One Day at a Time

To Thine Own Illness Be True

Oh God Almighty! Have you ever experienced what happens when someone dares to utter the words "real alcoholic" or "true alcoholic" in an AA meeting? It's hysterical. And if you do it - you had better hold your ass. I'm tellin' ya - I think you would do better to stand up and announce, "I LOVE HITLER."

But convey your experiecne as a recovered alcoholc and the dissenters come out of the woodwork to dispel the notion that such a thing could be possible. Of course, other sopinions about us are not really any of our business even when some tries to make it our business.

I have heard it said that anyone who refers to themselves a "real" or "recovered" alcoholic is only doing so to assuage their own egos. I will tell you from experience that the exact opposite is more correct. Heres is why:

Recovered alcoholic Twelve Step practitioners do inventory. Throughout the day and more intensly at night when we retire. We have a directed set of twelve specific questions that we ask and answer each and every evening at bedtime. This is part of our Step Eleven practice.

From this we well know where the ego stands and what it fears - and trust me - it does not like disapproval from others. Hates it. So much so that it finds it extremely difficult to stand in a room infiltrated with judging eyes who it knows will disapprove of hearing that a member has recovered and has qualified himself as the "real alcoholic" describes by the AA co-authors in "Alcoholics Anonymous."

Standing in a room of eye rolling, judgmental and critical old farts who are going to whisper and pass criticism for relating our experience as real, recovered alcoholics ain't as easy it sounds brother. It takes a a deflation of ego that reaches profound levels.

It is not self placed pat on the back that some folks imagine and it very often means dislodging an undeserved Nike or two from the rectum later in the evening at worst.

At best it can mean dodging the heat-seeking eyeball missiles launched from white haired, red faced, still-suffering old-timers or caustic head shaking and mutterings of hypnotized POP-AA zombies --- all for the sake of the newcomer who must hear that he can recover, that anyone who tells hi otherwise os ignorant and full of shit - that he might be a real alkie and that you have the solution to his problem if he is - even if most speakers he is about to hear will bore him silly and who may have nothing in more in common with him than an outie navel.

Plenty of folks will not like to know this but there is such a thing as a “true alcoholic” or “real alcoholic”. They won’t want to know it because if they did they might discover that they have been misled to believe that they can consider themselves alcoholic members of AA when in fact not only are they not truly alcoholic but not even qualified for membership.

Just because someone sits in a church basement on a Saturday night and says" I am an alcoholic when I say so" then says so -- does not mean it is true or that they are correct.

Hell I can go wading down the street here into Vineyard Sound and say, "I'm a bluefish". Does that mean I am one?

You can easily spot a person in AA who hasn’t bothered to familiarize himself with his own malady -- can’t help others if he does that -- nor the very Fellowship to which he claims to so love and cherish. Just ask him if he has recovered. The answer will be something outlandish and totally foreign to the AA's base concept of recovery that it will be apparent.

They will say something like “No one ever recovers from alcoholism . . . “ or “Its just one day at a a time” or some other snippet of pithy sloganeering common in religious cults. Pity -- since the co-founders of Alcoholism not only claim to have all recovered from alcoholism and achieved permanent subtlety but also claim that almost anyone else so afflicted could too. All that is required is the capacity to be honestly* - something that not all have, but most. God help you if you an alcohols and have no such capacity.

Alcohol abusers fitting AAs description of the alcoholic, possessing obsession AND allergy are classified in AA's book, for AA's purposes, as "Real alcoholics", "Alcoholics of our type" and those of the "Hopeless variety".

AAs Program is designed EXCLUSIVELY for THIS classification of drinker. Not for those who can "Put the plug in the jug" - "Just don't drink and go to meetings" or the most powerful of all of the heavy drinkers: Those who choose not to drink today by keeping it in the day.

Alcohol abusers NOT fitting AAs description - who for some other reason - have CHOSEN to drink problematically, yet do possess the ability to stop, using the POWER they already possess are referred to as non-alcoholics by AAs co-authors.

BOTH those passing and those failing this litmus test presently comprise AAs "membership" and these appear as a de facto sub-culture within AA separating itself from AAs real alcoholics.

This "subclass" of non-alcoholic AA "members" promulgate NOT AA's Program of recovery, but its' own alternative recovery methods of subtle mind control techniques like sloganism, guilt, and distractive technique like "over-Fellowshipping". You know - "meetings meetings meetings" frequently some asinine number like seven or even ten a week and "keep it green" -- stuff like that.

Non-AA "cultish" methods, like "Just don't drink and go to meetings" become offensive to anyone insightful. It repels some OUT of AA to alternative treatments, ultimately "unhooking" them from a fellowship, for which they never qualified as members anyway, yet
now they are dry and able to seek alternatives. This is good.

These ex-AAs are angry at AAs who mislead and attempted to coerce them into staying. Who can blame them? Haven't they themselves failed to investigate AAs Program outlined in AA's Book. Haven't they been gullible in accepting direction from people who don't even practice AAs published Program of recovery? Wasn't it THEY who failed to make the distinction between AAs Fellowship, and AAs published Program?

In this, they are themselves at fault.

Alternatively some of these non-alcoholics (i) remain IN the AA Fellowship, embracing others who, like them, do not need AAs Program to solve their drinking problem, yet bizarrely blend into a "meeting dependent" prison. Or (ii) allow themselves to be, in effect, self-"jettisoned" through their own sensibilities, fueled by the lame Fellowshipping of those unwitting, "Cultish", non-alcoholic AAs themselves that they have come to recognize as some form of mass craziness. This frees them to find appropriate help. Ergo, they HAVE BEEN unwittingly HELPED, even they do sometimes fall prey to the charlatan Anti-AA cult leaders like the Trimpeys, Peeles et al.

For the non-alcoholic, learning that one can STOP without changing their very being is a valuable lesson, for NO ONE has EVER recovered from ANYTHING they didn't have in the first place.

Combine millions of the real alcoholics AA has helped over seventy years with those form whom AA has NO SOLUTION, and are forced OUT of a program useless to them anyway, and we see that Alcoholics Anonymous has done more good than harm. And that harms upon others has been brought on not by AA, but by those themselves claiming harm.

Peace,

Danny S - RLRA

*Not to be confused with the requirement for AA membership which requires that one suffer from alcoholism and have a desire to stop drinking 1

1 Tradition Three - both long an short forms