HOW DO YOU WANT YOUR

CUP OF COFFEE ?

STRONG?  -  MEDIUM?  -  WEAK?



GRESHAM’S LAW - THAT BAD CURRENCY DRIVES OUT GOOD - HAS BEEN OPERATIVE IN THE LIFE OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. WEAK AA IS TENDING TO DRIVE OUT STRONG AA.

Page 4

This article originally appeared in the July, 1976 issue of “24 Magazine,” with the author unknown.

But a further point was also made - not directly, but by implication - in the defensive, back-pedaling, almost apologetic treatment of the whole subject of religious experience.  That point was the following: the authors and publishers of the Big Book, unofficial spokesmen for the movement, were responding to a change in the AA recovery pattern by lowering the spiritual level of aspiration of the society, a move they would not have dared to make in the early days but could, and even felt they must, make now that the society had become large and gained a reputation for respectability and reasonableness.  The facts of the situation in AA which prompted the rewording of the Twelfth Step and the adding of the explanatory appendix to the Big Book could have been summarized in this way:

"It is now possible to recover in one of two ways in AA.  Option one is the original, spiritual experience way which follows from working all of the Steps. Option two is the way of partial practice of the Steps, and primary dependence on the social, fellowship-related aspects of life in AA.  This second approach generally does not produce a spiritual experience as strong, full-program AA practice does.  It also violates our tradition that we should always place principles before personalities.  But in its favor, it requires less commitment and less work; it involves less in the way of life rearrangement; and it has proven itself sufficient in many cases to produce lasting abstinence from drinking."  But no such statement was ever made, and the switch in terms from spiritual experience to spiritual awakening had the net effect of clouding in everyone's mind the real nature of the change which had come about.

It was not a matter of conscious deception on anyone’s part.  It was just a failure to see a dividing into two camps when it had occurred.  This would have been an easy mistake in any case for those living through that period in AA's history, a quite understandable failure to see a trend developing, comparable to a mother's inability to notice growth changes in her own child. But in a movement committed almost before all else to the avoidance of controversy, blindness to this split was all but inevitable.

The drawback to the original, rigorous, strong-cup-of-coffee approach to the AA program was that it required new members to plunge into a drastic program of spiritual transformation, a course which has never in history had appeal with large masses of people.  Had the original approach remained the only approach, it is doubtful that AA would have reached anything like its present size of 850,000 members.  (1976)

But the weak-cup-of-coffee practice had even more serious flaws built into it. The relatively superficial life change which it produces is sufficient to get some alcoholics sober.  It is not adequate - it is not effective - it simply doesn't work - for a very large number of others.  This is particularly evident with the "hard" cases - the alcoholics who have been badly beat up physically and mentally before they arrive at their first AA meeting; the people whose alcoholism is complicated with drug abuse, perversion, criminal or psychotic tendencies, or a streak of psychopathology; and the "slippers," those who have developed a pattern of hanging around AA, staying sober for periods, but relapsing repeatedly into drinking.  (Generally, the slippers are alcoholics with psychopathic tendencies who keep coming back to AA but are unwilling or unable to work with root principles, notably rigorous honesty.)  Weak AA does not touch most of these people.  They cannot stay sober that way.

Yet if these hard cases find their way into an environment where strong AA, and nothing but strong AA, is being practiced, many of them are able to achieve lasting sobriety.  The East Ridge Community  in upstate  New York has worked with hundreds of these tough drunks over the past twelve years.  Strong AA is the standard fare at East Ridge, and they have a recovery rate of over seventy percent with these so-called AA failures.  No success turns to success for the lion's share of them when weak AA is replaced with strong AA.<?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O /><O:P> </O:P>

There is another, more insidious, danger built into weak AA.  In many cases the "recovery" produced by watered-down approaches to the Twelve Steps fails to hold up over the long haul.  What looked in the beginning like an easier, softer way to maintain happy sobriety yields progressively less and less contentment, finally ending in a complete reversal of momentum and a relapse into serious personal misery.  The end result may be a return to active alcoholism; or, short of that total disaster, it may be a sinking out into a life of discontented abstinence, marred by some combination of tension, resentment, depression, compulsive sick sex, and an overall sense of meaninglessness.  Either way, it is a final failure to reap the benefits of the AA program; it is, in the last analysis, a failure to recover.

Two disturbing tendencies are noticeable in contemporary AA.  One is toward a lower recovery rate overall.   For the first twenty years, the standard AA recovery estimate was seventy-five percent.  AA experience was that fifty percent of the alcoholics who came to AA got sober right away and stayed sober.  Another twenty-five percent had trouble for a while but eventually got sober for good, and the remaining twenty-five percent never made a recovery.   Then there was a period of some years when AA headquarters stopped making the seventy-five percent recovery claim in their official literature.  In 1968,  AA's General Service Organization published a survey indicating an overall recovery rate of about sixty-seven percent.   The net of all this seems to be that as AA has gotten bigger and older, its effectiveness has dropped from about three in four to about two in three.  (Note: two in three was in 1976 - our data shows numbers much LESS in 1997 - 1 in 15 )

The second unhealthy trend movement-wise is not backed by figures, but it is clear enough to any careful observer of the AA scene.  As the fellowship grows older in time, its class of old-timers, alcoholics sober ten years and longer, grows.  And the question of the staying power of an AA recovery looms even larger.  It is an unhappy fact that growing numbers of these old-timers find the joy going out of their sobriety, that many of them search around frantically for ways to recapture the old zest for booze-free living, often ending up in such blind alleys as lunatic religions, dangerous pop psychological fads, or chemical alternatives like acid, pot, tranquilizers, and mood elevators.  And far too many end up either back drinking or, what is almost as sad, sunk in despondency, hostility, bizarre acting-out patterns of one sort or another, or just plain, devastating boredom.

All of this is unnecessary. The gradually shrinking recovery rate and the old-timer blues do not require a complex or an innovative solution.  The answer lies in a return to original, strong AA.  The men who wrote the Big Book were, as it turns out, right after all.  There is no easier, softer way.  The extra work and commitment required by the full program approach pay enormous dividends. They make sobriety fun because they do not make sobriety an end in itself.  Mere non-drinking is a very negative kind of life goal.  Even the power of a world-scale society of non-drinkers can be in and of itself only a temporary and limited deterrent for most alcoholics.

The majority of those who become addicted are people with a mystical streak, an appetite for inexhaustible bliss.  We sought in bottles what can only be found in spiritual experience.  AA worked in the first place because its Twelve Steps were a workable set of guidelines to spiritual experience.  Growth of the movement made possible for a time a kind of parasitism in which partial practitioners and non-practitioners of the spiritual principles were able to feed off the strength of those who had undergone real spiritual experiences.  But at this point in time, (1976) the parasites have already drained the host organism of a considerable portion of its life force.

It is late in the day to be sounding a call for a return to the original way, the way of faithful practice of the full program.  Still, a great deal of life is left in the fellowship, and a major revival is possible if enough of us see our dangerous situation, personally and as a fellowship, in time.  What we need to do is clear enough.  It is spelled out in the first seven chapters of the Big Book.  What it all boils down to - especially for us old-timers - is a willingness to continue practicing all the principles in all our affairs today, rather than resting on our laurels, taking our stand on what we did way back when, in our first weeks and months of sobriety.

But we must not fail to face squarely the need for change, the need for re-dedication.  Complacency, smugness in our record of success, is our greatest enemy.  If we, as a recovered-addict society, are unwilling to reverse our present course, the outlook Is clear enough.  We stand to recapitulate in less than a century what the Christian church has spent the last two thousand years demonstrating: that even the best of human institutions tend to deteriorate in time; and that size in spiritual organizations is all too often achieved at the expense of compromise of basic principles and the progressive abandonment of original goals and practices.

I owe my life to AA.  I hope we have the vision, and the humility, to change.  I know we can if we will.  This much is certain: the Twelve Steps are as inspired, as effective, as un-compromised, and as practicable now as they were when they were first put in writing thirty-seven years ago.  (1976)