Misunderstanding Alcoholics Anonymous

What AA is and is Not

Photo by Anshu A on Unsplash

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Big Book (BB for brevity) has been (fairly) criticized for being sexist, chauvinistic, even racist, and overall wildly out of date.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.

I am a big fan of pointing to culture as the place of weakness in a given scenario. Whether it’s racial crime data or poverty statistics or gender-based statistics: Culture, to me, always seems to be the crux of the problem. It’s easy (and fun, if you’re young and/or lazy) to loosely blame “capitalism,” but it’s a lot more realistic, honest and heartbreaking to take personal responsibility for your community, your own family, your own unique self.

Anyway: I digress.

My point is: AA on paper, for sure, looks like going to Bible School. Judgmental; sexist; racist; God this and God that. Patriarchal and Christian to the core. The problem is this: That isn’t culturally what’s really going on in “the program.”

*[A side note here. This comment above isn’t monolithic, of course. If you get sober in, say, South Texas or Arkansas, you’re going to have a different cultural AA experience than if you got sober in, say, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, etc. That goes without saying. In the South and Midwest, broadly speaking, you’re generally more likely to encounter religious perspectives. In Oakland and SF, you’ll generally find more atheistic points of view. (“Free thinkers,” as many like to call it.)]

But no matter where you’re located, one thing is true everywhere, and this cannot be stressed enough: There. Are. NO. Rules. In. AA. You can do AA however the Hell you want to. All the “rules” in AA are actually “suggestions.” As the 12 traditions let us know in tradition #3: “The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.” In other words: If you want to stop drinking: You’re a member. No money is required. No belief in “God” or Jesus Christ is required. You don’t have to read the book if you don’t want. You don’t have to do any of the steps. You don’t have to get a sponsor. You don’t have to speak at meetings. You don’t have to solely read “AA-conference-approved literature.” You don’t have to believe in any religion or swallow any ideology.

When I got sober at 27 in September, 2010, I came in like most young alcoholic California men: Angry, confused, ambitious, selfish, and broken. I sat in the very back, never spoke at meetings, never spoke to anyone at all, in fact, and thought AA was mostly a bunch of jackass weaklings who weren’t strong enough to quit on their own. Besides: Who likes a quitter?

I went through this phase for over a year. Sit in the back in the darkness. Talk to no one. Judge everybody. Feel superior to all the intellectual lemmings. I thought AA was probably a weird Christian cult. I kept waiting for the blood rituals. I never put money in the basket for donations when it occasionally came to me. Fuck you, I remember thinking. You brainwashed fools.

And yet, I have to bring up two obvious points: 1. I kept coming. 2. I didn’t drink.

Eventually, after about 14 months—after I’d left Portland, Oregon and moved back to Oakland—something cracked inside of me one day at a 9am Oakland morning meeting and I raised my hand and spoke. For the first time. It just streamed out of me, almost without my permission. I realized I was desperate to share my story, to show people who I was, to announce myself to The World. All my life I’d felt apart from; isolated from humanity; desperate; uneasy; alone. The word “community” had always made me want to vomit. Community meant you needed others, which in turn meant weakness. Finally, that morning something deep inside shifted gears. I let go of my resistance, the resistance I’d been relying on as the oil for the machine that was my anger all my twenty-eight years.

Soon I got “into” the program. I came inside the circle. I got a sponsor, a man with almost thirty years’ sober who was twenty years my senior. We loved the same 1980s LA punk band (Social Distortion) and I liked his shares in the meetings, and so I asked him. He smiled and accepted and soon I had a BB and a sponsor. He took me slowly through the steps. I faced myself for the first time. I accepted my powerlessness over alcohol. I tried to believe in a “power greater than myself.” (Which in no way has to be “God” as understood conventionally.) I turned my “will and my life over” to that power. (For me my original “Higher Power” was the ocean, since I’d been a competitive, sponsored surfer as a teen. I knew the waves were much more powerful than I was.) I made a list of “those I’d harmed,” which, being a fledgling writer then (this was 2012), became a—get this—60 page document. (My sponsor went pale.)

I found out what “my part” had been in the resentments I’d dragged around for decades, people I hadn’t seen in a decade who I still “hated.” I let go of a lot of emotional baggage. Then I did my 5^th step, one of the cornerstones of the 12 steps: I read this detailed list of resentments, and my own part in them, to my sponsor. It was a magic experience. We laughed, seeing the insanity and obvious patterns. How had I missed this all my life? I’d been so lost, lying to myself all these years, holding on desperately and childishly to anger which was no longer necessary.

My life changed.

I did the rest of the steps. When I got to step 9 I met up with dozens of people and made amends for my past behavior. Everyone thanked me and forgave me. Many hugs occurred. Crying. Joy. Relief. Forgiveness reigned supreme, for others and for myself. This was a first. It seemed in one way or another I’d hated myself for a long, long time. The rage I’d felt as a child had spilled over, and alcohol had rescued me but had also stopped my emotional growth. Now, almost 30, I could, at last, close the door on the past.

Eventually I did all 12 steps. I sponsored many guys. I was secretary at several meetings. I did “H &I” work (Hospitals and Institutions), speaking at a men’s recovery facility for six months with other sober men. I met men and women who’d gone through incredible suffering in their past, and who’d done profoundly taboo things during their alcoholism. Tax fraud. Marital cheating. Terrible car crashes. Driving in a blackout with their children in the back seats. Fist fights with cops. Stints in jail. Prison. Attempted murder. Murder. And everything else in between. These weren’t bad people; they were suffering, wounded human beings, most of whom had gone through horrific childhoods. As far as all of it went I was on the lighter side of this chaos, despite the fact that I’d done my fair share of awful, and violent, things.

At the end of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s narrator, Raskolnikov, in prison, is “raised up like Lazarus.” I think all of us in AA, the lucky ones who make it, feel this way. I sure did. Redemption. Change. Another chance. Another shot at life and love.

*

In the past 12.5 years I’ve gone through many phases of AA. Some members judge this, some are neutral, some are like me. It doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks, inside or outside of AA. Since about 2017 I have not sponsored anyone. I go to meetings on and off sporadically. When I hear hardliners in the program mention “the first 164 pages” or other comments about how AA “works,” I tend to externally and/or internally smile and roll my eyes. They can do it however they want. I know what works for me. I rarely read the BB anymore. I don’t have any “commitments” in meetings. Lately I don’t even share in meetings. I don’t believe in organized religion; never have.

Here's what I DO think. I do believe in a Higher Power. (The Universe generally; nature.) I do believe in prayer, not worried about “where” that prayer “lands.” I do believe that if you struggle with drinking you’re probably an alcoholic and that, if this is the case, finding a pill or a drug to slow or stem the drinking would be like thinking if you removed Trump the people who voted for Trump would magically feel like the deeper systemic issues they’re (rightfully, in many respects) angry about are resolved. In other words: Alcohol, like Trump, was/is a symptom, and, as Paul Auster says in his gorgeous second-person memoir, Winter Journal: “Symptoms aren’t diseases.” This is leading me to the idea of spirituality being the underlying necessity of “solving” (to whatever extent this is possible) alcoholism. The notion that alcoholism exists not in a bottle, externally, but in the alcoholic’s mind, internally.

I don’t think quitting the bottle solves the problem. I think that resolves the superficial external symptom. You must, in my opinion, look to the deeper, trickier core. What do you fear the most? That’s probably what you need to face.

This sounds perhaps a little hokey. Let me explain.

I’ve always been critical of looking at “group populations” and deriving conclusions from said groups. This goes back to what I said about individuality and personal agency. Yet, over the decade-plus of my years in AA, it’s impossible for me to ignore the simple fact that there are so many similarities, broadly speaking, between alcoholics. Again, I am painting broadly here, but: Most alcoholics, in my experience (all of this is of course solely my own experience; I don’t represent AA) tend to be above average intelligence; often very sensitive; often creative-types; often people who struggle with anger, fear, worry; often people who have a penchant for some form of violence; often people who seem like both old souls and simultaneously emotional children; tend to be good storytellers; tend to have big, bright egos; tend to be judgmental and ambitious.

Now, look, I know what some of you are thinking: Doesn’t that describe 90% of the global population? Maybe. But there’s something specifically unique and strange about a roomful of sober alcoholics that is impossible to ignore: We are all uniquely different and who we are…and yet I can be traveling in Europe and walk into a random meeting in a cathedral in Valencia, Spain (this happened, in 2016) and speak immediately to strangers in a meeting there as if we’d just been talking yesterday and were continuing our conversation.

And, like literature, like mythology, like so much else in the world: AA is just that, an ongoing, tribal (non-political; I mean sociological) heritage. And it’s one in which you can be YOU 100%, without becoming a Christian or a robot or a cult member. You can design your own AA experience. You can be as involved or not as you want. Do I recommend doing all 12 steps, getting a sponsor, running meetings, getting involved with the program? Absolutely. I do. Especially in the beginning. But over time you’ll find your own path.

I don’t judge anyone who wants to take a pill which might slow or stop their craving. And I don’t judge anyone who stops without even considering AA. Or who tries it and rejects it. I’ve been in all three roles myself. I just think that, before you decide that the Atlantic has a monopoly on the concept of AA, try to not look at the program too literally. Read between the lines. This IS a DIY organization. An anarchist institution, really. No rules. No “government.” No king or president. No one person or group calling the shots. Democrazy but with a anarchic twist.

If you’re trying to get sober: I commend you. Consider AA. It might just save your life.