanatory note is to reassure people that the spiritual change
accompanying an AA recovery need not be in the form of a sudden
upheaval. The point needed making and was well made.
However, a further point was made: the point
that spirituality was not an essential of the program but that
willingness, honesty, and open-mindedness were all that was needed.
This point was not made directly, but by clear, strong and
unmistakable implication - by the indirect , defensive, almost
apologetic treatment of the whole subject of religious and spiritual
experience. The founders of the Movement were responding to the
spiritual problem by lowering the spiritual level of aspiration of the
society, a move they could not make in the early days, but could make,
and even felt they must make, now that the society had become large
and gained a reputation for respectability and reasonableness.
The facts of the situation in AA which prompted
the rewording of the Twelfth Step, and adding of the explanatory note
to the Big Book, could have been summarized this way:
It is now possible to recover in one of two ways
in AA. Option number one is the original, spiritual-experience way
which follows from working all the Steps. Option number two is the way
of partial practice of the Steps and primary dependence on the social
aspects of life in AA. This second approach does not produce a strong
spiritual experience. It also does not follow our tradition that we
should always place principles before personalities. But in its favor,
it requires less commitment and less work; it involves less in the way
of life rearrangement; and it has proven itself sufficient in many
cases to produce lasting abstinence from drinking.
No such clarifying statement was made, however,
and the switch in terms from spiritual experience to spiritual
awakening had the net effect of clouding in everyone’s mind the real
nature of the change which had come about. It was not a matter of
conscious deception. The mistake was simply a failure to see a
dividing into two camps when the division had occurred. This was a
quite understandable failure to see a trend developing, comparable to
a mother’s inability to notice growth changes in her own child. But in
a Movement now strongly committed almost before all else to the
avoidance to controversy, blindness to the split in the Movement was
inevitable.
This blindness has prevented AA members from
seeing the serious flaws built into the weak-cup-of-tea practice. The
relatively superficial life change which weak AA produces is
sufficient to get some alcoholics sober. It is not adequate - it is
not effective - it simply doesn’t work - for a very large number of
others. This situation is evident both in the “easy” cases and the
“hard”cases, that is, those alcoholics who have been very badly
damaged physically and mentally before they arrive at their first AA
meeting, those whose alcoholism is complicated with drug abuse, crazy
sex, criminal or psychotic tendencies, or a hard streak of
socio-psychopathology.
Also, weak AA simply doesn’t work with the very
large population of AAs who are known everywhere as “slippers” - those
alcoholics who have developed a pattern of hanging around AA, staying
sober for periods, but relapsing repeatedly into drinking.
Note well: if the above-mentioned “hard” cases
manage to find their way into a group where strong AA, and nothing but
strong AA, is being practiced, many of them are able to achieve
lasting sobriety. The East Ridge Recovery Facility in upstate New York
has worked with thousands of these “hard” cases over the past
twenty-nine years. Strong AA is standard practice in the East Ridge
group, and this group has a recovery rate of over seventy percent with
these so-called AA failures. No-success has turned to success with
this large majority of the “hard” cases, when weak AA is replaced with
strong AA.
There is yet another and more insidious danger
built into weak AA. In many cases the “recovery” produced by
watered-down approaches to the Twelve Steps fails to hold up over the
long haul. What looked in the beginning like an easier, softer way to
maintain happy sobriety yields progressively less and less serenity
and real happiness, finally ending in complete reversal of momentum
and a relapse into serious personal misery. The end result may be a
return to active alcoholism; or it may be a sinking-out into a life of
discontented abstinence, marred by some combination of tension,
resentment, depression, compulsive sick sex, and an overall sense of
meaninglessness. It is a final failure to reap the benefits of the AA
program; it is, in the last analysis,a failure to recover.
Two ominous tendencies are noticeable in
contemporary AA. One tendency is toward a lower recovery rate overall.
For the first twenty years, the standard AA recovery estimate was
seventy-five percent. AA experience was that fifty percent of the
alcoholics who came to AA got sober right away and stayed sober.
Another twenty-five percent had trouble for awhile but eventually got
sober for good, and the remaining twenty-five percent never made a
recovery. Then there was a period of some years when AA headquarters
stopped making the seventy-five percent recovery claim in their
official literature. In 1968’s General Service Board published a
survey indicating an overall recovery rate of sixty-seven percent. The
net of all of this seems to be that as AA got bigger and older, its
effectiveness dropped from about three in four to about two in three.
The second ominous trend in the Movement is not
indicated by statistics, but it is clear enough to any careful
observer of the AA scene. As the Fellowship grows older its class of
old-timers, alcoholics sober ten years and longer, grows. And the
question of the staying power of an AA recovery looms ever larger. It
is an unhappy fact that growing numbers of these old-timers find the
joy going out of their sobriety. Many of them search around
frantically for ways to recapture the old zest for alcohol-free
living, and many of them end up in such blind alleys as lunatic
religions, pop psychological fads, or chemical alternatives like
psychedelics, pot, tranquilizers and mood elevators. And many end up
either back drinking or sunk in despondency., hostility, bizarre
acting-out patterns of one sort or another, or just plain, devastating
boredom.
All of this is unnecessary. The gradual
shrinking recovery rate and the old-timer blues do not require a
complex or an innovative solution. The answer lies in a return to
original, strong AA. It turns out that the men who wrote the Big Book
were right after all. It turns out that there really is no easier,
softer way. The extra work and commitment demanded by the full-Program
approach pays out in enormous and indispensable dividends. The extra
work and commitment make sobriety fun, because they do not make
sobriety an end in itself.
The majority of those who become addicted are
people with a mystical streak, an appetite for inexhaustible bliss. We
sought in bottles what can only be found in spiritual experience. AA
worked in the first place because its Twelve Steps were a workable set
of guidelines to real spiritual experience. The growth of the Movement
made possible for a time a kind of parasitism in which partial
practitioners of the spiritual principles were able to feed off the
strength of full practitioners; those who had undergone real spiritual
experience.
But now, the parasites have already drained the
host organism of a considerable portion of its life force, with no
benefit to themselves.
It is late in the day for anybody to be sounding
a call for a return to the original way, to faithful practice of the
full Program. However, a great deal of life is left in the Fellowship,
and a major revival is possible. If enough of us see in time our
dangerous situation, personally and as a Fellowship. What we need to
do is clear enough. What we need to do is spelled out in the first
seven chapters of the Big Book. What it all boils down to - especially
for us old-timers - is a willingness to continue practicing all the
principles in all our affairs today, rather than resting on our
laurels, taking our stand on what we did way back then, in our first
weeks and months of sobriety.
But we must not fail to face squarely the need
to change, the need for rededication. Complacency, smugness in our
record of success, is our greatest enemy. If we as a recovered-addict
society are unwilling to reverse our present course, the outlook is
clear enough. We stand to recapitulate in less than a century what the
great religious communities of the world have spent the last two
thousand years demonstrating: that even the very best and highest of
human institutions tend to deteriorate in time; and that size in
spiritual organizations is often achieved at the expense of the
abandonment of original goals and practices.
I owe my life to AA. I hope we have the vision
and the humility to change. I believe we can if we will. This much is
certain: the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are as inspired, as
effective, as un-compromised, and as practical now as they were when
they were first put in writing fifty-four years ago. Whatever else may
have gone downhill, they haven’t.
Gresham's Law and Alcoholics Anonymous, by Tom P., Jr., ©
1993.This article originally appeared in 24 Magazine, with minor
revisions to bring the numbers and the history up-to-date. Address
questions and comments to 24 Magazine, Box 10, Hankins, NY 12741.
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