If you have ever traveled on a cruise ship you may have seen the following notice posted on the "Events" bulletin board.
Friends of Bill W. will meet in the Boatdeck Lounge tonight
"Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism."
This is the first sentence of the AA Preamble, a statement of purpose which is read at the beginning of AA meetings throughout the world. It outlines membership requirements, dues or fees, and political or religious affiliations. These three items are largely passive; AA cites only "a desire to stop drinking" as a membership requirement, has no dues or fees, and is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution. It further states that AA "does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes." The Preamble ends with, "Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety".
Following the Preamble, some or all of the following will be read: How It Works or the Twelve Steps, the Twelve Traditions, the Promises, the "blue card" {a short paragraph on the format of that particular meeting), and a statement of anonymity. After "the readings", the main item on the meeting agenda begins. Meetings can be Study Meetings, Discussion Meetings, or Speaker Meetings.
Study Meetings
Study Meetings are devoted to the reading of the Big Book, the book, "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions", or other official AA literature. An AA member will read several paragraphs aloud and those who wish to comment will do so. Then another member will read the next few paragraphs, and further discussion will take place. It is not uncommon for an AA group to read one paragraph and discuss it for the balance of an hour-long meeting.
Discussion Meetings
A Discussion Meeting differs from a Study Meeting in that no literature is read aloud and the topic can be anything that relates to alcoholism and how it affects the individual AA member. The chairperson of the meeting will announce the topic, or will ask for a topic from those attending. Topics can be as widely diverse as "How to get through the holidays without drinking", "Acceptance", "Pride and related character defects", "sponsorship", or "gratitude". Everyone is encouraged to speak, but all are asked to limit their "share" so everyone has an opportunity to speak. "Cross-talking" is discouraged or strictly forbidden.
Speaker Meetings
At a Speaker Meeting, only the Chairperson and one or several members speak. The tradition of anonymity is observed, even in a closed meeting. Speakers are very frank about details of their personal lives, but it is done anonymously; family names, addresses, and career details are absent or sketchy at best. While anonymity is stressed to encourage newcomers to participate, it is not practiced as a means of cloaking a shameful past. Anonymity, setting principles before personalities, has been called the spiritual foundation of Alcoholics Anonymous. The honor of long term sobriety is not accredited to the individual but to the principles of AA. Here is an excerpt from a Speaker Meeting.
Good evening. My name is Carl and I am an alcoholic. My sobriety date is October 2, 1989 and my home group is New Dawn in Daytona Beach, Florida. Thank you for asking me to share my story tonight. There is nothing I like better on one of these cruises than to spend an evening in a private room of the main bar, drinking soda and coffee with a bunch of other alcoholics in recovery. I bet the management just loves us.
Seriously, today the management often does love us. I attended the International Convention in San Diego in 1995. There were 45,000 of us there, or maybe 60,000, or any figure in between, depending on the newspaper you read. And the newspaper coverage was fantastic. They loved us. We were clean and polite and friendly. We did a lot of shopping, bought a lot of stuff. True, the hotels had to deodorize their hospitality suites after we left. This was back in the days when the first service job of a newcomer was to empty ashtrays, just like in the early days with Bill and Dr. Bob.
But it was a little paragraph at the end of one of these newspaper columns full of warm fuzzies that impressed me. It said that, for the first time in the history of conventions in the city of San Diego, it had not been necessary for the police department to use extra officers to "handle the drunks". Imagine that -- 60,000 alcoholics at a convention and they didn't need extra cops!
Imagine what it would have been like if we were still active alcholics.
Anyway, you didn't come here to hear about San Diego. I've told you who I am, what I am, and where I belong. Now it is time for the "experience, strength and hope", the only thing that any of us can offer each other. I can tell you what happened to me, how I got here, and what it is like today. In other words, my story. OK? All right, here we go.
I'm from the Midwest, a middle class family. Most of my relatives on both sides were alcoholic. My father drank until I was two or three, then my mother made him stop. She had grown up in a disfunctional alcoholic home and was terrified of drinking. So I have the genetic background but missed most of the environmental conditioning during my early years.
Was my dad an alcoholic, or even a potential alcoholic? I don't know. Looking back on it, I would say that for most of his lifetime he exhibited all the signs of a dry drunk, but who am I to say? You know our credo -- only an alcoholic can decide if he or she is an alcoholic. I know that I am an alcoholic, and that's as far as I go.
I started drinking when I was sixteen and the first time I got drunk I had a blackout. Some of us have blackouts, others don't. I had at least partial blackouts most of the time. I thought everybody did. I don't know which is worse, worrying about what I might have done the night before, or remembering what did happened. You know what it is like, that feeling of dread when you come to in the morning and think, "Oh, s***. Where am I and what did I do?"
I'm not going to run this into a drunkalog. Let's just say that I drank as much as I could for as long as I could, and that if I had figured out a way to keep on drinking and not kill myself, I'd still be out there.
This is the first part, the "what it was like" portion of the speech. The speaker then goes on to describe how he "hit bottom" and subsequently joined AA.
The third and final portion covers what the speaker has learned since joining, how he has changed, and what his life is like today as a sober alcoholic.
Speaker meetings, while a learning and sharing experience for AAs, are also considered entertainment. State conventions and other large gatherings will generally feature AA circuit speakers from distant states. The production and sale of speaker tapes is a thriving business in the AA world. This is not considered mercenary. (The speakers themselves do not own the rights to the tapes.) As one respected member of AA said, "All we can offer each other is our stories".
AA members find great comfort in meetings. Meetings are the backbone of the Fellowship. When away from home, in an airplane or on a cruise ship, it is not unusual for an individual AA member to ask a flight attendant to announce that someone is looking for "Friends of Bill W" or to post a notice announcing a "Friends of Bill W Meeting".
Organizational Structure
The organizational structure of Alcoholics Anonymous is an inverted pyramid. Control flows upward from the individual groups to the Districts, which are joined together into Areas (geographical in nature). Quarterly Area Assemblies send Delegates to annual General Service Conferences at the headquarters of Alcoholics Anonymous in New York City. A similar organizational structure is utilized globally wherever Alcoholics Anonymous exists.
At the Group and District level, Central Offices and Intergroups are often established to coordinate the meetings and activities of the various groups.
- www.alcoholics-anonymous.org
- www.aagrapevine.org
- "Alcoholics Anonymous", 4th Edition, Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. ISBN 1-893007-17-0
- "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions", Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. ISBN 0-916856-29-1
- "AA Comes of Age, a brief history of A.A.",Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. ISBN 0-916856-02-X