aa Spoken Here Community Group
Fellowship Where you can share your thoughts, feelings, stories and get support to gain and continue sobriety.
Many here seem concerned with new comers hearing ( dare I say it) disagreement.! My sincere apology to any new comer I may have offended. You are the most important people in any group at any given time and we do want to carry the message. however, some debate over what that message is is inherent to message boards, although less so for AA meetings. And much of this debate is healthy in the long run.
My feeling is that when I look at where many new comers come from ( bars, jails, family disharmony, run ins with the police, bar fights, angry bosses, self-loathing) that ANYTHING they hear on our board will be mild in comparision and that many come from far more chaos than we can dish out on our worst day.
My feeling is that when I look at where many new comers come from ( bars, jails, family disharmony, run ins with the police, bar fights, angry bosses, self-loathing) that ANYTHING they hear on our board will be mild in comparision and that many come from far more chaos than we can dish out on our worst day.
If we are meant to be living by spiritual principles, maybe we all ought to try that little bit harder to live that way here. We are menat to lead the way!
In other words, the sort of help we're offering is more along the lines of teaching someone how to swim or ride a bicycle than it is about getting them to understand a concept system like dogmatics or algebra. We can show others the motions, but such subjective experiences as flotation and balance can't be given or imparted. They can only be described in terms that encourage the newcomer to try, but that trying is then left entirely up to him. Sooner or later the water wings or the training wheels have to come off, and it's only then that the "AA experience" begins.
My favorite AA pamphlet is the one called "A Member's Eye View of Alcoholcs Anonymous." Published in 1970, it's the text of a graduation speech given in 1968 by Allen Reid McGinnis, who was then himself 18 years sober in AA, to a class of newly-minted alcoholism counselors at a large, well-known university. Here's one part of that speech I like best:
"If, then, alcoholism is largely a spiritual disease requiring a spiritual healing, does it come as a surprise to you, as it did to me, that there is nothing new in a spiritual sense, nothing startlingly different or unique in this program? Most of these ideas have been around since man crawled out of the cave. Many of them existed in even primitive societies, and every alcoholic â no matter how irreligious or unethical he may have succeeded in keeping himself â at some time must have used some or all of them as a set of values by which to measure himself. To believe that the alcoholic who approaches A.A. is an unprincipled, untaught barbarian, suddenly transformed by the previously unavailable spiritual illumination of the Twelve Steps, is, to me, utter foolishness.
"Once again, we are confronted with an aspect of A.A.âs therapy which has had a totally new impact without, apparently, any accompanying newness of substance. Where, then, could the difference be?
"I believe it lies in the way the Steps are presented, rather than what they contain: They are reports of action taken, rather than rules not to be broken under pain of drunkenness." (Page 16)
I think this is hugely important, because the assumption is too often made that the person who's been sober for a long time is in a position to set him or herself up as a teacher or an authority figure in the newcomer's life. And by the time most of us get into any sort of recovery, we've pretty much had our fill of authority figures tying to boss us around anyway. To make this still worse, there are plenty of sober people who relish this sort of superiority, and we in AA see sponsorship abused in that manner all the time. So right away the newcomer has to make a potentially treacherous decision, which is whether to trust the either the indulgent or the bossy types, or his own instincts about other people and their motives.
But as Allen McGinnis saw it, most alcoholics DO have reliable instincts, and one of the first demands put on us in early recovery is to learn how to keep our balance in a wide range of dicey social situations. The paradox here is that we ourselves have to grow up fast enough to decide whose guidance to trust and whose not. It's the baby first step in becoming accountable to the ultimate authority in our own lives, which our own individual and intuitively perceived higher powers. This, as I see it, is both the promise and the goal of recovery.
I like to think that this message board is for those looking for a strong message. Those looking for a easier-softer message can always go to:
http://www.dailystrength.org/c/Alcoholism/support-group
I just don't think the newcomer is quite a fragile as some think, thats all.
I think I understand what you mean there, Joel, yet I see my own experience differently. Yes, the pain of living is now gone, or it is at least greatly reduced here on this side of the Steps, but over the years I have seen many folks elect death as an "easier, softer way" to end their own pain ... and I cannot say I have never also had such thoughts.
>> I just don't think the newcomer is quite a fragile as some think, thats all.
We definitely agree there, at least for some, but let us never forget even our own vulnerability. I knew from about my third meeting on that I had just walked into the middle of some kind of big controversy. Having come out of organized religion, I was used to the kind of bickering and gossip I heard, and I had no trouble blowing all of that off. However, I had no idea how to sort through the confusion of all the different messages I was hearing ... and now here comes the pitch:
Things soon began clearing up along that line after I began following someone's suggestion to read the book in order to know at least *what* to listen to in A.A.!
A few disagreements doesn't change that one bit.