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The AA Way: Carrying the Message (After Having Invented It)

Alcoholics Anonymous—widelytermed simply AA—is the most widely available means for helping someone to recover from alcoholism/addiction. It is also very economical—it costs nothing. You’ll find in AA people who know a great deal about addiction and how to get (and stay) clean and sober. These are also people who stand ready to help others start recovery and stay in it.

How AA Can Help

Each year, many thousands of women and men who have become addicted to alcohol and drugs start in recovery through AA. They’re in all parts of the United States, and in many foreign countries. Those continuing in recovery as AA members now number some two million, according to AA reports at the time of this writing (May 2000).1

(Statistics about AA are approximate and estimated for reasons explained later. That they are approximations should be unimportant to you. The main point is this: Since AA helps millions of alcoholics/addicts start and stay in recovery, there’s a good chance it may likewise help the person who is worrying you.)

If AA is effective for your alcoholic/addict, you’d of course feel very relieved. You would both be very fortunate. Aside from his or her recovery, though, AA can help you learn the truth about addiction.

As important, the companion (but separate) organization Al-Anon, which is described thoroughly in chapter 3, could helpyourecover from the ravages of your involvement with the alcoholic/ addict. And you could thus be helped to recover whether or not the alcoholic/addict does.

Finding AA, Especially for a Crisis—Anywhere; Everywhere

You need only look in your local phone directory to reach AA throughout the United States. You’ll findAAorAlcoholics Anonymouslisted in the business section of the directory’s white pages. An AA phone number may also be listed in the directory’s yellow pages (classified phone directory listings), under a heading like “Alcoholism Information and Treatment Centers.”

Outside the United States, try local phone directories or use the telephone numbers, mailing addresses, or World Wide Web home pages or e-mail addresses given in the “Sources of Help and Information” section of this book. (Of course, if you’re in the United States, you can also use these additional phone numbers or addresses.)

Local police also often could tell you where and when nearby AA meetings are held.

•AA in Your Neighborhood

Very likely, groups of AA members are ready to help right in your locale. AA is a huge nonprofit society with chapters (called “groups”) almost everywhere in the country. Some sixty thousand AA groups operate throughout the United States and Canada, as do forty thousand more groups in other countries around the world.2

It may surprise you to find AA groups nearby. AA’s carefully observed principle of anonymity keeps it far more obscure than its size and importance would otherwise suggest. AA almost never advertises or publicizes.

•Denial

In all likelihood, you’d start to seek out AA in the midst of some crisis caused by the alcoholic/addict about whom you’re worried. If so, you’d have been kept from calling before by denial. Unbelievably strong denial about the addiction is universally suffered by alcoholics /addicts and those involved with them. (It is also very familiar to AA members, who circulate the ironic saying, “Denial is not a river in Egypt.”) Denial is also no joke. It stands as the major roadblock to breaking free of addiction. If not overcome, denial can and does kill.

Try out your local AA phone number in advance—even if you think you might not really need it. Should you face a crisis, you’d find it helpful to have the number right at hand.

•AA in a Crisis

Suppose that you phoned your local AA number during a crisis. Perhaps your alcoholic/addict was in a drunken or drugged stupor—or had just had a car accident, or had smashed the furniture, or had stormed out in the night to get more liquor or crack cocaine. What would AA do?

In a best case, a volunteer would answer your phone call. This AA member would tell you how to get immediate police or medical help, should your emergency require it. If it’s not that kind of emergency, the person would give you the time and place of one or two nearby AA meetings for your alcoholic/addict to attend that day or night. In addition, you might be told that an AA member will phone you soon, if you wish, to offer to talk with your alcoholic/addict and offer to take him or her to an AA meeting.

AA custom calls for the person who offers to meet with a prospective new member to be of the same sex as the prospect (in line with a time-honored AA admonition, “men with the men, women with the women”). This is done to avoid any romantic or sexual distractions that intoxicated prospects are especially likely to seize on. Custom also dictates having two members go out on such missions, and having those members be long-experienced and fully active in the AA program. Such missions with a potential new member are termed “12th-Step calls.”

Sometimes when you phone a local AA number, you’ll reach an answering-machine message that may offer to have a volunteer call you later with information and help if you leave your number. The message may also tell you where else to phone for immediate aid if you need it.

•Get Medical Help

Alcohol and drugs are toxins—poisons—that damage the body in many ways, especially when abused by addicts. If the alcoholic/ addict who concerns you has reached late-stage addiction, she or he needs drugs or liquor simply to push away the tortures of withdrawal.

Such withdrawal sometimes starts with violent physical reactions if she or he tries to go without the alcohol or drugs for even as little as thirty minutes. The addict needs alcohol or drugs to keep from shaking and aching all over unbearably, being racked by fevers and chills and hideous nausea, feeling a nameless, enormous dread, and even experiencing horrifying hallucinations.

Withdrawal reactions can be so intense that they kill an alcoholic. Perhaps the most frequent way in which alcohol withdrawal causes death is from convulsions or nausea. With these, the alcoholics suffocate after partially swallowing their own tongue, or choke to death on their vomit.

In order to get through such withdrawal safely and with the least distress, alcoholics/addicts who have severe addictions need to enter a medically supervised process calleddetoxication.Detox treatment usually involves being in a hospital for three to seven days. During this time, the patient’s condition is carefully monitored and medicines and nutriments are given that counter withdrawal reactions.

•Finding Detox Treatment

If he or she has entered late-stage addiction, your alcoholic/addict would first need detoxification treatment before starting AA or another addiction-recovery program. AA members should be able to help you get your alcoholic/addict into a detox. (AA members know local detoxes well; some have been there, and many have helped prospects enter them.) So common is alcoholism/addiction that detox facilities are found in most hospitals today. How to find a detox and other help aside from AA is explained in chapter 2, which also tells more about the detoxing process.

Some drugs, such as marijuana and cocaine, cause less physical withdrawal torment when discontinued by an addict. However, detoxification for drugs such as these can be important to counter intense craving and emotional distress due to withdrawal.

Moreover, alcoholics/addicts who need detoxification these days most commonly have been abusing a variety of drugs and alcohol together. Some recovered addicts tell how their drugs of choice reinforced each other. One says, for instance, that cocaine enabled him to go on drinking liquor without passing out, while liquor then slowed down the frenzy of a cocaine hit so that he could go on with more cocaine a bit later—and so on.

Some alcoholics/addicts who very luckily start recovery in earlier stages can undergo withdrawal free of severe physical distress. If this is true of the one you’re concerned about, recovery can start with immediate daily attendance at AA meetings without the need for initial detox.

Even someone who is starting recovery without needing detox should get an overall medical checkup. Active alcoholics/addicts typically harm their health and physical condition by abuse and neglect. Infections, malnutrition, and exhaustion often need to be cleared up. Moreover, specific and severe damage to vital organs that include the liver, heart, brain, stomach, esophagus, and pancreas due to the direct action of excessive alcohol and drugs may require treatment.

Essential Truths You Could Learn through AA

•Go to “Open” AA Meetings

When you’re inquiring or being told about AA meetings nearby, you might ask especially about “Open” Meetings. Open Meetings are ones that nonalcoholics are permitted to attend. Most AA meetings are “closed” ones—for alcoholics/addicts only. Closed meetings are held mainly to protect the anonymity of members. Membership requirements are uniquely simple, and the individual—not AA—decides whether or not the individual is a member. AA’s third “tradition” (a kind of constitutional provision) states: “The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.”

Notice that being a member calls merely for “a desire” to stop drinking. Some who come in find that they can’t stop drinking or drugging even though they want to do so. In many cases, though, members like these eventually do stop if they keep trying to get sober and keep going to AA meetings.

By going to Open AA Meetings, you can learn essential, literally life-saving truths about alcoholism/addiction and recovery. You’d learn these most vividly from AA members talking at the meetings. You’d also learn them from AA books and pamphlets available at the meetings.

•Have Your Alcoholic/Addict Go to AA

Should you try to have your alcoholic/addict go along with you to the Open Meetings? Only in either of two cases: First, if doing so is the only way he or she will consider joining AA—or at least finding out about it. Or second, only if doing so reinforces his or her participation without you in closed meetings. (AAers generally recommend that new members go to a meeting every day at the start, if at all possible.) But you can go to Open Meetings whether or not your alcoholic/addict does—and, because of denial, he or she may absolutely refuse to attend, at first.

Most (though not all) AA meetings are held in the early evenings, starting right after dinnertime at an hour like 7:00, 8:00, or 8:30. Meetings typically last one hour. Such timing is common for several vital reasons. That time of day is when many alcoholics/ addicts most often started drinking or drugging. It comes after the day’s work. It gives the recoverer a tremendously important goal that many feel (and find) they can attain: Don’t have a drink or a drug just that day—hold on until the meeting tonight. However, a great many AA meetings are also held at all hours throughout the day, particularly in larger urban areas.

What Makes an Alcoholic/Addict Start Recovery?

•Hitting Bottom

Among the essential truths about alcoholism/addiction and recovery you’d learn through AA, the most important to you is discovering what could make your alcoholic/addict start recovery. AA began in 1935 with the discovery of what can begin recovery by its two founders and their fellow early members. Subsequent experience of the members who followed, now numbering in the millions, has confirmed this discovery in virtually every individual case.

What is it? What finally breaks the iron grip of addiction and opens the way to recovery? Absolute despair. Utter hopelessness. In what has become common and widespread AA parlance, “hitting bottom.”

To the alcoholic/addict—and to those who care about him or her, like you—this is terribly grim news. But the consequences from continued addiction are even grimmer. No wonder denial grows so strong.

It’s the hideous nature of physical addiction that the future alcoholic/addict feels great with alcohol or drugs at the start—especially with relatively large amounts. As time goes on, larger amounts are needed more frequently in order to feel great, but even that euphoria disappears. Instead, increasing consumption is needed merely to feel normal. Then, without even more, feelings become unbearable. It’s only a little less unbearable witheven more. Full-blown addiction has set in.

•Where Does Full-Blown Addiction Lead?

At this point, the alcoholic/addict absolutely must sacrifice anything and everything in order to get and ingest alcohol or drugs. Inside, he or she feels terrified and borderline suicidial. Unless the drug or alcohol abuse is stopped, in time the addict may become abandoned by everyone, homeless, destitute, unemployable, ill, injured, jailed, or committed as insane. Death is not uncommon.

This is essentially what was discovered by those who started AA, and the phenomenon was described in their seminal, anonymous book,Alcoholics Anonymous(which first appeared in 1939, and gave the organization its name).

Controlling addiction is thus a matter of life and death. Hitting bottom is often the only thing that can stop the horrifying course of alcoholism/addiction. Hitting bottom is a time of mortal terror for the alcoholic/addict, a time when she or he can see—or is made to see—the addiction for what it is. The addict faces all the ruin and catastrophe the addiction has already wreaked, and even much worse ahead. Yet every cell in his or her body is screaming for alcohol and/or drugs.

Hitting bottom thereby makes it possible for the alcoholic/addict to accept help and to get just a glimmer of the realization that for him or her, alcohol and /or drugs might be ruinous and deadly. In rather rare cases, the alcoholic/addict has such an awakening alone. More often, it takes outsiders, like you or AA members, or health-care professionals, to help the alcoholic/addict hit bottom and start recovery.

•Catastrophe May Trigger Hitting Bottom

In quite a few cases, some shocking catastrophe brings on a “bottom.” The wife or husband leaves with the kids, or threatens to do so. The car hits a telephone pole or injures a toddler. The boss finally fires the alcoholic/addict. He or she is thrown in jail for fighting in a bar, drunk driving, or drug possession. The doctor gives her or him six months to live (unless all alcohol intake stops immediately) after discovering an alcohol-damaged liver.

•The Addiction’s Infinite Cruelty Can Postpone Hitting Bottom

In many cases, addiction exhibits infinite cruelty in playing with the alcoholic/addict. It can be much like a cat playing with a mouse, which cannot escape being slowly terrorized, maimed, and killed. Like the mouse that thinks this time it will run away, the alcoholic/ addict may stop for a day, a week, even one or two years. But then the alcoholic/addict irresistibly goes back, in a short time worse than before.

Other expedients are endless, and always fail. He or she switches types of drinks or drugs. Too many car accidents happen, so he quits—quits driving, that is. Or she blames the locale, and moves across the country or halfway around the world. So common is this last “solution” that it’s gotten a widespread name in AA, a “geographic”—that is, a futile geographic cure.

Sadly, such tortuous measures can be tried for years, while agony and loss go on and on; they may postpone hitting bottom indefinitely .

Is AA Only for Alcoholics—Not Drug Addicts?

•Your Addict is Eligible

One objection the addict may raise is that her or his problem isn’t alcohol—it’s drugs. And after all, isn’t this outfitAlcoholicsAnonymous?

In reply, inform your addict that many AA groups today welcome persons with all varieties of substance–addiction problems. This is particularly true of AA groups in cities. Most recovering drug addicts today also abused alcohol as well as different drugs. Some rare AA members today abused only marijuana, or only crack cocaine, or only prescription drugs. But these new members are often welcomed all the same by their AA groups.

If your addict should encounter an AA group that seems a bit unfriendly, he or she could find and join another group whose members include some successfully recovering drug addicts. Many groups share a view commonly expressed at AA meetings: “A drug is a drug”—whether it’s alcohol or cocaine, heroin or marijuana, Percodan or Valium, or whatever. Moreover, by basic principle, no AA group can exclude anyone who wants to join and states that he or she “has a desire to stop drinking”—AA’s only membership requirement.

•Narcotics Anonymous (NA) and Cocaine Anonymous (CA)

Two organizations similar to AA were organized for drug addicts in past years. One of these may appeal to your drug addict instead of AA. Narcotics Anonymous, or NA, and Cocaine Anonymous, or CA. NA and CA came into existence when a number of addicts found that AA’s method and principles seemed to prove about as effective for drug addiction as for alcoholism. However, in those years several decades ago, many AA leaders and groups resisted opening AA to persons who were mainly drug addicts. These leaders feared that AA’s proven value against alcoholism might be fatally compromised if AA should lose credibility by trying to counter drug addiction and failing. Some were concerned about the illegality of drugs.

Curiously, then, as a result, NA and CA were organized with exactly the same approach as AA. Even the same AA words were used for the basic “12 Steps” of NA and CA, with only the wordsnarcoticsandcocainesubstituted foralcohol.

Compared to the number of AA groups, fewer NA and CA groups function today. Some NA or CA members prefer them to AA groups, feeling that the struggles of fellow addicts most closely parallel their own experience and thus better help bolster their recovery. If the alcoholic/addict in your life may be interested, you can find out how to get in touch with NA or CA and their groups in the “Sources of Help and Information” section at the end of this book.

You may find it helpful to know that AA’s methods and principles have also been applied in still other “anonymous” societies dealing with habit-forming problem behaviors. Perhaps the two largest of these are OA (Overeaters Anonymous) and GA (Gamblers Anonymous).

Neither the official AA central organization nor AA groups have any connection with or any formal role in these other organizations termed “anonymous.”

Outside Experts Evaluate AA

You may be wondering what respected authorities independent of AA conclude about the program’s effectiveness. Here are two examples.

Dr. Allen Frances and Dr. Michael B. First, who were respectively the task-force chairman and the editor ofDSM-IV—the most recent edition of the definitive professional reference work for psychiatrists—say this about AA in their “layman’s guide to the psychiatrist’s bible,”Your Mental Health:

Alcoholics Anonymous (and its offshoots) is the great success story in the treatment of addictions. On any given day, more people go to AA groups around the world than attend any other form of therapy. The message of AA is compelling and translates very well across different drugs, social classes, and cultures. AA groups are so numerous and so varied that almost anyone can find a congenial one that is readily available, conveniently located, and probably meeting that night. AA provides hope, a philosophy of life, a spiritual reawakening, an emotional experience, concrete support, a sounding board, great advice, and help for family members. It is all the more remarkable that it does all this with virtually no bureaucracy or budget.3

A second opinion on the value of AA is expressed by another psychiatrist, Dr. George E. Vaillant. Dr. Vaillant led and wrote a report on one of the most authoritative studies ever made of alcoholism and alcoholics. This monumental research project followed and analyzed the lives of more than six hundred persons for more than forty years. Its findings were presented in Dr. Vaillant’s books,The Natural History of Alcoholism(1983) andThe Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited(1995). In his second book, Dr. Vaillant stated:

More recovered alcoholics from both groups [two large groups of men studied in the research] began stable abstinence while attending Alcoholics Anonymous than while attending alcohol treatment centers.

Dr. Vaillant added that, on the basis of findings for these two groups and an additional one he had studied:

The numbers of subjects in these studies are small, and these results, drawn primarily from middle-aged white males, must be interpreted with caution. The implication from the three samples, however, is that a great many severely alcohol-dependent Americans, regardless of their social or psychological makeup, find help for their alcoholism through Alcoholics Anonymous.4

Personal Histories

From the start, AA has relied on tremendously moving firsthand stories of individual men and women—who tell about their lives in the hope of getting other alcoholics/addicts started on recovery—rather than on statistics or research findings. As a speaker at an Open AA Meeting once put it when sharing what worked with him and what also works for others in his own twelve-step efforts: “When I say what I think, it has no power. But when I tell about my life and all that I’ve gone through—that has the power.”

That power was one of AA’s original startling discoveries. An alcoholic who is in fact recovering from alcoholism in many cases has more power than anyone else to break through to what AA calls to this day, “the still-suffering alcoholic.”

The first-editionAlcoholics Anonymousvolume of 1939 states:

Highly competent psychiatrists who have dealt with us [alcoholics] have found it sometimes impossible to persuade an alcoholic to discuss his situation without reserve. Strangely enough, wives, parents, and intimate friends usually find us even more unapproachable than do the psychiatrist and the doctor.

But the ex-problem drinker who has found this solution[AA],who is properly armed with facts about himself, can generally win the entire confidence of another alcoholic in a few hours. Until such an understanding is reached, little or nothing can be accomplished. [Italics in the original.]5

•Life Stories at the Open Meetings

You can experience the power of life stories like these directly—in person—at the major type of AA’s Open Meetings. These are informally called “speaker” meetings. At them, the frequent custom is to have from one to three speakers “tell their stories.”

Time-honored advice for telling your story calls for a speaker to cover three main things:

• what it used to be like, while “active” (that is, actively drinking/ drugging);

• what happened to get you into recovery and AA; and

• what it’s been like in recovery.

A meeting chairperson or other meeting leader introducing the speakers is very likely to set forth two vital guidelines for the listeners. One centers on AA’s principle of anonymity. It is usually phrased, “What you hear here, and who you see here, let it stay here.” Anything said, and anyone seen, are not to be mentioned to anyone outside that room.

Alcoholics/addicts attending are the target of the second admonition. “Identify. Don’t compare,” the leader typically warns. Identify with the feelings that a speaker sets forth, a leader often goes on to explain. Don’t compare the disasters and troubles of a speaker with the disasters and troubles in your active-addiction days.

By comparing that you didn’t have as many car wrecks or jailings or job losses or psych wards as a speaker did, you might compare yourself right out the door and back into drinking and drugging, the leader might add. But if you instead identify with a speaker’s feelings, you’ll know in your bones that you often felt (and sometimes still feel) exactly the same way.

If the alcoholic/addict you wish to help would be able to identify like this at Open Meetings, she or he might be strongly reinforced to get started in recovery. Especially if she or he should happen to have that electrifying experience of needing to gasp to a speaker: “You toldmystory!” Sooner or later, if the alcoholic/addict keeps attending meetings, just that happens. Always.

Two Unlikely Addicts

The eloquence of even a little-schooled, rough-and-tumble speaker at an AA Open Meeting can prove surprising, and also moving. This results because speakers can talk about themselves with a rare degree of openness and trust made possible by AA’s unique qualities as an organization. Also motivating the speakers are deep convictions that what they say with complete honesty mightily helps buttress their own sobriety and may even help save someone else’s life. Such sharing of “experience, strength, and hope” between one alcoholic and another has represented one of AA’s main curative powers from the beginning.

The following two examples may just barely suggest how some speaker at an AA Open Meeting might have a powerful effect on the alcoholic/addict in your life.

•Oil-Rigs Roustabout from a Rich Family

“Hi, I’m Frank. I’m an addict and alcoholic,” says the powerfully built, lean young man standing at the front of the room. You’re in the basement room of a church parish hall at an after-dinner hour one weekday evening. You and the very mixed assortment of some thirty or so people are sitting on metal folding chairs. Frank, the speaker, has given the currently common opening remark whenever a member talks at a meeting (one’s nickname or first name and “I’m an alcoholic” or “addict”). Two lettered signs hang on the front wall. One is headed, THE TWELVE STEPS. The other is titled: THE TWELVE TRADITIONS.

Frank relates how he grew up on the two-hundred-acre estate of his folks in the rolling hills outside Seattle. He got shipped off to private boarding school when only ten years old. He hated it at first. He soon ran across some other boys who turned him on to pot and speed. In a couple of years they added LSD to the mix. Tripping out on all this stuff was just great, he found. He found it all still more exciting when he went on to dealing in drugs himself.

Frank got caught and kicked out around age sixteen or so. At the next two boarding schools the same thing happened. Mom and Dad then shipped him off to two wilderness-survival, Outward Bound—style programs, one in the American Rockies, and the other in the Peruvian Andes. Then came a couple of very foggy college years heavily laced with alcohol and finally ending with his expulsion for again dealing drugs.

Once home, Frank took his big Harley-Davidson motorcycle out touring and wound up in the Texas oil fields. He started work there as a roustabout on the rigs drilling new wells. Even more than the very dangerous and very heavy physical labor with huge steel casings and drill bits and guide chains, he liked the company of really tough guys who drank as hard as he did starting right after every day’s work. Drinking and work filled his life seven days a week. In two years in the oil fields, Frank took off only one day, a Christmas Day. Gruesome accidents on the job crippled or killed a friend now and then, but Frank kept right on working.

Finally that got too crazy, so he tried college again for a while. By this time he couldn’t stand being anywhere but alone at the far end of the bar while he drank. On campus one day, some young college punk carelessly bumped him aside to go through a door. In a lightning oil-field reaction, Frank slammed the boy against the wall but stopped just before beating him senseless. That alarmed Frank. He felt he’d turned into an animal. He left the college and biked home on the Harley.

By this time the booze and the drugs had him completely. He slaved like a dog maintaining his parents’ estate, doing all the mowing, all the dangerous tree work of felling huge trees and clearing new fields and pruning dead limbs, all the painting and repairs on the outbuildings and mansion. He worked alone. Nights he went off by himself to drink at bars. Towering rages would sweep over him on his workdays outdoors, and he would smash logs and rocks.

Most of the time, though, he felt absolutely hopeless, and in a black despair. Drinking and drugs no longer brought any cheer or excitement. They merely dulled the hopelessness and pain for just a few minutes. And when he went any more than a few hours without them, the black despair dropped down to terror, and he started feeling physically sick.

One night when Frank felt especially wretched, a boyhood friend whom he used to drink with came by. The friend asked Frank to come along with him to an AA meeting. Frank has no idea why he said yes. He did go along. Frank guesses that he’d reached the point where he was sick and tired of being sick and tired, as an old AA saying goes. Or maybe some angel just smiled on him that night, he says.

Frank is one of the lucky ones for whom AA clicked almost from the start. It felt like he had come home at last. For years he’d thought that he was the only one on the planet who acted and reacted the way he did. But here was a whole roomful of people who had gone through many of the same kinds of experiences and who’d felt the same hopelessness. And from their smiles and the light in their eyes and what they said of their lives, they had found a way out. He wanted what they had.

•How AA Members Fight Urges to Drink or to Drug

He was amazed especially that they fought off that irresistible craving to drink and to drug. How? With various basic tools, perfected by many over the years. A prime one is that AA members don’t vow to quit forever. They simply don’t drink or drug today. They quit “one day at a time,” as they endlessly remark. And if that gets too tough, they don’t use for just one hour at a time. Or on occasion, one minute at a time. And they are given phone numbers by other men (or other women, for a woman). And if they feel an urge to use getting strong, they phone or see another member and confess the urge and get bolstered by the member not to give in because that insane urge will soon pass and be gone.

Another vital basic for him, Frank says, was the saying, “It’s the first drink that gets you drunk—not the tenth or fifteenth.” This is paradoxically true for anyone who has become addicted—the addict has lost the power to decide when to stop or how to act after the first drink or drug. Frank likes the time-honored comparison to getting hit by a train. “It’s the locomotive that kills you,” he says, “not the caboose.”

At the start Frank was told that it gets better and it keeps on getting better the longer you stay with the AA program. Frank briefly sums up how he worked the Twelve Steps of the AA program with his AA sponsor as his experienced guide. Those steps especially opened up a whole new life for him, he says.

Now he has a wife he’s crazy about and two darling little kids. He’s gotten free of the stifling influence of his mom and dad, yet has still found how to give them his full affection. He started his own landscaping business, and it’s doing very well. Thanks to the program, he says, his life has gotten better than he’d ever dreamed.

For the newcomer, he says: If it happened for me, it can happen for you. Just keep coming. Don’t drink or drug, and go to meetings one day at a time, and you, too, will get a great life.

•Regal Beauty Who Had Everything but Couldn’t Stop

“Hi. I’m Elaine, and I’m an alcoholic.” The speaker at this AA meeting has a really striking appearance, you think. She’s tall, trim, blond, blue-eyed, tanned, and chic in a simple, sleeveless black tube dress.

She grew up in Winnetka, a fashionable suburb on Lake Michigan, north of Chicago, where her dad was a very successful lawyer, she says. Their lives were extremely comfortable. Tutors, summer trips to Europe, country club parties and sports, expensive cars, a splendid house right on the lake.

Her mom and dad drank, of course. Everyone did. For her parents, it was one of the social graces, part of good living. On holidays, many weekends, and special occasions, cocktails before dinner, vintage wines with dinner, and fine liqueurs and cordials after dinner.

Mom and Dad let Elaine have occasional sips of one of the sweet wines like port or sherry as an older child. In her teens, they carefully introduced her to proper drinking, “drinking like a lady,” when she began going out to dances and parties on dates. Elaine hadn’t yet reached legal drinking age, but no one in their set paid any attention to that—except not to get caught. Mom and Dad did warn and guard her against taking any chances with drunk drivers.

Elaine fell deeply in love with one endearing boy in her late teens, even though on occasion he’d get terribly drunk. And one day she was heartbroken to hear that, driving home late the night before, he’d killed himself skidding off a curve and hitting a tree. She says that that may have had much to do with her deciding while in college to become a certified alcoholism counselor, a CAC.

Shaking her head, Elaine says it’s unbelievable how she never saw her drinking start to be a problem. She went on after college to marry a corporation lawyer, have two children, and go back into her counseling work when the kids were in high school. Their life was much the same as her life had been while growing up—gracious good living, with no money problems at all.

George, her husband, worked hard and, on occasion, drank hard. Elaine had no trouble keeping up with his drinking. In fact, at parties when he was starting to slur his speech and sway on his feet, Elaine would still be steady as a rock and would drive them home.

Her drinking began to change so gradually that it was only by looking back that she could glimpse what had happened, Elaine says. First it was having another highball or two once George had been tucked into bed after she’d driven them home. Then it was downing cocktails—“just one or two,” she recalls having told herself—in the kitchen while getting dinner when George was away on one of his many business trips.

One evening at dinner, George joked that he liked her new habit of fixing them cocktails every night without fail. But, he went on, what might her counseling clients think of her possibly heading down the same road as them? He laughed loud and long at the thought.

Elaine, though, was aghast. No more drinking that anyone sees, she silently swore to herself. She went on getting George cocktails, and going out to dinners and parties with him just as before. But on all these occasions, she drank only tonics, juices, or spring waters—no alcohol. If George or anyone asked, she’d casually say she just didn’t care for alcohol anymore, but certainly didn’t want to spoil anyone else’s enjoyment of drinking.

In time, in a slow unfolding, Elaine found her life turning ever more hard and bleak. She had so much to do, every day! Every minute, with her home, her kids, her work, their social life—it was always go, go, go! She felt she deserved some relief, had to have some relief.

Finally, one night after everyone was asleep, she got a vodka bottle from the liquor cabinet and took it into her walk-in clothes closet. Her mind was a blank. It felt like a dream, but she knew it was real.

She huddled down on the floor in a corner and drank right from the bottle. Oh, what relief! What blessed relief! She kept on drinking until she passed out. Some time before morning, she woke with a sharp stab of terror of being found out. She soundlessly put the bottle back, and climbed into bed.

Through the following weeks, her need for these closet binges came over her more often. In time, it was every night. Some mornings, she vowed she would stop, but by night never could.

In some part of her mind, she sensed where she was headed. But that made her only more desperate during her high-pressured daytime hours. She took on ever more responsibilities and tasks to prove there was nothing wrong.

Elaine felt especially torn to be working with clients who were struggling as hard as they could not to take any alcohol or drugs at all. But she tried to brush that aside by telling herself they were much worse than she was—that she really didn’t have a problem because she knew so much, and she worked so hard and so well.

Then, one horrifying night, the closet door opened and there stood George. Elaine never asked how he happened to be there. She had burst into tears and sobbed that she needed help.

She would be eternally grateful that George understood, she says. Right away, she went off to a four-week inpatient rehabilitation program that started with several days’ detox. Elaine had felt utterly crushed on arriving, utterly beaten and hopeless. She couldn’t choke back her tears in the middle of the admittingoffice questions. But then the older staff member who was asking the questions had gotten up, come over, and given Elaine a hug.

Elaine will never forget how the woman had told her, “It’s over, dear. It’s really over.”

Elaine had been so deeply shaken by her bottom that she started going to AA meetings every night as soon as she left the rehab. Today, Elaine says, her life is outwardly much the same as before—her home life with George and the children, her work, their friends and social life. Inwardly, though, it all seems completely different. An old, nagging, deep-seated inadequacy is gone. Her compulsion to drink was lifted early, while still in rehab. Brief thoughts of drinking are rare. She ends them right away by phoning or seeing her AA sponsor or another AA friend.

Elaine now has, she says, “an abiding peace of mind” that has transformed everything in her life. “But, most important,” she says, “if you’re like I was when I started, you have no hope at all that anything can help. For me, I knew so much about this disease that I was certain nothing could save me. Nothing. I was terrified. Totally without hope. If you’re like that right now, take heart. This program really did work for me. And it really can work for you, too.”

What AA Basics Would Your Alcoholic/Addict Follow to Recover?

Simplicity is a prime virtue of AA’s program for surviving the ruinous and often fatal disease of alcoholism/addiction. Everything in AA aims at one supreme, single point: Don’t drink or drug. Not in even the slightest quantity. Not for any reason, no matter what happens. Not at any moment.

In essence, this is the only fundamental element of AA that’s absolutely necessary for recovery by the alcoholic/addict you’re concerned about. Notoriously, though, one of the main definitions of an alcoholic/addict is someone who cannot possibly stop.

•One Day at a Time, Don’t Drink or Drug—and Go to a Meeting

So, AA members ask the newcomer, can you stop just for one day—thisday, now? The newcomer who doesn’t need detox badly enough, and who is already hitting bottom badly enough, will say yes.

Fine, say AA members. We just don’t drink or drug “one day at a time.”Thisday. Today. And we get to an AA meeting tonight. Every night, at first.

At the meeting, members say, you’ll find that we’re all kinds of people who know all about how to stay away from a drink or a drug one day at a time. We will welcome you, and we’ll offer to help you by really caring about you—the way others cared about us when we were new. You’ll learn from us how we’ve gone through all that you’ve gone through. (Some of us have gone through even more.) You’ll learn what we do so that we still don’t have to drink or drug.

And, with us, they say, you’ll find that you don’t have to drink or drug today, either. If you do what we do, you’ll get what we’ve got: a life, a life clean and sober, a good life, in recovery.

•AA Members Help Your Alcoholic/Addict, and Their Own Recovery

Passages earlier in the chapter told about AA’s discovery of the unique power often possessed by a recovering alcoholic/addict to get an active alcoholic/addict started on recovery. AA made an even more important companion discovery concerning such power. This power works both ways—it works on the alcoholic/addict trying to help, as much as on the alcoholic/addict needing help. In fact, it typically proves more consistently effective on the helper than on the one being helped.

Discovery of this reverse effect on the helper marked the founding of AA. Future founder Bill W. discovered that he could not preserve his own then-new and shaky sobriety alone, by his own efforts. He could save his sobriety, his freedom from addiction, only by trying to help a hopelessly addicted and alcoholic Akron physician, Dr. Bob S., to start on recovery.

Bill did try (essentially by telling Dr. Bob his story), and stayed sober himself. The date of Dr. Bob’s last drink, on June 10, 1935, is AA’s founding date. Dr. Bob is the other founder. Each of the two drunks helping the other stayed sober. Alone, neither could do it.

•“Passing It On”

Ever since then, every AA member gratefully recalls getting extraordinary help when new to the program from longer-experienced members who said that any all-out help they gave greatly protected their own sobriety. They were passing it on, giving to others what had been given to them.

Helping others to recover as the best protection of one’s own recovery thus became one of the most effective parts of the “message” invented by AA—the message that here at last in human history is a way by which a great many previously hopeless alcoholics /addicts actually are recovering. AA members today accordingly try to “carry this message to alcoholics,” as it says in AA’s Twelfth Step.

•“You Can’t Do It Alone—and You Don’t Have To”

In almost anything he or she does in AA, the alcoholic/addict you care about will be helped by members carrying the message to him or her with their actions and words. In turn, your alcoholic/addict is likely to start helping in simple ways, such as going to and honestly speaking up in meetings, talking with others before and after meetings, setting up and putting away meeting chairs, and phoning other men (for a man) or women (for a woman) who are members. Getting involved with others in ways like these has been found extremely important to promoting recovery.

“It’s a we program,” members often observe. “I drank and drugged alone, but we get sober together.”

“You can’t do this thing alone,” one member recalls having been told in his early days. He was immensely heartened to hear what followed: “And you don’t have to.”

•Join an AA Group Soon

Two more basic commitments will almost certainly be “suggested” to the alcoholic/addict when he or she starts going to AA meetings. These are to join an AA group and to get an AA sponsor—and to do both in one’s first few meetings.

Incidentally, AA members merely “suggest” by tradition, in order to avoid alienating the often rebellious newcomer. Members typically accompany a suggestion by describing how they had felt much like the newcomer does at the moment, and how acting on the suggestion had eased their difficulty.

Joining a group is usually very simple, and is generally done by just giving a group meeting leader or chairperson one’s name, phone number, and date of last drink or drug. As noted earlier, anyone who says that she or he has “a desire to stop drinking” meets all the requirements for joining any AA group. Only the individual need make that decision to join. No AA group can reject his or her membership.

Often it helps to choose a group that has meetings that occur at the most convenient places and times. Newcomers sometimes sample a few different groups in order to see which one might feel most congenial. More important than sampling, though, is joining soon. Drifting among groups can be a kind of drifting away. Besides, members are free to change groups anytime later if they want.

•Get a Sponsor Soon

Choosing a “sponsor” as soon as possible in the group that one joins is also suggested to a newcomer.

A sponsor for something like a country club or fraternal order is someone who proposes one for membership. However, an AA sponsor is different. A sponsor usually has at least a year’s sober experience in AA and serves as a guide to the AA program. Most often, it’s thought that the sponsor should be of the same sex as the person sponsored (again, to avoid risking any possible romantic distraction from the vital task of staying sober).

In many groups, it’s customary for the newcomer to ask an experienced member to be his or her sponsor. It’s suggested that the member asked be a person whose sobriety and grasp of the AA program seem especially strong from what the newcomer can gather in one or a few early meetings. Some groups have a “temporary sponsor” list of members who have volunteered to serve in that capacity. A newcomer may be given a temporary sponsor from such a list.

Good reasons stand behind suggestions to get a sponsor no later than one’s first few meetings. Wide experience has shown personal guidance from a sponsor to be especially helpful when starting out in AA. And one can change to another sponsor at any time for whatever reason. On the other hand, some initial sponsors continue with the people they sponsor for many years.

•Basic Actions Enable Your Alcoholic/Addict to Learn More

If the alcoholic/addict gets through these basic actions, she or he has a very good chance of staying in recovery. He or she will learn a great deal more, especially about his or her own character and past, and about tailoring AA’s powerful and very many resources to his or her individual needs for safeguarding recovery. He or she will learn most vitally through other members. Reading AA books, pamphlets, and articles would also help.

Depending on how close you are, the alcoholic/addict starting in recovery may share with you something of all that’s being learned. You could also get the gist of much of it by continuing to go to AA Open Meetings. You’d find it informative, too, to read AA literature, especially a current edition ofAlcoholics Anonymous(traditionally called “the big book” in AA).

You yourself could safely afford to rely on reading for almost all of what you might want to know about AA. However, the alcoholic /addict in your life could do so only at risk. Exhaustive painful experience has shown that one cannot read oneself into recovery. One has to live it, with like souls.

•AA’s Unique Character Fosters Recovery

You and the alcoholic/addict would find AA unlike any other organization you’ve ever known. Its unique anonymity means that members generally avoid incurring public scorn as despicable drunks and addicts (even though recovering).

Anonymity in addition cultivates an atmosphere in meetings where members can be as completely honest about their addictioncaused wrongdoings and failures and scandals as they wish, and not be judged or gossiped about but instead be understood as having developed the disease of addiction—and be thus understood because everyone else there needs to be freed of just such shame and guilt. Honesty—especially about ever-recurring urges to drink and to drug, and about troubles that can bring urges on—helps break addiction’s denial.

AA is by basic provision exclusively self-supporting and absolutely nonprofit. Passing the basket at meetings (and having members who can afford it toss in a dollar) is the very widespread way in which groups pay for meeting places and refreshments. No one in any group gets paid for anything he or she does in AA. There is no money whatever to be made in AA. This keeps newcomers like your alcoholic/addict from suspecting he or she is being exploited for money.

Your alcoholic/addict should find no one on power trips in any AA group. AA’s Tradition Twelve decrees, in part, “place principles before personalities.” By custom, all group office holders—group chairpersons and steering committee members, and meeting chairpersons—rotate out of office every few months.

Paperwork and records are virtually nonexistent in AA groups, so that as much of the volunteer members’ time as possible will go into helping newcomers and troubled members get and stay sober. Also, group membership records are kept to the barest minimum (almost always, with no last names) and are kept strictly confidential in order to protect AA’s supreme anonymity principle. As a result, statistics about AA’s effectiveness and even its total membership are approximations based on surveys, sampling, and special studies.

•AA’s Effectiveness and Size

AA does have a General Service Office (GSO) in New York City at which some 110 full-time employees handle the production and distribution of official AA books and pamphlets. (These are sold essentially at cost, and almost exclusively to AA groups.) GSO employees also edit and issue AA’s monthly magazine, theA.A. Grapevine. They carry out the tasks of liaison and communication assigned GSO by AA’s extensive and active, all-volunteer structure of representation linking individual groups through district and area bodies to a central General Service Conference of delegates representing areas. This conference and the GSO technically serve the United States and Canada, but they also cooperate with and help out AA groups and bodies in many other countries.

Based on its latest triennial survey (made in 1998), GSO reported that AA had approximately two million current members worldwide, with some hundred thousand AA groups. Those groups functioned in more than one hundred countries.

Moreover, the GSO survey indicated that, among all AA members, 47 percent had been sober more than five years, 26 percent had been sober for one to five years, and 27 percent had been sober for less than one year.

•Alternatives to AA

One other characteristic of AA is its typical open-mindedness regarding any other source of help with recovery from alcoholism/ addiction. The AA way may not prove to be effective just by itself, or may not be acceptable at all, to some alcoholics/addicts. This might turn out to be the case with the alcoholic/addict you’re concerned about. If so, you have every reason to keep up your hopes. For such alcoholics/addicts, AA members will often urge other sources of help. Quite often, these are professional sources like those described in the next chapter.

ADDICTION-FREE: HOW TO HELP AN ALCOHOLIC OR ADDICT GET STARTED ON PECOVERY. Copyright © 2001 by Gene Hawes and Anderson Hawes. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10010.