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Seventy years... Got any other interesting bits to share?
***Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer November 2, 1939 ***
By Elrick B. Davis.
Quote:
In a recent series, Mr. Davis told of Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization of former drinkers banded together to beat the liquor habit. This is the first of two final articles on the subject.
The Book
When 100 members of Alcoholics Anonymous, the extraordinary fellowship of men and women who have cured themselves of "incurable" alcoholism by curing each other and adopting a "spiritual way of life," had established their cures to the satisfaction of their physicians, families, employers and psychotherapists, they published a book.
It is a 400-page volume of which half is a history of the movement and a description of its methods, and the other half a collection of 30 case histories designed to show what a wide variety of persons the fellowship has cured. It is called "Alcoholics Anonymous," and may be bought for $3.50 from the Works Publishing Co., Box 657, Church Street Annex Postoffice, New York.
The name of the publisher is that adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous for its only publishing venture. The address is "blind" because the name "Alcoholics Anonymous" means exactly what it says. The price of the book is "cost," 50 cents a volume less than one of the country's soundest old-line book publishers would have charged if the fellowship had accepted that house's offer to publish the book and pay the society 40 cents a copy royalty on sales.
Among the first reviews of the book to see print was that written by the Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick for the Religious Digest. That review so attracted at least one well-known Cleveland minister that he obtained a copy of the book, got in touch with the Cleveland chapter of the society, and plans to preach a sermon about the movement.
Dr. Fosdick is himself the author of seventeen books. His review of "Alcoholics Anonymous" follows:
"This extraordinary book deserves the careful attention of anyone interested in the problem of alcoholism. Whether as victims, friends of victims, physicians, clergymen, psychiatrists or social workers there are many such, and this book will give them, as no other treatise known to this reviewer will, an inside view of the problem which the alcoholic faces. Gothic cathedral windows are not the sole things which can be truly seen only from within. Alcoholism is another. All outside views are clouded and unsure. Only one who has been a alcoholic and has escaped the thraldom can interpret the experience.
Truth
"This book represents the pooled experience of 100 men and women who have been victims of alcoholism-and who have won their freedom and recovered their sanity and self-control. their stories are detailed and circumstantial, packed with human interest. In America today the disease of alcoholism is increasing. Liquor has been an easy escape from depression. As an English officer in India, reproved for his excessive drinking, lifted his glass and said, "This is the swiftest road out of India," so many Americans have been using hard liquor as a means of flight from their troubles until to their dismay they discover that, free to begin, they are not free to stop. One hundred men and women, in this volume, report their experience of enslavement and then of liberation.
"The book is not in the least sensational. It is notable for its sanity, restraint and freedom from over-emphasis and fanaticism.
"The group sponsoring this book began with two or three ex-alcoholics, who discovered one another through kindred experience. From this a movement started; ex-alcoholics working for alcoholics, without fanfare or advertisement, and the movement has spread from one city to another.
"The core of their whole procedure is religious. They are convinced that for the helpless alcoholic there is only one way out-the expulsion of his obsession by a Power Greater Than Himself. Let it be said at once that there is nothing partisan or sectarian about this religious experience. Agnostics and atheists, along with Catholics, Jews and Protestants, tell their story of discovering the Power Greater Than themselves. 'Who are you to say that there is no God,' one atheist in the group heard a voice say when, hospitalized for alcoholism, he faced the utter hopelessness of his condition. Nowhere is the tolerance and open-mindedness of the book more evident than in its treatment of this central matter on which the cure of all these men and women has depended. They are not partisans of any particular form of organized religion, although they strongly recommend that some religious fellowship be found by their participants. By religion they mean an experience which they personally know and which has saved them from their slavery, when psychiatry and medicine had failed. They agree that each man must have his own way of conceiving God, but of God Himself they are utterly sure, and their stories of victory in consequence are a notable addition to William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience."'
Even back then, AA was a bit of a conundrum to people on the outside
***Source: The Saturday Evening Post, March 1, 1941***
By Jack Alexander.
Quote:
Alcoholics Anonymous
THREE MEN sat around the bed of an alcoholic patient in the psychopathic ward of Philadelphia General Hospital one afternoon a few weeks ago. The man in the bed, who was a complete stranger to them, had the drawn and slightly stupid look the inebriates get while being defogged after a bender. The only thing that was noteworthy about the callers, except for the obvious contrast between their well-groomed appearances and that of the patient, was the fact that each had been through the defogging process many times himself. They were members of Alcoholics Anonymous, a band of ex-problem drinkers who make an avocation of helping other alcoholics to beat the liquor habit.
The man in the bed was a mechanic. His visitors had been educated at Princeton, Yale and Pennsylvania and were, by occupation, a salesman, a lawyer and a publicity man. Less than a year before, one had been in shackles in the same ward. One of his companions had been what is known among alcoholics as a sanitarium commuter. He had moved from place to place, bedeviling the staffs of the country's leading institutions for the treatment of alcoholics. The other had spent twenty years of life, all outside institution walls, making life miserable for himself, and his family and his employers, as well as sundry well-meaning relatives who had had the temerity to intervene.
The air of the ward was thick with the aroma of paraldehyde, an unpleasant cocktail smelling like a mixture of alcohol and ether which hospitals sometimes use to taper off the paralyzed drinker and soothe his squirming nerves. The visitors seemed oblivious of this and of the depressing atmosphere of psychopathic wards. They smoked and talked with the patient for twenty minutes or so, then left their personal cards and departed. If the man in the bed felt that he would like to see one of them again, they told him, he had only to put in a telephone call.
THEY MADE it plain that if he actually wanted to stop drinking, they would leave their work or get up in the middle of the night to hurry to where he was. If he did not choose to call, that would be the end of it. The members of Alcoholics Anonymous do not pursue or coddle a malingering prospect, and they know the strange tricks of the alcoholic as a reformed swindler knows the art of bamboozling.
Herein lies much of the unique strength of a movement, which in the past six years, has brought recovery to around 2,000 men and women, a large percentage of whom had been considered medically hopeless. Doctors and clergymen, working separately or together, have always managed to salvage a few cases. In isolated instances, drinkers have found their own methods of quitting. But the inroads into alcoholism have been negligible, and it remains one of the great, unsolved public-health enigmas...
(((((((((Dan)))))))))
I love A.A. History. Looking forward to possibly going to the 50th AA Comes of Age Celebration this coming November in St. Louis. Boy oh boy we had some pretty good publicity from our friends back in the day. Letting our friends reccommend us was and still is a sound spiritual principle.
PS On a history bit to share.........
to the BIG BOOK
66 years this month since we first published & released our Basic Text.
Thats the wording AA used back in the 30;s-40;s...Cured. OR Recovered.
That's they way I understand it as well. Bill, Dr. Bob and others considered themselves cured. However, they still said their continuing sobriety was contingent upon working with other alcoholics. Curious, huh? I like to consider myself in remission from the disease.
__________________ "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.....do the thing you think you cannot do." ~Eleanor Roosevelt
Time Magazine, February 8, 1971 "Behavior: Anonymous Ally"
Quote:
The more money he made in the 1920s bull market, the more Wall Street Analyst William Griffith Wilson hit the bottle. "Men of genius," he assured his worried wife, "conceive their best projects when drunk." He was right, though hardly in the sense he meant. When Wilson died last week at 75, he left one of the finest projects that a drunk has ever conceived. He was the famous "Bill W.," who sobered up and in 1935 co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous.
A gawky Vermonter, Wilson grew up with a crushing sense of inferiority. Alcoholism ran in his family; he was physically weak and a target for bullies. By sheer persistence, he became captain of his school baseball team, played the violin well, and led the school orchestra. But his feelings of inadequacy remained until as a World War I artillery officer, he gulped his first drink.
Inspirational Teachings. As Wilson used to relate, "Down went that strange barrier that had always stood between me and the people around me. Here was the missing link." After the 1929 crash, Wilson tried to forget his losses with numbing doses of bathtub gin and bootleg whisky. His wife went to work to support him, and, as Wilson recalled, his mental disintegration "proceeded rapidly and implacably." Injured after an Armistice Day bender in 1934, he tried to heed the inspirational teachings of the First Century Christian Fellowship (precursor of Moral Re-Armament), but soon went on a three-day drunk that left him shattered.
At a Manhattan hospital, Wilson grimly prayed for help. "Suddenly," he related, "the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe." After leaving the hospital, Wilson tried to help other drunks achieve similar religious experiences, but found that he also needed medical facts to crack their tough egos. In 1935 he got the help he needed when he met "Dr. Bob," Akron Surgeon Robert H. Smith, a fellow Vermonter who had vainly tried to control his own compulsive drinking. Together they founded Alcoholics Anonymous.
For a time, Wilson had grandiose visions: "Chains of A.A. hospitals and tons of free literature for suffering alkies." But when he sought millions from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the philanthropist astutely replied: "I think money will spoil this." As a result, A.A. was financed by its own members. In dealing with each other or the public, they use only their first names and initials. "Identification leads to power drives," Wilson explained. "The thought of power is one reason we were drunks in the first place."
A.A. shunned moralizing in favor of viewing alcoholism as an emotional crutch combined with a physical allergy to liquor. Thus, A.A.'s methods leaned more heavily on psychology than physiology. Recognizing that alcoholics must not merely control their consumption but curb it entirely, A.A. members listened to each other’s stories and helped one another resist the temptation to drink. But they never forgot that the major effort to abstain must be made by the drinker himself. â€The only requirement for A.A. membership," according to an organization tradition, "is a sincere desire to stop drinking."
Wilson was A.A.'s most active member. Even after his retirement in 1962 he remained in touch, addressing the organization’s banquet each fall and, despite illness, struggling from a wheelchair to speak to its convention in Miami last July. He took immense pride in his accomplishment, and with good reason. A.A. now has 475,000 members in 16,000 groups in the U.S. as well as 90 foreign countries. A.A. strategy has been copied by organizations like Synanon and others working on group therapy for all kinds of troubled people, including ex-convicts. It obviously works. Today 60% of A.A. members get on the wagon and stay on it.
Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't Dr. Bob a drug addict as well as an alcoholic?
__________________ "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.....do the thing you think you cannot do." ~Eleanor Roosevelt
"Alcoholics Anonymous A Uniquely American Phenomenon"
Quote:
Alcoholics anonymous was conceived by a drunk lying on a bed in a drunk’s hospital in New York in 1934, and had a hard birth in Akron, Ohio, the following year. A doctor of medicine was present but at this critical moment was too alcoholically jittery to know an accouchement was taking place. The American tradition of adverse beginnings was thus fulfilled by this organization, which today equally fulfills the tradition of success after struggle. By birthplace, heritage, tradition, habits, looks, and tone of voice Alcoholics Anonymous is unmistakably American. And yet in almost every way it contradicts the stencils by which non-American minds gauge American achievement. It has almost no money and wishes it could do with still less. In fifteen years its membership has grown from nothing to 120,000, yet it never urges anyone to join. Of formal “organization” it has almost none, yet it avers it “ought never to have any.” A man or woman becomes a member by simple declaration, and need share his decision with only one other human being. There are no pledges or constraints in A.A.; no records that must be kept or quotas that must be broken. Seniority confers no favors. A.A. has one purpose only: “to help the sick alcoholic recover, if he wishes.”
In a world whose spiritual values have dropped close to the vanishing point, the strange society of A.A. places its entire proposition upon the reality of spiritual experience. It achieves harmony among a membership in which Catholics associate not only with Protestants and Jews but with high-decibel agnostics or fancy religionists of species known only to God. Its members, who know better than to contradict the psychiatrists’ diagnosis that they are “grandiose, infantile, and self-absorbed,” practice daily an Obedience that has no enforcement mechanism and no system of punishment for infraction. The one rule common to every A.A. clubhouse is that if, as rarely occurs, a member seeks to attend a meeting while drinking, he is escorted to the door, with the invitation to return only as soon as he recalls his society’s purpose.
If A.A., successful and American, has a password proof against any member’s forgetting, it would be “Failure.” One by one, each member tackled something that proved too big for him: only when he acknowledged his inability to deal with a circumstance that most people can meet with ease was he able to become a full member of this organization, of those for whom “one drink is too many and a thousand aren’t enough.” Dentists and doctors, stevedores, ministers, cops, poets, publishers, matrons, vocational-guidance counselors, stenographers, artists, bartenders, and master mechanics are all to be found in A.A.’s ranks, as diverse and exclusive as a classified telephone directory. Yet all have a common vantage point; each one, from a broad and comfortable ridge, has a clear view downward into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Although alcoholism is a state so complex that a leak-proof definition is impossible here, a clinician can, in his own bald terms, describe it simply: “a progressive, incurable and fatally terminating disease.” That alcoholism could be arrested was well known, but this knowledge was for many years almost useless, for the arrestment was up to the drinker; would he or would he not stop? Usually he would not, no matter how he longed to, for he was inwardly convinced that he could not; so long as he knew that a couple of quick ones would give him a desperately bought temporary relief from his sufferings, he could see no permanent way out. Psychiatry’s dictum that alcoholism was only a symptom of a deep-seated psychic disorder was not very helpful in the crisis forever engulfing the alcoholic and his family.
It dawned on Bill W.* in 1934, when he was close to the last stages of alcoholic disintegration, that if he attempted to help other alcoholics he might thereby help himself. He went to work---and found himself able to stay sober for the first time in years. But this was cold comfort, for the drunks on whom he worked stayed drunk. He was on the verge of a relapse that might well have been final when he met the drunken Dr. Bob in Akron. Only then did it dawn that the help must flow two ways; one-sided preachment was useless, but when help was mutually offered and accepted between two suffering and desperate drunks, each of whom sought to help himself by helping the other, a new element entered into a materialistically hopeless situation. As a result of this help from the helpless, Bill W. stayed sober and Dr Bob got sober, and the nucleus of Alcoholics Anonymous was formed. By the end of that year A.A. had three members. By the end of another year it had fifteen. By the end of still another it had forty---divided among Akron, New York, and Cleveland. That was all.
Since those years A.A. has evolved into a membership of 120,000 divided into some 4,100 local groups. Metropolitan areas such as New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and Los Angeles may harbor 100 to 200 groups each. Ninety prisons have A.A. clubs within their walls, and over 100 clubs exist to further the A.A. idea, although not formally affiliated with A.A. In Chicago the weekly “Intergroup” meeting never brings out fewer than 1,200 A.A.’s at a time. In New York, the “Annual Banquet” may have to be abandoned unless some way can be devised of splitting it into sections, for no hotel has a ballroom large enough to seat it.
Much more important are the statistics of sobriety. Of those who make a genuine effort to stop drinking through A.A. principles, 50 per cent get sober at once, and stay that way. Another 25 per cent get sober after some relapses. The remaining 25 per cent show improvement. A.A. is not out to make a showing. It refuses to screen its membership, as some doctors would like, to eliminate the “hopeless” cases; gaining a statistical advantage is not A.A.’s purpose---and furthermore an impressive number of “hopeless” cases have recovered. A.A. quietly and with good cause believes that all those who relapse or drop away will be back later and permanently, if they live. The word “cure,” however, is not in the A.A. Vocabulary. On the contrary the man who succeeds in staying sober must still recognize himself as an alcoholic.
Suppose you were to go to an open meeting of A.A., as you are perfectly free to do. You would find yourself in a group of from thirty to 300 people, one-third of whom might be women. (Only 10 to 15 per cent of A.A.’s active membership is female, but non-alcoholic wives of alcoholic husbands are attending meetings in increasing numbers, and this attendance is strongly encouraged.) The average age would be between thirty-five and forty and is steadily growing younger; it used to be that an alcoholic seldom recognized his trouble until his middle forties, where-as now, with greater publicity for the whole problem, he sees what is wrong sooner; today some A.A.’s are not much over thirty. Prosperous, less prosperous, and poor would be represented in about equal thirds; so would the educational levels of college, high school, or less. If this were a typical meeting, 40 per cent of those present would be Catholics---double the number you would encounter in an exact sample of U.S. population. At the other end of the scale are the Jews---represented by no more than a sprinkling, even in New York.**
There is no use trying to draw conclusions from appearances; the blowzy old lady near the front may be a casual visitor who never had a drink in her life, whereas the pink-cheeked, white-haired gentleman who looks like a deacon may have a record of fifty alcoholic admissions into hospitals and jails. The group is probably meeting in the parish house of a church, a political clubhouse, a public auditorium, or a small mezzanine banquet room of a hotel---any place where an evening’s rent is reasonable and the atmosphere is neither so high-toned as to discourage a man wearing out his last pair of shoes nor forbidding as to scare a Caspar Milquetoast. The air is dense with tobacco smoke, and the evening’s chairman has to bang his gavel hard to cut through the loud, familiar talk. There is no set speech for chairmen, but a typical opening might be something like this:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I wonder if the new people who are here for the first, second, or third time would please raise their hands…….That’s fine. I’ll ask the old-timers to please make themselves known to the new people and try to see they have a good time. As you know, A.A. groups have two kinds of meetings, open and closed. The closed meetings are for alcoholics only, but tonight is an open meeting, so everybody is welcome. If there are any reporters here I just want to remind them that they can write anything they like so long as they don’t use anybody’s name. You’ve got to respect us on that because some people are funny: they usen’t to mind being seen in the Hotel Metropolis so drunk they couldn’t stand up, but they’re still a little bit sensitive about being seen sitting down here cold sober……..
“Maybe you think we have some fancy test that can tell you whether you’re an alcoholic or not. But we haven’t. The only person who can decide whether you’re an alcoholic is yourself. If you want a little helpful hint I’ll tell you something I heard Fanny J. say at a meeting a couple of months ago; when anybody stops boasting about how much he had to drink the night before and starts lying about it, there’s maybe just a little bit of a chance that he’s getting to be one of us. But that’s up to you. “Some people are able to get the A.A. program while they still have their jobs and their wives and their homes, but there are others who don’t seem to be able to quit drinking until they’ve lost everything. That’s given rise to the saying that there are â€high-bottom’ drunks and â€low-bottom’ drunks. But remember what Bill W. said; “The difference between the high-bottom drunk and the low-bottom drunk is that both are lying in the gutter but the high-bottom drunk has his head on the curb.” We are all drunks. If you think you are a drunk we invite you to join us.
“You’re going to hear from three members tonight, and they’re all going to have very different stories to tell. All we ask you new people is that you keep an open mind. If you don’t happen to hear anything tonight that fits in with your own story, or reminds you of your own pattern of drinking, please keep coming, for sooner or later you’re bound to hear something that hits you right where you live.
“And I ought to tell the newcomers that we don’t practice any religious ritual of any sort here, except that we end every meeting by standing up and reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and we ask you all to join. The first speaker this evening…” The first speaker, and every speaker at every A.A. meeting, begins with one standard line; “My name is_______, and I am an alcoholic.” Thereafter he says exactly what he likes, and what he usually likes is to tell the story of his drinking, and how, eventually, he came into A.A. What a newcomer, feeling in his heart of hearts that he is an alcoholic, expects to experience at the first meeting can never be known, except it is a good bet he does not expect to be shaken with laughter. But that is what usually does happen to him, and what usually dissolves his intention of leaving after the first twenty minutes and making a dash for the nearest bar. No one has quite such terrific stories to tell as an alcoholic, and once he is released from his fears and shames by having put his alcoholic activity behind him he makes a formidable raconteur, using his old self as the butt of his new. The laughter that shakes the hall is the laughter of recognition.
Over and over, the newcomer hears references to the Twelve Steps and in particular to the Twelfth Step. The Twelve Steps constitute at once the philosophy of A.A. and its means to therapy for the alcoholic who is making an honest attempt to stop drinking. They are not absolutes, but are presented as suggestions. In condensed form for the quick-reading non-alcoholic, they are these:
First, the alcoholic admits that he has become powerless over alcohol; that his life has become unmanageable. This is the admission of failure without which his ego does not undergo the deep deflation that seems the key to success. Next, he comes to believe that only a Power greater than himself can restore his life, and turns his will and his life over to the care of God as he understands him.
Further, via nine detailed suggestions, the alcoholic undertakes a searching moral inventory of himself; admits to God and one human being his wrongs and shortcomings, asking God to remove them, and himself making the human amends possible. He seeks by prayer and meditation to improve his conscious contact with God as he understands Him, praying only for knowledge of His will, and the power to carry that out.
Finally, having had a spiritual experience, he tries to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all his affairs, (the Twelfth Step).
Alcoholics Anonymous, said Bill W. when the American Psychiatric Association invited him to address it in 1949, “is not a religious organization; there is no dogma. The one theological proposition is â€Power greater than one’s self,’ but even this concept is forced on no one. The newcomer merely immerses himself in our society and tries the program as best he can. Left alone, he will surely report the gradual onset of a transforming experience, call it what he may. Observers once thought A.A. could appeal only to the religiously susceptible. Yet our membership includes a former member of the American Atheist Society and about 20,000 other almost as tough. The dying can become remarkably open-minded. Of course we speak little of conversion nowadays because so many people really dread being God-bitten. But conversion, as broadly described by William James, does seem to be our basic process……
“Our deep kinship, the urgency of our mission, the need to abate our neurosis for contented survival; all these, together with the love for God and man, have contained us in surprising unity. There seems safety in numbers. Enough sandbags muffle any amount of dynamite. We think we are a pretty secure, happy family. Drop by any A.A. meeting for a look.”
Among the toughest of the tough, the lowest of the low, the most cynical of the cynical, the program works. The alcoholic man or woman, is merely urged to look again at the idea of a Higher Power, and to dissociate that idea from the old-man-with-the-whiskers, the angry Santa Claus, the avenging anthropomorphic tyrant with which he was stuffed and terrified in his childhood. Gradually the phrase “as you understand Him” takes hold. Sometimes the concept of the Higher Power can be accepted only by some elaborate stratagem. One alcoholic, determined in his agnosticism, at last solved his problem by accepting as a Power greater than himself the steam radiator than clanked and hissed in his miserable room. It was hot and full of energy and burned him when he touched it. It was sufficient. The radiator clanked inscrutably; the alcoholic stopped drinking.
One by one, the speakers who rise and tell their stories 12,000 times or more a week the country over are driven to say the same thing: “I don’t understand it, but I don’t need; it works.” Certainly one thing that works is the feeling of fellowship engendered by several hundred people in the same room, every one of whom knows at firsthand the exact horrible details of alcoholic suffering. Most alcoholics, before they encounter A.A., are convinced that nowhere in the annals of medicine or abnormal psychology can any parallel to themselves be found. “It may be all right for some people but it would never work for me” is the most common first response heard by an A.A. having his first talk with an alcoholic who does not yet dare to hope. Nothing is a more powerful solvent to this sort of suffering egotism than being physically surrounded by several hundred people, every one of whom once held precisely that same thought, and slowly realizing that the horrors once thought to be unique are, in reality, a universal experience in the society of A.A. Most A.A.’s carry fat address books in their pockets; in these are crammed the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the A.A.’s he has met inside or outside his own group. This is the equipment he needs for what is known as the Nickel Therapy; when the desire for a drink reaches dangerous proportions, the A.A. drops a 5-cent piece in a coin telephone and dials the number of a fellow member who will sit out the siege with him.
The Twelfth Step, by which alcoholics work with alcoholics, does not mean that A.A. evangelizes, proselytizes, or whoops things up in any way among “hot prospects.” If a despairing wife calls an A.A. (almost every sizable telephone book in the U.S. has an A.A. number in it) and asks that he “try to do something with Jim,” the first inquiry must always be directed to the point, “Does Jim want it?” If the answer is “No, but God knows he ought to,” the A.A. will beg off seeing Jim and have a chat with his wife or family instead. Only when Jim says he is ready to talk will the A.A. go to work directly. Even then, there is no urging. The A.A. member will talk not about Jim but about himself. He will emphasize that no A.A. takes any sort of pledge of sobriety. He works, instead, on the “Twenty-four Hour Plan,” which the A.A. often expresses as “Tomorrow I may go on the damnedest bender you ever heard of, but I’m not going to have a drink today.” The Twenty-four Hour Plan is of vital importance to those who have newly stopped drinking—for to them, nine times out of ten, the contemplation of the balance of a lifetime without the solace of alcohol is intolerable. Yet A.A.’s who have been dry ten years or more still wisely make their plans for sobriety no further than a day in advance. The first longing of someone who has stopped drinking is to be able to resume it successfully; only slowly is this point of view replaced by the one that says “I wouldn’t take a drink now, even if I could.” All this the A.A. discusses at low pressure.
Where the A.A. truly burns to get something across to the suffering alcoholic is in telling him that not only is life possible without alcohol but it is a damned sight more pleasant. This is difficult. A universal feature of advanced alcoholism is a sharp constriction of interests: the alcoholic who once belonged to a choral society, went to sketch class once a week, collected matchbooks, and went on short-line railroad excursions has now abandoned all these things in favor of continuous drinking. It is hard for him to find his way back to these things alone; it is hard for him to find his way back to society at all. But A.A. offers him a society that will instantly welcome him, ask no questions, but instead begin to deluge him with the mirthful, frightful record of its own calamities.
A.A. is founded on the Christian principle of Love. It is the fashion, even in these dark days, for the worldly to scoff at such a declaration, but the A.A. does not scoff and does not blush at holding so old-fashioned an idea. Like ceasing to drink, the A.A. finds that loving his fellow man makes no impossible exactions of an ordinary, all-too-human being…
There was once a new A.A. named Joe, who came to an older A.A. named Fred, asking advice. Joe had encountered a third A.A. named George whose every attribute of personality Joe found repulsive. Was it essential that Joe should love George? Yes, said Fred, it was. Joe thought for a long, dismal moment and then announced that if this were true he would have to retire from the program and resume drinking; loving George was beyond his powers.
“Wait a minute,” said the old A.A. “There isn’t anything to keep you from loving George. Hell, you don’t have to like the s.o.b. any more than I do.”
Is there hope for habitual drunkards?
A cure that borders on the miraculous-and it works!
For twenty-five or thirty cents we buy a glass of fluid which is pleasant to the taste, and which contains within its small measure a store of warmth and good-fellowship and stimulation, of release from momentary cares and anxieties. That would be a drink of whisky, of course-whisky, which is one of Nature's most generous gifts to man, and at the same time one of his most elusive problems. It is a problem because, like many of his greatest benefits, man does not quite know how to control it. Many experiments have been made, the most spectacular being the queer nightmare of prohibition, which left such deep scars upon the morals and the manners of our nation. Millions of dollars have been spent by philanthropists and crusaders to spread the doctrine of temperance. In our time the most responsible of the distillers are urging us to use their wares sensibly, without excess.
But to a certain limited number of our countrymen neither prohibition nor wise admonishments have any meaning, because they are helpless when it comes to obeying them. I speak of the true alcoholics, and before going any further I had best explain what that term means.
For a medical definition of the term, I quote an eminent doctor who, has spent twenty-five years treating such people in a highly regarded private hospital: "We believe . . . that the action of alcohol in chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy-that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all."
They are, he goes on, touched with physical and mental quirks which prevent them from controlling their own actions. They suffer from what some doctors call a "compulsion neurosis." They know liquor is bad for them but periodically, they are driven by a violent and totally uncontrollable desire for a drink. And after that first drink, the deluge.'
Now these people are genuinely sick. The liquor habit with them is not a vice. It is a specific illness of body and mind, and should be treated as such.
By far the most successful cure is that used by the hospital whose head doctor I have quoted. There is nothing secret about it. It has the endorsement of the medical profession. It is, fundamentally, a process of dehydration: of removing harmful toxins from all parts of the body faster than Nature could accomplish it. Within five or six days-two weeks at the maximum- the patient's body is utterly free from alcoholic poisons. Which means that the
physical craving is completely cured, because the body cries out for alcohol only when alcohol is already there. The patient has no feeling of revulsion toward whisky. He simply is not interested in it. He has recovered. But wait. How permanent is his recovery?
Our doctor says this: " Though the aggregate of full recoveries through physical and psychiatric effort its considerable, we doctors must admit that we have made little impression upon the problem as a whole. For there are many types which do not respond to the psychological approach.
" I do not believe that true alcoholism is entirely a matter of individual mental control. I have had many men who had, for example, worked for a period of months on some business deal which was to be settled on a certain date.... For reasons they could not afterward explain, they took a drink a day or two prior to the date . . . and the important engagement was not even kept. These men were not drinking to escape. They were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control.
" The classification of alcoholics is most difficult. There are, of course," the psychopaths who are emotionally unstable.... They are overremorseful and make many resolutions -but never a decision.
" There is the type who is unwilling to admit that he cannot take a drink just like the rest of the boys. He does tricks with his drinking- changing his brand, or drinking only after meals or changing his companions. None of this helps him strengthen his control and be like other people. Then there are types entirely normal in every respect except in the effect which alcohol has upon them . . .
" All these, and many others, have one symptom in common: They cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving.... The only relief we have to suggest is complete abstinence from alcohol " But are these unfortunate people really capable, mentall, of abstaining completely? Their bodies may be cured of craving. Can their minds be cured? Can they be rid of the deadly " compulsion neurosis "?
Among physicians the general opinion seems to be that chronic alcoholics are doomed. . . But wait!
Within the last four years, evidence has appeared which has startled hard-boiled medical men by proving that the compulsion neurosis can be entirely eliminated. Perhaps you are one of those cynical people who will turn away when I say that the root of this new discovery is religion. But be patient for a moment. About three years ago a man appeared at the hospital in New York of which our doctor is head physician. It was his third "cure." Since his first visit he had lost his job, his friends, his health, and his self-respect. He was now living on the earnings of his wife.
He had tried every method he could find to cure his disease: had read all the great philosophers and psychologists. He had tried religion but he simply could not accept it. It would not seem real and personal to him.
He went through the cure as usual and came out of it in very low spirits. He was lying in bed, emptied of vitality and thought, when suddenly, a strange and totally unexpected thrill went through his body and mind. He called out for the doctor. When the doctor came in, the man looked up at him and grinned.
"Well, doc," he said, "my troubles are all over. I've got religion."
"Why, you're the last man . . ."
"Sure, I know all that. But I've got it. And I know I'm cured of this drinking business for good." He talked with great intensity for a while and then said,
" Listen, doc. I've got to see some other patient- one that is about to be dismissed."
The doctor demurred. It all sounded a trifle fanatical. But finally he consented. And thus was born the movement which is now flourishing with almost sensational success as Alcoholics Anonymous."
Here is how it works:
Every member of the group-which is to say every person who has been saved-is under obligation to carry on the work, to save other men. That, indeed, is a fundamental part of his own mental cure. He gains strength and confidence by active work with other victims.
He finds his subject among acquaintances, at a "cure" institution or perhaps by making inquiry of a preacher, a priest, or a doctor. He begins his talk with his new acquaintance by telling him the true nature of his disease and how remote are his chances for permanent cure.
When he has convinced the man that he is a true alcoholic and must never drink again, he continues:
"You had better admit that this thing is beyond your own control. You've tried to solve it by yourself, and you have failed. All right. Why not put the whole thing into the hands of Somebody Else?"
Even though the man might be an atheist or agnostic, he will almost always admit that there is some sort of force operating in the world-some cosmic power weaving a design. And his new friend will say:
"I don't care what you call this Somebody Else. We call it God. But whatever you want to call it, you had better put yourself into its hands. Just admit you're licked, and say, `Here I am, Somebody Else. Take care of this thing for me.'" The new subject will generally consent to attend one of the weekly meetings of the movement.
He will find twenty-five or thirty ex-drunks gathered in somebody's home for a pleasant evening. There are no sermons. The talk is gay or serious as the mood strikes. The new candidate cannot avoid saying to himself, "These birds are ex-drunks. And look at them! They must have something. It sounds kind of screwy, but whatever it is I wish to heaven I could get it too."
One or another of the members keeps working on him from day to day. And presently the miracle-But let me give you an example: I sat down in a quiet room with Mr. B., a stockily built man of fifty with a rather stern, intelligent face.
"I'll tell you what happened a year ago." He said. "I was completely washed up. Financially I was all right, because my money is in a trust fund. But I was a drunken bum of the worst sort. My family was almost crazy with my incessant sprees."
"I took the cure in New York." (At the hospital we have mentioned.) "When I came out of it, the doctor suggested I go to one of these meetings the boys were holding. I just laughed. My father was an atheist and had taught me to be one. But the doctor kept saying it wouldn't do me any harm, and I
went."
"I sat around listening to the jabber. It didn't register with me at all. I went home. But the next week I found myself drawn to the meeting. And again they worked on me while I shook my head. I said, 'It seems O.K. with you, boys, but I don't even know your language. Count me out.'"
"Somebody said the Lord's Prayer, and the meeting broke up. I walked three blocks to the subway station. Just as I was about to go down the stairs-bang!" He snapped fingers hard. "It happened! I don't like that word miracle, but that's all I can call it. The lights in the street seemed to flare up. My feet seemed to leave the pavement. A kind of shiver went over me, and I burst out crying.
"I went back to the house where we had met, and rang the bell, and Bill let me in. We talked until two o'clock in the morning. I haven't touched a drop since, and I've set four other fellows on the same road.
The doctor, a nonreligious man himself, was at first utterly astonished at the results that began to appear among his patients. But then he put his knowledge of psychiatry and psychology to work.
These men were experiencing a psychic change. Their so-called "compulsion neurosis" was being altered-transferred from liquor to something else. Their psychological necessity to drink was being changed to a psychological necessity to rescue their fellow victims from the plight that made themselves so miserable. It is not a new idea. It is a powerful and effective working out of an old idea. We all know that the alcoholic has an urge to share his troubles. Psychoanalysts use this urge. They say to the alcoholic, in basic terms: "You can't lick this problem yourself. Give me the problem-transfer the whole thing to me and let me take the whole responsibility." But the psychoanalyst, being of human clay, is not often a big enough man for that job. The patient simply cannot generate enough confidence in him. But the patient can have enough confidence in God-once he has gone through the mystical experience of recognizing God. And upon that principle the Alcoholic Foundation rests.
The medical profession, in general, accepts the principle as sound.
"Alcoholics Anonymous" have consolidated their activities in an organization called the Alcoholic Foundation. It is a nonprofit-making enterprise. Nobody connected with it is paid a penny. It is not a crusading movement. It condemns neither liquor nor the liquor industry. Its whole concern is with the rescue of allergic alcoholics, the small proportion of the population who must be cured or perish. It preaches no particular religion and has no
dogma, no rules. Every man conceives God according to his own lights.
Groups have grown up in other cities. The affairs of the Foundation are managed by three members of the movement and four prominent business and professional men, not alcoholics, who volunteered their services.
The Foundation has lately published a book, called Alcoholics Anonymous. And if alcoholism is a problem in your family or among your friends, I heartily recommend that you get hold of a copy. It may very well help you to guide a sick man--an allergic alcoholic-- on the way to health and contentment.
Good Housekeeping January 1960
"When the ones they love are Alcoholics"
Quote:
Most people know about the work done by AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), an organization in which alcoholics help one another overcome their drinking problems. Fewer realize there is a somewhat similar group devoted to helping the families of alcoholics.
Al-Anon Family Groups have no official connection with AA, though the two organizations work closely together. Like AA, Al-Anon is a nonprofit, voluntary association. The family groups sprang up informally when wives and husbands of AA members met to discuss mutual problems. In 1951, Al-Anon Family Groups headquarters were set up to serve as a clearinghouse for the exchange of ideas and information. The member groups, however, remain autonomous and decide their own rules and procedures. At present there are some 1,300 groups-about 1,000 in the U.S. and Canada, with the remainder scattered throughout 20 foreign countries. The average group has an active membership of about 25.
Membership is open to anyone with an alcoholic relative or friend; even teen-agers are welcomed. (In some communities, teen-age children of alcoholics have set up their own groups, called Alateens.) Most members are women, largely because there are many more men alcoholics than women. There are no bylaws or dues; members make small, voluntary contributions to cover the rental of a meeting place and the cost of refreshments. In addition, each member is encouraged to contribute a dollar twice a year for the support of the national headquarters.
Most groups meet once a week or twice a month. A typical meeting might open with a nondenominational prayer for serenity, followed by the introduction of new members. Next might come a group discussion, an address by an outside speaker (a doctor, psychiatrist, or clergyman), or a reading of inspirational literature. Typical problems discussed might be: how to protect the children from the impact of alcoholism; whether the wife (if the husband is the alcoholic) should go to work to ease the financial situation; or what the basic cause of excessive drinking is.
The heart of most Al-Anon meetings, however, is the "personal story" period, in which two or three members recount their own experiences in living with an alcoholic and either ask the group’s help in easing some of the problems or recount the methods they themselves have found successful. Members are encouraged to be frank but urged to withhold particularly intimate or emotional problems for private discussion with individual members.
Basic to Al-Anon’s philosophy is the idea that the family of an alcoholic is powerless to control his drinking. But a nonalcoholic can control himself, and the Al-Anon program tries to help its members by urging them to live one day at a time; to accept the idea that alcoholism is a disease; to examine their own consciences and try to remove from their conduct toward the alcoholic any trace of self-righteousness, resentment, or irritation; and to live full lives themselves, even if that means developing interests and activities the alcoholic cannot share. In carrying out this program, Al-Anon, like AA, stresses the need for reliance on spiritual help.
Al-Anon promises no miracles. About ten percent of its new members usually drop out after two or three meetings, when they discover the organization does not attempt to solve the basic problem of alcoholism itself. In other cases, the alcoholic relative bitterly resents having his problems discussed with strangers. Often the Al-Anon program just does not take. But even more often, Al-Anon says, its members are greatly helped by simply being able to talk over their problems with others in the same situation. As they struggle to overcome their own resentment, fear, or despair, they make at least their own lives more bearable. And in some instances, the resulting improvement in home life encourages the alcoholic relative to seek help himself from doctors, psychiatrists, clergymen, or AA.
For further information, write to Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Inc., Post Office Box 182, Madison Square Station, New York 10, New York
Thank you for including this part of the history, Dan. It truly is a disease that affects the whole family, and I believe that recovery for any member has a positive impact on the family as a whole.
It amazes me that this article written so long ago reflects the spirit that continues to be shared today, and I'm grateful that those who went before me continued to pass it on until it finally reached me when I needed it most.
Hugs
Ann
__________________ “Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” ~Winnie the Pooh~
04-24-2005, 09:18 AM
to the BIG BOOK
Thread hi-jack, I'm afraid. It's not just how we say it, it's how it is! It's a county in England.
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