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Old 09-16-2009, 09:47 PM
  # 14 (permalink)  
Ago
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: The Swish Alps, SF CA
Posts: 2,144
To elaborate further, I bolded what I thought was pertinent for me

Question: Does AA have an official description of what exactly constitutes cross-talk? Is it prohibited in AA?

Answer: No. There is no rule in A.A. against "cross talk" though it avoided as a matter of strong custom in many areas.

Typically "cross talk" refers to people speaking out of turn, interrupting someone while they are speaking or giving direct advice to someone in a meeting. There is a custom in many areas to speak only from one's own experience and to avoid giving direct advice or lecturing a group or individual.

How it is accepted and dealt with varies from group to group and region to region. In some groups members frequently interrupt one another for joking comments, in other places you might be asked to be quiet or leave for doing the same. In many places outside The USA the idea of "cross talk" being detrimental doesn't exist.

The ultimate arbiter of the subject is the individual group which is free to follow its own customs. What is considered quite proper in one meeting may cause quite a stir in another, but there is no rulebook for it.

The Big Book describes the earliest meetings as "informal" get togethers. The idea of "cross talk" being discouraged is not evident in the book but something that started later.

The Big Book does however give some good advice on not giving advice and explains why people should consider sticking to their own experience and not lecture others. From Page 125:

We find it better, when possible, to stick to our own stories. A man may criticize or laugh at himself and it will affect others favorably, but criticism or ridicule coming from another often produces the contrary effect. Members of a family should watch such matters carefully, for one careless, inconsiderate remark has been known to raise the very devil. We alcoholics are sensitive people. It takes some of us a long time to outgrow that serious handicap.


Prohibition of "cross talk" is a common practice in clinical group therapy and this has perhaps become an influence on A.A. Many people first encounter this custom in a rehab setting and often have no reason to consider that it might be different in A.A. which is not intended to be form of group therapy.
AA is not group therapy, in AA we share our "Experience, Strength, and Hope" and in those three words there isn't room for "you should" or "If I were you I would" or "in my opinion"

Good judgment comes from experience, most of that comes from bad judgment

So in a topic we can share how we navigated X Y or Z in sobriety and how it applied to the steps etc and what our experience is with this particular step (like Dawg describes in his home group) but to me Crosstalk has always bordered on "giving advice or opinion" and I have a particular antipathy for people who give advice and tell you what YOU should do rather then speak from their own experience because in 99/100 that person is unable to apply those concepts in their own life, however, when someone says, I tried this, and got this result (the room roars with laughter since they have all tried forms of that particular stupidity themselves) but when I did this I got THIS result.

it's all about the ESH baaayyybeeeee ESH, crosstalk eliminates Experience, Strength and Hope upon which the success of communicating the program rests on.

course that's just my opinion
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