Traditions as Operational Tools: Common Welfare, Singleness of Purpose, and Autonomy With Responsibility – Tom I.
About This Speaker Tape
Tom I. speaks at the Stateline Retreat in Primm, Nevada in December 2006 with 49 years of sobriety. A member of the Primary Purpose Group in Southern Pines, North Carolina, he opens by tracing how his father's desertion when he was four years old produced a set of coping devices — compulsive lying, isolation, distrust — that became ingrained character defects. He contrasts himself with his sister, who grew up in the same household but responded constructively to their circumstances, while he reacted and internalized everything. These defects made him a poor candidate for joining anything, which is why the traditions became as vital to him as the steps.
He walks through several traditions as practical instruments for building unity, not abstract rules. Using the First Tradition, he tells the story of nominating a new treasurer over the beloved old-timer who had held the job for seven years and become possessive of it — a decision that crushed the man but launched a group that grew from a handful to sixty members. He describes a time his home group made a decision he hated while he was out of town, and how he sat on his anger for two full months before calmly requesting they revisit it, because common welfare required patience rather than force. On singleness of purpose (Tradition Three), he recounts stopping a drug addict from being nominated as chair of a prison AA meeting and delivers an impassioned argument that the original tenet — one alcoholic talking to another — is the fulcrum on which AA was built, and if that tenet is right, every member has a responsibility to protect it.
He argues that after the Ninth Step promises, the entire tempo of the program shifts outward. Steps Ten through Twelve are about service, not continued self-excavation. He describes discovering intensive Big Book workshops where a facilitator reads passages and asks "How do you identify or relate?" — and how a fiercely atheist, intellectual woman who joined the workshop was utterly changed by the Third Step prayer and became the finest female member in his area. Not one person who completed these workshops relapsed. He urges the audience not to romanticize the steps into a permanent self-improvement project but to move into real action.
He closes with stories about cooperation with professionals — a psychiatrist who was sending alcoholics to bad meetings and getting them back worse, a CPC project born from a bootlegger raid, and his work with lawyers in North Carolina. The capstone is a call from the General Service Office connecting him with a man in Kenya trying to start prison meetings, who sent back a photo of 600 African prisoners squatted on the ground waiting for instructions. Tom I. frames all of this as the natural product of the Tenth Step directive to grow in understanding and effectiveness, and challenges every person in the room to go home and do something to make a difference.
Discussion
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