‘Hi, I’m Nick and I’m an alcoholic’. I’ve said these words at countless AA meetings over the last two years, and they trip with surprising ease off the tongue, largely because a) they’re true, and b) everyone else at a meeting says them too, so you know you’re probably in the right place. In part 1 of this post, I said that God gets mentioned quite a bit in AA meetings, which came as a surprise to me at first. Like a lot of people, my only experience of ‘the fellowship’ was through seeing it in the movies. I just assumed that people sat in a circle, talked through their problems and that talking helped them see the wood from the trees. And although it is a simple program in many ways, there’s a lot more to it than that and yes, sorry, but God is part of the solution. But here’s the thing, a veritable masterstroke of therapeutic insight, that allows people into AA who may completely reject the notion of God and religion, and allow them on the path to recovery: it’s a God of your own understanding.
As such, to the recovering addict, ‘God’, may be a higher power that can take pretty much any form you like: your standard heavenly deity, complete with long white beard and robe, nature, the music of Leonard Cohen or whoever else (as long as it isn’t Take That obvs), Group Of Drunks, Buddha, the wind, Jesus Christ, the love you bear for your children; anything that says ‘higher power’ to you. I heard of one guy in Melbourne whose higher power was the tram he took home from work that didn’t stop at the liquor store, so he knew he could get home without being overwhelmed by temptation.
The genius behind Alcoholics Anonymous was a prophet called Bill Wilson (or Bill W to use the AA anonymising protocol) and his co-founder Dr Robert Smith (Dr Bob), who reckoned, along with Carl Jung, that addiction was a spiritual problem that required a spiritual solution. If his own stories are to be believed, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be, Wilson was once one of the drunkest men of the 20th century – useful experience, it turned out. A successful businessman, operating in the 1920s, Wilson destroyed his life with alcohol on more than one occasion and, after multiple hellish relapses, came to an understanding that talking the problem through with a fellow alcoholic (Dr Bob in this case), was extremely helpful. He was also approached by a friend, a recovered alcoholic from the Oxford Group, a kind of early religious version of AA, who suggested that addicts required something more than just a good chat. Wilson, cautious of religion, hesitated until it was suggested that a god of the alcoholic’s own understanding was perhaps an easier way in. And so it came to be. This insight, or rhetorical twist, whatever you want to call it, opened AA up to pretty much all comers, atheist or otherwise, and went on to change and save the lives of untold millions of people.
Bill Wilson and Dr Bob realised that recovery from addiction is very much a social process, because addiction festers and grows in isolation. So whilst I’m not particularly happy to wind up as an alcoholic and found it very hard to go to my first few meetings, I am immensely grateful that I’m able to sit comfortably with a group of complete strangers and say the words that to a large, but not exclusive, extent define who I am.
So, yeah, it’s not easy sometimes, in fact it’s a royal pain in the arse, but hi: I’m Nick and I’m an alcoholic.
One day at a time.
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