The Spiritual Malady Versus the Medical Disease – Norma A.

Hello, my name's Norma and I'm an alcoholic. So this week we're going to look at Tradition 6, which states, An AA group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose. So in and outside of AA, we give information about our meetings, our steps, et cetera, but not particularly on alcoholism in the medical sense. AA doesn't call alcoholism a disease but an illness or a malady. The disease concept came from outside of AAA. The more we bring outside lingo into AA, the more it proliferates. It is our job as AA members to clarify with the sponsees and in AA meetings through our literature to maintain a clear understanding of what AA is, that we are not an agency, we are Not an organization, and we are NOT professional, but we are a spiritual entity with one purpose. and the big book says on page 30 that we are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking that is the main description of alcoholism also if if and when you honestly want to you find you cannot quit entirely or have little control over the amount you take you're probably alcoholic and that's on page 44 it also says you may be suffering from an illness that only a spiritual experience will conquer so alcoholism is not a disease in the same sense as strep throat tp or syphilis is a disease because the spiritual experience cannot cure strep throat syphillis or tv only antibiotics will do that um it's like what dr paul says in his story acceptance is the answer there he had a pill for every ill and he was sick a lot But the pills that he took ultimately did not solve his problem with alcoholism. And when he stopped living in the problem, he says, and began to live in the solution and accepted help from God in AA, he found the spiritual solution for his spiritual malady. In the early days of AA, because of the ignorance that was widespread about alcoholism, professionals began to set up alcoholism information centers. People began to form educational agencies like Councils on Alcoholism, MHMR, drug abuse agencies. But these are not AA's purpose and they are not AAA's business. We can cooperate with our friends, but we stay out of the professional end of it. We are not into prevention, education, or reform, which is the old-fashioned word for treatment. Outside agencies like to have our participation because we have pretty much the best track record of success. tradition six sets the boundaries of our relationship with outside agencies there's a story that when one of our pamphlets medications and other drugs came along and we were looking at putting this pamphlet together and it came to the floor of the convention. About 96 experts appeared, all kinds of psychologists, doctors, professors offering advice about what to put in and what to take out, etc. But we AAs are not professionals and if we offer our opinions on medications it can be devastating. One of our trustees tells a story about a young woman who came into AA, newly sober, very excited, looking up to the AA members there that were older, more experienced. Some of them found out she was on medication and said, well, if you're taking medications, you're not sober. This girl wanted to do AA right. She went home, poured all her drugs into the sink, but it was medications that she had gotten from having a brain injury. And these medications she was on were antipsychotic drugs to prevent seizures. So when she stopped taking the medication, she went into convulsions and she died. That's a good example of how opinions can kill us. And so if we are not epileptic ourselves, we have no business giving advice. If we are not diabetic, if we're not afflicted with whatever real condition someone else has prescribed medication for, we have no business telling them anything. We have only one thing to share, our experience, strength, and hope. How we were drinking, how we couldn't stop drinking, how we could live, how he couldn't die, and how he helped us to get sober and stay sober. David A. says there's three kinds of alcoholics, drinking alcoholics sober alcoholics and dead alcoholics and the drinking kind and the dead kind outnumber us. Another thing Tradition 6 describes is that we do not lend the AA name to any facility. Outside groups combat alcoholism and members of AA sometimes start organizations. there's a lot of tax free money, government money, grant money available to little groups that go into the drunk business and then someone decides that they want to be an alcoholism counselor and they think that because they have sponsored others it qualifies them to be an alcoholics counselor but does true counselors have to be qualified counselors not just enthusiastic alcoholics turned doctor so that means you go to school you do your studies you get your degree and then you're qualified super promoters in the early days had ambitions for drying out places farms and the same thing's going on today with its promoters we have so many sober houses halfway houses rest farms etc run by and patronized by aa members and they're practically on every corner and that's okay. But when money and property is involved, our experience shows that it should be totally separate from any AA group. No AA names or inferred names like 12-step should be used. Again, because of AA's success they would like to be associated with us by these kinds of things and ride on the coattails of AA success So the question is, how do we cooperate without affiliation? We cooperate by welcoming referrals from treatment to AA, bringing people from treatment in. So perhaps potential AA members might identify when they come to meetings. Carrying AA meetings into treatment or correctionals for the same reason. informing potential AA members there about the home group, the steps, our recovery program, our literature. We bring meeting schedules in and grapevines and we share about other types of AA resources and intergroups and whatever we can make available information about AA. What if an AA member works at an outside agency? Well, our literature says that we wear one hat on the job if we are an alcoholism counselor. But there's no AA counselor. There's only AA members. So if you go to a meeting, you take off your professional hat and you're a member of AA, not an expert trying to educate the fellowship. there's an unfortunate pattern many of us have observed of the many gainfully employed counselors health workers or other professionals we seldom see them in meetings are active in service they seem to think that their job is their 12-step work but still 12-stop work by our traditions is never to be paid for Later, some of these relapse. Sometimes they make it back, realizing their mistake was using their job as a substitute for AA service work. So why don't we have AA hospitals? Well, because we tried that in the past, and our unity was destroyed because there were too many busybodies. You have 50 members involved, you get 50 dictators all trying to run the show, And it creates controversy, divides us, disturbs the unity of the fellowship. And there's lots of stories in the 12 and 12 about things like this that has happened when it comes to trying to mix education, religion, medicine, reform with AA. the confusion that it causes when we try to marry ourselves to other enterprises and what happens when we try to interact with the judicial system who want to put people who may or may not be alcoholics coming to the meetings and want us to take responsibility for sobering them up. It just gets very confused. On the political end, we can't endorse anything or any enterprise like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. Any kind of fundraising, individual members can do this, but AA as a whole cannot endorse anything. And so when AA was offered a public relations job with a distilling company, The director of publicity was offered to an Alcoholics Anonymous member because he had credibility as a sober person, but it would break his anonymity. It would also link the AA name to some distillery, which, you know, some drunk on TV might watch that and say, oh, AA recommends whiskey, and other problems came of that. This member changed his mind about the job and realize that AA had saved his life and AA's well-being has to come first. So we don't endorse or lend our AA name to any cause but our own. And the more an AA group minds its own business, the better off we are. You know, we have general influence everywhere simply by the way we live. We may think we can help the world more, But the more we stick to our primary purpose, the reality is the more we can help everyone else by our changed lives. That is effective enough. In every field, AA has had its influence in the medical field, psychiatry, religion, business, research, rehab, education, therapeutic groups, you name it. You know, more than 156 Self-help groups, I think maybe even up to 300 or more now, has adapted our 12 steps with a different singleness of purpose. We wouldn't let NA use our book. They have their own book. You know, they have got their own steps modeled after ours. they realized they need their own recovery group because they're powerless over addictions. And they decided that AALingal, like sober, would not serve them and they used the term addiction instead. And so we do set guidelines for our traditions to be adopted. we don't ask for anybody to change our steps if they do they're not aa so those guidelines are in place in the early days we stayed away from helping everyone else but our attraction and our success rate caused others to be successful i'm going to read a little bit from the language of the heart on tradition six page 83 and this is what bill writes says tradition six enjoins the group never to go into business or to lend the aa name or money credit to any outside enterprise no matter how good Strongly expressed is the opinion that even clubs should not bear the AA name. They ought to be separately incorporated and managed by those individual AAs who need or want clubs enough to financially support them. We would thus divide the spiritual from the material, confine the AA movement to its sole aim, and ensure, however wealthy as individuals we may become, that AA itself shall always remain poor. We dare not risk the distraction of corporate wealth. Years of experience have proven these principles beyond doubt. They have become certainties, absolute verities for us. That experience is universal. Thank God we AAs have never been caught in the kind of religious or political disputes which embroil the world of today. As we ought to face the fact that we have often quarreled violently about money, property, and the administration thereof, money and quantity has always been a baleful influence in group life. Let a well-meaning donor present an AA group with a sizable sum, and we break loose. Nor does trouble abate until that group, as such, somehow disposes of its bankroll. So the core of our AA is one alcoholic talking to another. Whether that be sitting on a curb in a home or at a meeting, it's the message, not the place. It's the talk, not beyonds, that does our work. just places to meet and talk that's about all AA needs beyond these a few small offices a few secretaries at their desk a few dollars apiece a year easily met by voluntary contributions trivial indeed are expenses and I was talking just before on the way here about how even AA events should be affordable for everyone so that all can participate and that there are some controversies around larger conventions all over Texas that have expensive fees and not everyone gets to participate because of that. But Marty Mann was one of the first women alcoholics. She did a lot of public education and got into helping scientific research and get the backing, the money, the effort to change the attitudes of society against alcoholics and she helped explain who and what AA was all about. And she was an individual who chose to step away from AA and into the professional field but kept her anonymity and helped change things, and individuals can do that. And Bill was very much in favor of what treatment centers, hospitals, schools, churches, other outside agencies, what they could do to help us alcoholics in areas that perhaps the home group could not help. But he was really interested in the treatment centers, doing things like offering a medical detox, taking care of the physical needs for the first 30 days or so, and the medical monitoring that might be necessary for those alcoholics that could go into convulsions from withdrawals and stuff. And also providing education, especially for young people. Bill was really interested in seeing that people could be reached before they hit a really low bottom. And he writes about that in a very interesting article in the Language of the Heart called On the Alcoholism Front, on page 184. And he rights this, talking about educating the public. Let's start at the bottom of the heap. heat. Our mental institutions are flooded with the brain damaged and deeply psychopathic. Here and there a few find their way back, but not many. Most are gone beyond recall. The next world is their best hope. But more research upon their condition might add to our knowledge of prevention for the benefit of others who are approaching that jumping off place. Great numbers of alcoholics are found in prisons. Either alcohol directly got them in the jams that landed them there, or they had to drink in order to commit a crime toward which they had compulsive tendency. Here research, medical, psychiatric, and social is plainly needed. AA can't do this, but others have. Every large city has its skid row. The so-called derelict alcoholics, doubtless numbers, several hundreds and thousands. Some are so psycho and so damaged, the mental hospital is their destination. The rest of these countless men and women clog police blotters, courts, jails, and hospitals. To them, the cost in suffering is incalculable. The cost to society, even in dollars, is immense. Huge numbers of these, not yet legally insane, are thus condemned to mill hopelessly about. Can anything be done? In all probability, yes. Perhaps these sufferers can be transferred to farms who are in some sort of quarantine confinement. They can do enough work to support themselves, be in better health, save their respective cities' sons in trouble. This and other related experiments are beginning to offer much hope for the skid row. Individual AAs are helping, but most of the work and money will have to come from elsewhere. What now? The millions of alcoholics who haven't hit prisons, asylums, skid row. These, we're told, constitute the vast majority. At the moment, their best hope of recovery seems to be AA. Well then, why haven't these millions come to us? Why haven't they tried to get well by some other method, maybe? Any AA can give you a quick answer. They aren't ready. They don't know how sick they are. If they did, they would flock to treatment, just as though they had diabetes or cancer. The problem, therefore, is how to expose them to the facts that will convince them they are gravely ill. More than anything, the answer seems to be in education. Education in the schoolrooms, medical colleges, among clergy, employers, families, the public at large. From cradle to grave, the drunk and the potential alcoholic will have to be completely surrounded by true and deep understanding and by a continuous barrage of information. The facts about its illness, its symptoms, its grim seriousness. Why should an alcoholic have to wait until he's 55 and horribly mangled to find out that he's a very sick person when enough education of the right kind might have convinced him at 30 or 35. And so he concludes, Let us work alongside these projects of hope and health that have kept them at it, the recovery of those millions who have not yet found their way out. let us work alongside these projects of promise to hasten the recovery of those millions who have not yet found their way out these varied labors do not need our special endorsement they need only a helping hand when we as individuals can give it and one thing that gso wrote in a letter a couple of years ago to the treatment facilities committee chairs was how important it was with these outside agencies like treatment centers and jails to be communicative, cooperative, and flexible. The surveys that come out every few years say that 33 percent of our membership comes from treatment centers so you know that's something important. The pamphlets that I mentioned that kind of go along with this tradition is AA member, medications and other drugs. Very good experience in that pamphlet. Speaking at non-AA meetings. What you do when you go out somewhere and you're not going to an AA meeting but you're maybe presenting information about AA. AA and treatment facilities If you go to treatment centers This pamphlet has valuable information About how to cooperate Communicate And stay within our traditions While you're there AA is a resource for the healthcare professional If you're a professional How do you How do You stand by tradition 6 And still do your work And And this last pamphlet is how AA members cooperate with professionals, our main one on cooperation but not affiliation. All of these are excellent resources. All of them are AA's experience. And the last thing I want to mention is AA puts out a newsletter for professionals, And it's just this one here, which was from fall of 2012, says the 2011 AA membership survey reveals current trends. Frequently asked questions about anonymity. Pamphlets that have been revised. AA's big book, A Cultural Icon. Just various things that could be of interest to the professionals that will interact with potential AA members. So that's what we have on Tradition 6, and I would suggest that you go to the questions that are out of the grapevine traditions checklist and see where you stand on this tradition.