Misunderstanding Alcoholics Anonymous

What AA is and is Not

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Misunderstanding Alcoholics Anonymous

After 12.5 years sober “doing” AA, and after reading quite a few posts on Substack “about” AA, and reading many, many comments responding to it, I felt compelled to write about it.

First: Almost everyone I’ve heard discussing AA who isn’t a part of it gets it almost entirely wrong. Ditto the famous 2015 Atlantic article titled The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous. (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/)

It’s humorous and ironic to me: For all the people who constantly rail on “the media” (I do this frequently myself) a scarily large proportion of these people seem to rely almost entirely on the media’s myopic, biased, for-profit hot takes on AA.

For those of you who don’t know the basic, brief history of AA, here it is. Bill Wilson and “Dr. Bob” started the organization (free and for anyone with a “desire to stop drinking”) in the mid-1930s. Soon a small group of recovering alcoholics formed. Borrowing from Christian, Buddhist, Jungian and other concepts, as well as from The Washingtonians and The Oxford Group, the so-called “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous was first published in 1939. There have been several editions of the Big Book since then. Members talk about “the program” being in “the first 164 pages.” (Meaning: Where the 12 steps are outlined. Beyond the “first 164 are helpful personal stories about alcoholism by members throughout the last three-quarters of a century.)

Since 1939, the year of the outbreak of war by Hitler in Europe, obviously a lot has changed, politically, culturally, industrially, socially, etc. The Big Book (BB for brevity) has been (fairly) criticized for being sexist, chauvinistic, even racist, and overall wildly out of date. This is very true. And yet myself and most diehard members generally feel that, like classic literature (say Twain, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Baldwin), the basic universal truths remain just as potent in 2023 as they were in 1939. (Ditto Christianity, for believers, etc.) I think this is basically true. (And there is currently a new edition being born as we speak. I worry here about possible Woke-if-i-cation to the language, concept and ideology of the BB, but we’ll see how that lands.)

*[Never before, until 2020, had I attended so many [Zoom] AA meetings wherein politics were nakedly, partisan-ly and overtly discussed. This was, to say the least, highly disturbing. It was almost always coming from the far-left perspective, particularly (and egregiously) around identity politics. This is NOT what AA is about, in any form at all. AA tradition clearly steers away from any public political discussion, or on taking any political stance. AA remains neutral and apolitical, embracing all people of any religion, political persuasion, ideology, etc.]

But herein lies the main confusion, I think, between the media narrative of AA, and the reality: Culture.