Tradition 11 and Putting Principles Before Personalities – Anonymous

principles before personalities and it will last for about 50 for 50 minutes I will open with the presentation of approximately 10 minutes after which the discussion will be open to the floor it is suggested that we keep the discussion centered on the workshop topic and that no one speak to any question for a second time before everyone who wishes to speak has the opportunity to do so the topic as I just said is anonymity principles before personalities and I have a reputation I guess among my friends for telling really bad jokes so I'm going to start out this presentation by telling one and it's about Bernie Schwartz is drinking in a bar not to be offensive to anybody and he's this guy let's call him Joe sitting next to when Bernie starts talking about all the people he knows me he names this long list of really well known people and the guy's real cynical and says hey you know i i kind of doubt what you're saying he says i'll tell you what i'll make a little bet with you 10 bucks you name anybody on that list and i'll call them up and see if i know him so the guy says okay john foresight okay well that guy's on the list so he calls him up and bernie calls up says hi there john do me a favor talk to this guy and tell him you know me so john forsyth gets on the phone and he talks to joe and says hey and bernie are good friends we go way back well joe is totally amazed he says i can't believe it that you really know all those people and brenny says well yeah tell you the truth i really can't think of anyone i don't know in fact i'll make another bet with you let's make this for a hundred just name anybody anybody at all and i'll bet i know him he says okay paul newman so the guy calls up paul newman and burnie calls up Paul Newman and gets on the phone says says hey i know bernie we're great friends we are really good friends uh well at this point joe's just totally dumbfound and he says okay you couldn't know everybody and he thinks well i says well you don't know the pope the guy says hey I know the Pope we're great friends he says ok we're going to do this right this time and they go he says I'm gonna buy a plane ticket to Rome and I want to see you with the Pope so they go to Rome in and Bernie goes in to see the Pope and and Joe stand out in a square with a lot of other people and twelve o'clock the doors open and out walks Bernie with the Pope guy next to Joe Poulsen says who is that guy stand up there next to Bernie Schwartz the reason I chose that joke is I guess there's I at some level in some ways tend to be sort of an aspiring Bernie Schwartze and I may be the only one in AA that's ever had an ego problem but I think from what I from some of the stuff I read I think that's not the case and I think my presentation is talk a bit about ego and I have to say it's a little bit ironic for me to be standing up here talking about ego because I think getting in front of a microphone like this can be a big ego trip for me but be that as it may I'm just going to talk a little about the the anonymity traditions kind of as I see them and then open it up for other people um as i was riding up here with another woman in the program we were talking about this a little bit and one of the things that she said that i i thought was really right on is that it's really these i'm not sure i'm saying this right but the idea i got from this was this tradition can be really confusing for newcomers a lot of times we don't understand you know like someone just came out of treatment or or just walked into the meeting and we're really preoccupied with our sobriety and it's kind of hard to say you know what's this anonymity stuff and I personally think part of the trouble with the anonymity thing also from my point of view is that it's confusing because you think you understand it but but what I didn't understand is that there's a lot more levels of meaning or at least a few more than I thought there was when I first came into AA or into the program I actually started in another 12-step program I I thought anonymity seemed pretty clear it meant that I don't supposedly when I see you know John Smith walking down the street I don t say okay there's John Smith I know him from an AA meeting and I don' t reveal you know what his personal stuff is going on like you know he's having a big big problem at work you know this kind of stuff I don''t know if I practiced that perfectly but you know I thought it was pretty clear and I guess one of the thoughts i had i know i don't know if dennis bauer is here but he's our area pi person and i know periodically he works with people that have these anonymity breaks in the paper you know periodically there'll be somebody in the newspaper that uh... you know fred schwartz or whoever and uh... he's a member of alcoholics anonymous and that stated real clear up front and usually he's talking about something else in conjunction with alcoholics unanimous it's my opinion i guess i don' t know but in my opinion a lot of times i don''t think these people step out and say hey there's the 11th tradition of aa screw it you know i don't care i'm going to get up there and do it anyhow i suspect a lot of people are not familiar with that tradition and i think for me i saw that tradition at some point i saw the tradition and i came to an understanding that we were not supposed to break anonymity at the level of press radio tv and films it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me why we shouldn't do that uh someone said because well what's if someone breaks anonymity and then they go out and get drunk uh well okay that that does make some sense you know they make a poor example i guess what to me really made it crystal clear is there is that thing in a comes of age where bill w talks about how this tradition developed and what he talks about is um that there was a time when anonymity breaking was going on you know quite a bit and he was really kind of in the forefront of that bill w made a point of going out and getting his name put in a whole bunch of papers and stuff like that and he did it at least you know consciously later you know I think he may be question to somebody he did with the very best intentions you know he really wanted to see a develop and to grow the what happened was pretty soon there was other people jumping on the bandwagon there's all kinds of people well yeah we're all gonna hold we'll get out there and we'll break our anonymity and we're more than willing to put our names before the public and it seemed like what happened from reading that book is as more people did it it got to be more and more self-seeking like there was some guy that wanted to start a crusading magazine that was sort of promoted promoted prohibition and he wanted to do that you know as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and I think you know if you stop to think about that what's going to turn a drunk out there off more more than hearing that AlcoholicsAnonymous is supporting prohibition and, you know, we're preaching against drinking. Another guy at the same time, the liquor company wanted to hire another guy to speak for them as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous saying something on the order of, you know... We understand that certain people can't drink and you shouldn't drink a lot, but it's okay if you can do it moderately, something like that. Another guy was running for political office and just wanted to use his AA membership to try to get more votes. And what was happening and i think what my what my perception after reading this is what happens when we start breaking our anonymity at the level of press radio and tv is it real fast turns into a personality thing and an ego trip for a lot of people and it can be real self-seeking and we have a lot of goodwill among the press but if they start seeing people you know talking about aa and it's real clear that they're out there trying to do something like that uh they're going to get turned off so that was kind of another uh thing with anonymity i guess in that sense i see the 11th tradition in two two ways um helping us and helping the program helping helping aa in the sense that it i think it protects aa it puts the principles before the personality and i read somewhere i don't remember where that it's easy to argue with a personality it's it's easy to dislike a personality there's probably not too many people that don't get that don'T have something about their personality that for some reason just turns certain people off but it's um it's a lot harder to argue with a principle for example brotherly love which to me is maybe the biggest principle or one of the bigger principles behind this program it's why harder to get up and argue with that principle than with the person and I think by putting those you know principles before the personalities that we make this you know that it really protects our program and gives the image we want to see I think it protects the individual in that it helps with that ego problem i mentioned that i have one uh it's always kind of strange to me whenever i'm into my ego it's like i want all this attention and stuff and it's like i need all this to be happy or something and yet the more i'm in to it the less happy i am i feel a lot better when i kind of can let that go and you know focus on something else besides because it's never enough anyhow if you can relate to what i'm saying and i guess the last thing i want to say another level that i came to see the anonymity is you know spiritual tradition the spiritual foundation of all these traditions the twelfth tradition says it's the spiritual foundation of our traditions ever reminding us to place principles before personalities um that made no sense to me for a long time uh i guess i thought well if i suppose they must mean that it's really spiritual not to go around broadcasting other people's names around or something didn't make a lot of sense and then one day i was on at a meeting that regularly talked about the traditions as well as the staffs and we're talking about that tradition and i came to see it in a different light because what i kind of got out of that meeting was one of the things that this anonymity functions as is it makes us all equals it means that if a famous movie star walks into our meeting and your stereotypic skid row bum walks in right after him that as far as aa is concerned those people are both equal i mean they are both welcome into alcoholics anonymous equally if they have a desire to quit drinking that's the only requirement for membership and i like that um i think we're a society a lot of ways based on personalities uh one way i can check it out is next time you know if you want to do this next time your standard of checking out check out in a supermarket notice all the magazines and all the scandal sheets you know that had gossip sheets or whatever all of them have all this stuff about various personalities you know johnny carson did this you know uh burt reynolds said this you know whatever uh they have all these personalities and you know that's okay but i guess i like the idea that alcoholics anonymous is that's not what we want we don't want to be personalities um you know we want to be something more than that and maybe in a sense i think in some ways it gives us permission to be ourselves uh because sometimes when you get into personality especially on that public level you know who are you being you know are you being the role or whatever some of the ways that I can see putting this to work at the group level are and I have to say I don't think I'm real good at practicing this principle this principle before personality so I don t I don want to stand up here and sound like I feel like I'm the authority on it but some of ways that if I choose to do it I think I can is at a meeting not to not to if we count off into groups I go into the group I'm in that's one way I can do it to try to talk to the newcomer rather than my friends which sometimes I don't do that too good rotating leadership that's some of the ways I see now my ten minutes are up and the next thing that we're going to do here is what we did before which is open this up to general discussion and I guess I'll remind you that we do ask not to have anybody come up again if you know if somebody hasn't spoken so would someone like to start it out my name is Pete Wagner and I'm an alcoholic yeah I'd like to make something in reference to what you said, Rita, about the ignorance, a situation that I became aware of a couple short months ago in my district. A member called me up and said that he had been given a public service announcement to read over his radio station. And this public service acknowledgement came from a treatment center advertising an open AA meeting was being held there, and so-and-so was going to be the speaker. And it was to be broadcast over the airwaves in the Rochester vicinity. And he asked if I would check into it, and I thanked him for the information and I called the treatment center and talked to the person who had put the ad together. and I expected somewhat of a hostile response you know, this is we're just trying to spread the word et cetera, et cetera but my expectations as they often are in this program were dashed and I found a very apologetic a very understanding open individual on the other end of the line who said oh geez I didn't know that this was a problem I'm a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and I just assumed that this was okay. I had checked with this speaker, and he said that it was okay by him if his name was used. And I said, well, if it's okay with him that his name is used, then you didn't really check with AA to see if it was okay that his named be associated with AA. And what turned out was the ad said something like this, so-and-so will speak at an open AA meeting at such and such a time at this treatment center. And what we worked out over the phone that she could change that very same announcement, not change any dates or any times, just by saying that so-an-so will speak about his experiences in alcoholism at such-and‑such a treatment center The same event would take place, the same message would go out, but A.A. and anonymity would be preserved Next Hi, I'm Joe Dolphy and I'm an alcoholic. I guess referring to the anonymity of the tradition, quite often I'll use my full name in a group and I'll have people look at me and question that afterwards. And I guess what I try to do, to the best of my knowledge, is to explain to them, as I heard Tom Bream say at one time, that when we are at the level of a group, if we don't use our full name, we're breaking the tradition as well as using our full name at the level of radio, press and film. And I guess I'd like to get some feedback whether I'm correct on that or not, but I know it's pretty hard when we're at a group level and try to be friends with a new person coming in and we're only using first names and say call me and your name isn't listed in the book as Joe D., my name is listed as Joe Dolphy. and I guess I'd like to see a little bit more of that possibly in the groups where we use full names at a group level of a closed meeting. Over here. Hi. My name is J.C., and I'm an alcoholic. Doctor, in answer to the previous gentleman, Dr. Bob, in The Good Old Timer says that any idiot that can read the tradition knows that we're not supposed to be anonymous from one another. I'd like to do something real quick. At Sioux Falls one year at an anonymity workshop, there was a little poll taken, and it was very interesting. First I'm going to ask, how many of you have got your last names? No, I can't because the badges remain out for you. How many of vous in here think that it's okay at a function like this to have your last name on your badges? Raise your hands. Okay. That's about 95%. Who does not think you should have your las name on you badge? Well, I figured you wouldn't. That's Angie. That's all. Thanks. I'm Dudley and I'm an alcoholic looking around and listening I could be the only Dudley in the crowd but you know that makes me feel uncomfortable at times wait till I meet another one You know, but anyway, I ran into a situation. It wasn't too good, you know, but I just happened to go to my home church one Sunday morning and the minister, he was a young, he's a young fellow, younger than I am, but, you Know, he would sit in with another individual well-known in Minnesota. He happened to be a lawyer and an owner, half-owner of a TV channel in Duluth. So they invited me to speak on that channel, you know. They worked around it, and I said, geez, my anonymity, I said my name Dudley, that's way too much from the beginning. so anyway I didn't accept the invitation to go and speak you know and you know I said no there's lots of other sober people around in Minnesota that could do more than I could do you know they said oh no but anyway you know with a lot of humor and whoever I talk with you know And I wasn't sober only about three years then. My brother heard about this deal. He said, why didn't you do it? And I told my brother, a lot of people probably wouldn't have turned their TVs on that time of the day. Anyway, they could have busted their TV sets, I told them. So with that, I'll pass. good afternoon my name is Earl and I'm an alcoholic I'm a GSR from Sherbourne and I also happen to be district treasurer for district 12 it was um Some anonymity came to me because I'm ignorant of it sometimes, but I live in a small town, Sherbourne, and everybody knows where I go on Thursday nights and where I Go Weather Nights, and it doesn't bother me. But the other day my wife said to me, she said, Earl, you keep getting all these letters from these other groups when they send you their contributions to the district. And she said don't you people have anonymity? I said yeah she said well yours has been broken three times this week and she was right on the envelopes it was such and such a group AA group and their return address and so I'm going to bring it up to their GSRs that when these secretaries and these treasurers send stuff out maybe they should be careful you know like I live in a small town and this guy reads this it doesn't bother me but it could bother somebody. And that's not the point whether it bothers me or not. It's being broken, and it needs to be stopped. And if anybody else has got this problem, maybe they should bring it up to their groups. When you send information out to a person, all you need for the return address of that group is the box number or whatever it is. You don't need to be, this is back to basic AA group, whatever town it is or what have you. Thank you. my name's carol and i'm an alcoholic and i was up until a short time ago the treasure seemingly interminably of the southern minnesota area um and you know one of the ways to to solve this problem is to receive your mail at a post office box because if it's coming to the post office box people can put any kind of return address they want to on it and it doesn't blow any individual's anonymity recently the Al-Anon in my household received a piece of mail from an Al-Ano society out in the Minneapolis suburb plastered all across the front of the envelope was the A.A. logo, I mean it was a beautiful piece, it was a beautiful peace of design but it was totally inappropriate and I thought that the chairman of the southern Minnesota area wrote some letter pointing this out to them, I don't know whether he ever had a response, I haven't heard anything about that, but it you know the business of violating anonymity by by the mail is an ongoing problem and it's a problem as many of you may know and some of you may not know the southern Minnesota area mailing list is available and subdivided you know cut up by districts so if you want to mail a mailing in your district you can get that this your district's mailing list through one of the officers of the area and we have had trouble with with people using the mailing list without adequate attention to the thickness of the stationery so the AA logo shows through. We have had trouble with incorrect return addresses and on, you know, the return address if you're using our bulk mail permit your return address is supposed to be the area's return address and, you can have your whole mailing rejected by the post office by putting the wrong return address on it, but more to the point. If you have a group name as a return address, it runs the possibility of blowing somebody's anonymity. And it is something that we really all need to be tremendously aware of because last summer I answered a really very sad piece of mail from a man who was on the area's mailing list and he himself didn't seem to object to the fact that his anonymity had been blown by a mailing in which the AA logo had bled through the stationery but he said my wife is really upset and we need to recognize that we're not just dealing with the people that we are mailing to we are dealing with their entire families and there have been instances and this is not so much in Alcoholics Anonymous but when I was involved with Alateen there was one instance that I know of where an Alateens anonymity was broken by misuse of the name and address on an envelope and that kid got beaten within an inch of her life you know It really is important that we stay aware of the anonymity, not only with respect to our fellowship, but with respect to our sister and brother fellowship across the aisle. Well, I'm Gene, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Gene. I know that this question of anonymity is something that people talk about frequently, and most people are really deeply concerned about doing it and doing it right, and they want to know why. And I guess the study of AA literature would help to teach them why and a study of AA history would help to teach them why. Why do we need anonymity, and so on. Now, people feel differently about it, of course. A lot of us didn't have and never have had much anonymity personally. I didn't Have any before I came to AA, I don't think. before I moved to Minneapolis and I moved in Minneapolis about the time I was old enough to drink of course I don't mean that I didn't get off to a head start I was an alcoholic already by that time but when I lived in a little town of Medford when I live there there was about 400 people there and my relatives were all a descendants of a whole bunch of Puritans that came out from New England, you know, in about the middle of the last century and most of them didn't drink at all. In fact they used to give speeches about being a total abstainer and all that sort of thing and some of my exploits when I was working in a roadhouse in Medford were known pretty much all around several counties and there certainly wasn't any anonymity involved in it. uh when i got to minneapolis i guess i had a little bit more anonymity you know you kind of get uh well you got more competition in minneapolis but by the time i arrived in aa i didn't really have any anonymity anybody that knew me knew i drank too much i mean there was no question about it and so that uh and that's been pretty much that way ever since you know so as a personal thing it doesn't really concern me a great deal but i understand the spiritual need for anonymity in aa as an organization and i realize how some people are are pretty touchy about it all i want to say is i hope that they don't become overly sensitive to the question of anonymity. You know, I have seen people that were so afraid somebody was going to see them going to an AA meeting that they would not go. And these same people would be drunk in some bar, you know, and think nothing of it. The whole town would know about it. So you have to kind of use your head a little bit when you think about your anonymity, too. There's certainly nothing disgraceful about trying to do something about your drinking problem. You know, what's disgraceful is doing nothing about it. Hey, I'm Bill Schmidt. I'm an alcoholic. like talking about breaking anonymity I guess I more or less had to do that in order to get a job one time okay I had to prove to the people that I was going doing something like Jean said it about my alcoholism I like him by my anonymity was pretty well broke you know everybody knew I was a drunk but me before I came here but also want to relate an experience I went through down missouri i drive a truck over the road and i went to a meeting in missouri on that particular night this group uh was having a group conscience meeting they used the whole rf for their grip conscious meeting but they had a deal about anonymity being broke to the mail like somebody was talking here uh this particular person in the group got a letter from somebody in a you know his aa all over the envelope but because of that there was two people working in the postal system that knew this man they found out he experience to give you some more uh to think about there I'm Pete and I'm an alcoholic before I got to this program towards the end I sensed that maybe drinking was a part of the cause of my problem and I knew of AAA but what I conceived AA was I sure as hell didn't want anybody to know that I went to it and when I came to it the first meeting they told me to uh who i see here leave it here and they do the same for me and i like that because i didn't want nobody to know i was there but i was able to look around to see how they stayed sober and the sickest i was when i first went to my first meetings which happened to be an entrance on main street in the community i went to i had to walk up and down that street until the pedestrians were clear so nobody would see me walk in that door and now i'm here today and anonymity does not bother me at a personal level i feel when i'm carrying the message or whenever it can be used i will share my identity but i think anonymity is very important to the new man and because it was very important for me and carried a heavy message to me when i came here i want to see that that's always protected for the new men coming to our door thank you I'm Alice Gleason and I'm an alcoholic when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous I was a closet drinker my bar was my bedroom people knew I was crazy but they didn't exactly know why, I don't think I am an anesthetist by vocation i was married to a doctor at the time i had watched two other nurses get fired for drinking and i wanted to take care of the drinking in my life i didn't like the craziness in my life so i very desperately needed that anonymity um i needed it so desperately that i drove all over southern minnesota to meetings so that nobody would get to know who i was so i could be a little mouse in the corner and come in and listen and get what it was that you people had the smiles and the happiness uh without ever telling you who i was and it took a long process of growing for me to accept myself to have the self-worth to share who I was to find a home group and even to get involved in service and I think even involved in I was involved in service but I wasn't willing to go out and talk to people until one of my co-workers was in the process of dying from alcoholism and drug abuse and didn't know I was an alcoholic didn't know I was in the program and that to me was a point at which I decided I needed to let go of that blanket of security I was wrapping myself into and be on the CPC committee at that time and I feel very strongly that you need that anonymity at the beginning I would not have survived if I had thought that people knew who I was thank you My name is Joe, and I'm an alcoholic. And, you know, it does address pretty much that the anonymity level would be at press, radio, and movies, I believe. But it also says in the big book that we can't be so anonymous that nobody knows who we are. Because if we were totally anonymous, this program would never grow. there's a program of attraction and if i'm attracting somebody i gotta let them know where i'm attacking them too i don't have a problem letting people know i'm in a program you know if i uh know somebody's having a problem with alcohol i'm going to be the first one to let them that there's an answer you know and i think that's my my responsibility because this program if it was totally anonymous we would never grow we have to let people know that we're in Alcoholics Anonymous, or how are they going to know that I'm smiling now and six or seven years ago I was walking around not smiling? They have to know what changed that on my face. And if I stay so anonymous, nobody's ever going to Know That. Thank you. I'm Angie T., and I'm an alcoholic. And as JC pointed out, I'm touchy about my anonymity. I know it was real important to me when I first sobered up to have the right to be anonymous, and it's still real important for me today. I think that in Minnesota we are more well-informed as the general state population, and people do applaud or some people applaud us getting sober and getting help for our alcoholism. But I've spent part of my sobriety in a southwestern state, and their anonymity is real important because people aren't real informed i had a boss who lectured me on alcoholics who were clients and not to trust them and not to give them any breaks even though they were in the program and i knew him personally he didn't know i was an aa because you couldn't trust alcoholics and there's a different ideas and prejudice against alcoholics recovering and drinking alcoholics in different parts of the country and i think in those states and areas that's one reason that anonymity is so important because it can actually deter or ruin people's careers so i'm real grateful that we do have the option and that's all i have to say my name is candy and i'm an alcoholic and i come from friendly and i am also in district 13. I'd like to speak also to my gratitude for the anonymity of the program. The situation in which I work, I feel, does not permit me to share my membership in Alcoholics Anonymous comfortably and still retain my position. So I share with the friends and the sponsees and sponsors that I have that I'd Like to maintain that anonymity. Perhaps at some point I'd Like to reveal on a one-to-one basis and by my choice, just exactly, that I am a member of Al-Anon and AA and that I value both those memberships, but I reserve that right to me. I don't give that right for the rest of my life. I give that to someone else. I'm Floyd Furman from Austin. Hi, Floyd. Hi, Lloyd. I had an innocent incident happen early this last year where my daughter broke my anonymity with a person I was to do business with he watched I watched him drink beer for three hours and I drank my pop and the job he was doing for me went sour and I had to get back to him three other times and this fall I found out that because of the way I handled myself, he's in the program today. Thank you. My name is Chuck and I'm an alcoholic. A little bit on anonymity as far as in the groups. For me, when I was first in the program, it was really important because it helped me put the principles before the personalities in the programme. When I came for meetings and stuff, I talked to other people in the programmes who weren't at the meeting, and they'd say, well, so-and-so there. And then I recognised the name, but myself being terrible at names, I can't remember them, which is an asset to me now, which I thought was bad before. i put these important individuals as far as i come from a smaller town and these individuals when i knew their full name then all of a sudden they turned out to be something different because when i was drinking i was uh a very phony person and i was trying to please everybody and if i would have known that this person was actually that particular person where i never saw him before but i heard their name so much in a smaller talent i think that um i would have been different towards them. By just knowing their first name, and a lot of times forgetting that even, I was able to be myself and just concentrate on the program and not worry about this particular person as a professor or a doctor or man of the clergy or whatever. I was able just to take them as a person in the program, and I think it really helped me out a lot by them not letting me know their last name, which I probably would have forgot anyway, but the impression would have been on there, that they were something more important than I was because they held a title maybe someplace or a higher prestigious job. And I think it really helped me a lot by having the anonymity on the group as to I was more equal to them because I had a first name too. Thank you. Hi, my name is Jim McBourne and I'm an alcoholic. I am from a smaller community down in southwest Minnesota, and this is an interesting topic for us. You know, being in a small community and having the judicial response that we have and the people coming in, there's quite often where after meetings you hear about people who hit the bars afterwards and are talking about who was at the meetings and what happened at the meeting, what things were talked about. now for myself i have to take a very personal stand on this um i don't like to have that happen but there's not a whole lot i can usually do about it but what i do to protect myself under those types of circumstances when i go to an ae meeting i like to like to talk about the steps i like To talk about traditions i like TO talk about what's in the big book if i've got something that i don' t want people to know about that goes to my sponsor jim's going take care of his tail you know and that is my responsibility at that point um we are alcoholics anonymous the anonymous part is very important but we are also human beings and human beings do have their feelings so if i have something that i need to share or want to share and i don't want everybody in my community to know about it that's for my sponsor thank you my name is jack cockle alcoholic i would like to just touch briefly on what i believe to be the main reason for anonymity and we haven't hit on that yet so far in this workshop for me it's a anonymity is a three pronged kind of affair the first one is is within myself i am free to break my anonymity below the public level anywhere i choose on the job in the church in my neighborhood and within alcoholics anonymous that's up to me the second concept i think with anonymity is that i must never break another person's anonymity at any of those levels including with NAA. That's important. And Angie and these other folks that raised their hand before, I think that's important, that it's incumbent on us to respect their wishes. And I really believe that. But the third thing, and the main reason that Alcoholics Anonymous is anonymous, was to protect us from ourselves. And Bill puts it so beautifully in AA Comes of Age. He said, the reason for anonymity is to protect us from those damned, infernal egos of ours. It was so that nobody could ever make a name for themselves out of AA. Bill says, I'll let you know how big my ego was in this thing. When they were looking for a name for this, he wanted to call it the BW Movement. Yeah. And the interesting thing is I've been pretty much a flop all of my life. The only place I've had any degree of success in my entire life is within Alcoholics Anonymous. and you want to know the real neat thing about it is i can't tell a soul this workshop is going to schedule to go for five more minutes at this point my name is mary and i'm an alcoholic hi mary um i like what you had to say and i was just about ready to get up to say most of that but i also believe that the traditions that the purpose of them is to preserve aa that they weren't meant for me personally um as a guide to how i live my life or stay sober the steps are meant for that but um this tradition is is uh much bigger than me personally i have to take into consideration my group when i think of breaking anonymity or something like that comes into my life i have to consider the whole group in aaa as a whole and what's that going to do my action how that's going to affect aa because without aa without the group i won't survive so i think that that we have to look much beyond ourselves and that's where our ego comes down. It takes me out of myself into the welfare of others. Hi, I'm Steve, an alcoholic. Hi, Steve. This is my first meeting I've attended here and as far as my anonymity, as far myself i i felt everyone in the city of minneapolis knew that i was a drunk and driving all over the road and being picked up and thrown in jail so when i came out of treatment i wanted to tell the whole world at that time however a gentleman that i sponsor who was in the professional he's a professional athlete i had a tough time with him when when he came out i couldn't relate to me and him, but I did at first. I'm kind of rumbling here, but he had the press and the news media hounding him to get a story on what it was like for him to go through treatment, and he never wanted to acknowledge them, so we came to an agreement basically to keep it silent until he was ready to talk to the press at that time, and he gave a story a couple of weeks ago in the Minneapolis paper, and I'm just grateful today because now he's got his six months in today. I just talked to him about an hour ago, so I'm real happy. Thank you all. Hi, Monica. I'm an alcoholic. Hi, Monika. And I'd like to tell you a little bit about something that happened to me, and I was real grateful to a person for letting me know he was in the fellowship i was i was um i think about two weeks out of treatment and and i wasn't real hip on the idea of staying sober to begin with and and i was about i was 16 and i borrowed my mother's car one night without telling her about it and and I was driving around aimlessly and andI was just about 100 miles away from home and andi was going through this small town, and I got pulled over because this guy noticed I looked kind of young. And when he pulled me over, he said, you know, you look really mellow. You know, what's the problem? And I started crying, and then I gave him this sob story about how all these people were hounding me about not drinking anymore, and that I thought it was a real bummer. You know the whole works. And he said well you know it's funny you should mention that because you know I'm part of that fellowship called Alcoholics Anonymous, and it's a really beautiful thing. And so he sort of told me I guess part of his story and the whole work And it planted something in me that wasn't there before. I didn't know that there were caring people in that fellowship. I thought they were really a bunch of mean people because I didn' t like what they said to me. But when this man told me part of his story and took the time out, and he didn' d even give me a ticket or anything, I thought I was pretty nice to him. something else um on the subject of anonymity i i was once asked to speak at a uh to a group of fifth graders up on the object of alcoholism and aa and and um before i got there the teacher had already told them you know my whole name and i guess you know that was okay with me the only problem was is you know we have that thing it was read last night and i believe at one of the meetings today it's it goes something like some of you may not be familiar with our tradition and to try that to explain that to a group of fifth graders about what our anonymity meant to us you know and i like jack's explanation that's kind of what i use you know and i uh to explain to them you know why why we need our anonymacy and things like that so that was real neat for me thanks we have time for this one more I'm London the alcoholic from st. Paul I found anonymity to be about as elusive as humility when I first got in this program I came out of treatment and it happened where I was working a general manager was in AA and I was worried about coming back to work, and he says, nothing to worry about. He said, I got it all set up. Everybody knows where you were. That wasn't all bad, though, because sometimes if you got it flaunted, and I guess that's what we did, and when I retired from there, there were seven of us in the program. The next time I got going in this anonymity thing was at church. The pastor came to me and asked me to start a group there, something that I was not interested in doing, but there it was. So we got going, and I thought, well, geez, I'm the first alcoholic that's ever been in this church, you know, because he was picking on me to get things going, and there was no response. I think, geez am I the only alcoholic in the whole church? And at that point I figured, well geez, maybe some more people should know that I am an alcoholic and that we are trying to get AA going there. And it finally developed, and when I left there we had a membership of over 40. by the way I was thrown out for being a bleeding deacon my name's Scott B hi Scott I just want to say a few words on anonymity at the group level and what that means to me is one big word and that's trust when I came into the fellowship my level of trust was real nil And it's grown since then. Personally, I'll share my experiences with people in my time and in my place. But what I've found in my group that I go to or the groups that I goes to is that there's a whole lot of people that come to the fellowship that are ordered to go there. And even more than that, there's whole lot people that don't stay. And they come and they go. And I think if we're using our full names, it's a dangerous thing because these people come and they go and they take that information. Ballplayer X is in this A group, and I met them there, wherever they're at talking about this, or Dr. B, or whatever. And Ithink for me, and my idea of it, is that there's plenty of time for that trust to develop. There's plentyof time for people to learn last names. If you stick around the program a while, you'll learn who so-and-so's last name is, and that will develop. And that's kind of what my relationship with the members of my fellowship is founded on, is trust. And that is what I want to say. Before we close, I wantto mention that there is this little pamphlet here called Understanding Anonymity. There is a whole mess of them over at this table. I think they're about a quarter or something like that. They're pretty cheap, so if anyone wants to do some more reading. We will be taking a 10-minute break now before the next session, which is going to be on the subject of promotion versus attraction. Joyce Kaye will be presenting that. I think what we want to do at this point is anybody that wants to stand and join hands in the Lord's Prayer.