I’ve come to realize I like hearing an old-timer share at a meeting. I mean the old old timers who are pushing 30 years sober. I heard one at a meeting today, and somewhere in the back of my mind I find I have labeled them “badasses of sobriety”.
The person I heard today had all the details that spark my half-bemused, half-disapproving, half-in-awe** interest. The sponsor walking up and saying “I’m your sponsor”. Followed by the same person explaining “this is your home group”. The standard tale of aggressive extension of the tools of sobriety… including the terrifying news that, aggressive as the old approach was, if you walked away nobody was going to chase you down and drag you back. The not taking any crap off of a bigmouth newcomer. The ‘shut up and listen, you’re not ready to talk’.
I think perhaps the idea that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink was clearer in AA back then. I have heard folks in the rooms talk about how they were having a hard time getting their sponsees to attend meetings, or to work the steps, or do the reading, or how hard it was to get them to answer the phone (or the door) after yet another relapse.
Now, maybe this is viewing the past through rose-colored glasses. After all, I wasn’t there. But it strikes me that in those days, the effort was geared more towards getting the newbie to stay than to get them to come back.
That might seem to make absolutely no sense. Let me explain.
By ‘come back’, I don’t mean come to the next meeting. If you stay in AA, you come back to the next meeting, whether you go to a meeting a day or a meeting a week. I mean come back in after a relapse.
In the old days, it sounds like it was made clear that AA wasn’t going anywhere even if you did. In other words, if you go out, it’s up to you to come back in the door.
I’d love to hear from someone who remembers those days on this… but it seems to me that there’s a lot more of tracking down the chronic relapser these days, and begging them to come back and sit through some more meetings.
By doing this, I think it makes it harder to get the point. The point is not that the AA police will call and knock on your door until you come back to the rooms, collect another 2 or 3 chips, and go back out to drink again.
The point is, come and see if you want what you see. If you don’t want it, go home. If it turns out you’re not really an alcoholic, but a normal person who drinks too much, well… sitting in on a few meetings and hearing the crap we alcoholics put ourselves through may just put you in the right frame of mind to not get behind the wheel after drinking, or to put down that one too many.
If you are really an alcoholic, and you don’t want to stay… well, best of luck and hope to see you another day, but get the hell out there and drink! Either you’ll die, or you’ll find your way to sobriety.
Either way, problem solved, in the long run.
It’s harsh, the old timers’ way. We like to be a little more easygoing now.
I’m coming to appreciate that old harshness. Alcoholism is harsh. Waking up with mystery bruises is harsh. Waking up with borderline hypothermia because you broke your living room window in a blackout in the middle of winter is harsh. Puking blood is harsh. Washing strings of stomach lining off of your shoes is harsh. Knowing how the end of your pistol tastes is harsh.
Dying drunk with nothing to be proud of is harsh. And that one is the only one of the list I don’t know anything about.
Everyone who has sobered up from hopeless dead-drunk alcoholism in AA knows that harshness; not with the exact same details, but I guarantee you they know harsh.
I’d love it to be so, but the longer I stay sober, the less I believe that the way out can be nice. It can be happy, we can approach the newcomer with a smile and a joke, but the edges of the road are made with barbed wire.
I think being too soft is a common hazard in the rooms today. And being too soft, I think, will kill as at least as many and probably more than being too hard.
**You may have noticed that this adds up to more than two halves. If this surprises you, you still have a thing or two to learn about drunks.
The Tao Of Chaos 