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May 1972

Contrary to the advice of the AAs who say, “Don’t bother to find out why,” I have always been curious as to why AA has had the success it has. As a man who’s been around AA for a long time, I understand that AA cannot and does not help everybody. But it does offer the greatest help to the largest number of alcoholics of any system that has been offered to date. Why?

My friends ask, “What goes on at an AA meeting? How does it happen that a guy who was just throwing everything away has suddenly started to come back and is well and happy and is carrying his weight in the world?”

If I say, “Well, we meet together, we alcoholics,” he says, “Yeah, yeah.” So I say, “We have some speakers, and one of the speakers will get up and talk about his experiences and how AA helped him. Another guy will tell his experiences, and often we have a third fellow who sums up what the other two have said, and we say the Lord’s Prayer, have coffee and doughnuts, and go home.”

The guy says, “And that keeps you sober?’’

Obviously, there’s a great deal more at work to enable us to overcome the obsession with alcohol and the compulsion to drink. I offer you my own analysis, for what it’s worth. You know there is no party line in AA; this analysis represents a distillation of what I’ve learned about myself and what I’ve heard at countless AA meetings.

It’s this simple, I think: AA meets the needs of the alcoholic in a way that satisfies him. Let’s examine these needs. They’re no different, by the way, from the needs of all humanity; but by the time AA sees the alcoholic, these needs have become acute and hence are often more urgent, more present, more demanding than they are in the ordinary run of mankind.

The first of these needs is hope. If one word had been used to describe the alcoholic more often than any other, I suspect it is “hopeless.” “John is a good guy, he’s smart enough, he’s able, he’s bright, he’s capable. But he can’t stay sober; he’s hopeless.”

If that is repeated over and over again—John and other alcoholics do not live in a vacuum—we hear what is said. We shrug it off for a while, don’t we? “A lot of bluenoses!” we say. We seek explanations outside ourselves: it was raining; it was clear weather; the team won; the team lost; Republicans won; Republicans lost; I made a lot of money; I lost a lot of money.

Always, there’s the same delusion in the back of our minds: “I can quit.” Finally, we get tired of this constant repetition, and we try to stop. We can’t. Anxiety gives way to panic, panic to depression, depression to hopelessness. And we reach the point where we drink simply because we can’t see any other way out, and we can’t stand what is happening to us. Until that little flicker of hope is lighted in the alcoholic’s heart, nothing is going to happen.

The greatest sin that one alcoholic can commit against another is to perpetuate the idea of hopelessness. Even if you find that you aren’t the man or woman to help, never let him feel that he’s hopeless. Let him feel that you haven’t been the one who’s able to supply the answers. If we turn our backs on the alcoholic, who in God’s name—and I say this reverently—who in God’s name is going to help him? You and I are the people who know from our own experience that there is hope, that alcoholics can come back from the very depths. This hope is the priceless ingredient for recovery. This, AA gives, most frequently not in mere words. Upon the alcoholic’s first contact with AA, as he looks around the room and sees men and women respectably clothed and in their right minds, enjoying themselves, that flicker of hope begins to bum. And he says to himself, “If these jokers can do it, I can.” The first need, beyond any other, is hope. Without it, there is nothing.

The second need—and this is almost as desperate, because it accompanies the first—is the need to be welcomed back into the human race. The alcoholic has experienced universal rejection. Every man’s hand is against him; the doors of employment are closed; his friends do not invite him around anymore because he’s a nuisance; sometimes the door of his own home is closed to him. And he begins to feel that horrible sensation that he is insignificant to every other living human being.

There are a few rare souls who can live in total solitude, but they are very rare. Most of us need some significance and importance in the eyes of others. We must have some meaning, be it only to one other person. And yet we often reach the point where we think nobody cares whether we live or die, except for the people who wish we would die.

Couple that feeling of utter loneliness with the feeling that you can’t do anything about it, and you begin to understand the depths to which alcoholism reduces the individual. He becomes a man of no importance to anybody, in a situation from which he can find no escape. This is why the outstretched hand of AA is so vital. In my work at the clinic, I heard hundreds of men tell about their first AA experiences, and over and over again it went something like this: “I told these guys I’d go to this meeting, and one of them came around to pick me up. We went, and they met on the second floor somewhere, and I stumbled up the steps and came into this room, and some guy was up front talking, but I couldn’t hear what he said. A couple of guys shook my hand. Another one put his arm around my shoulder, and a third one gave me a cup of coffee. These guys had never seen me before—they didn’t know me from a bag of beans—but all of a sudden I felt they liked me.’’

An elementary thing, you say? Of no importance? Nonsense! When you’ve been lost, lonely, forgotten, rejected, it’s the most important thing in the world to have somebody shake your hand.

So we have first, hope; second, acceptance as a human being. Third, as we all know from our First Step, the alcoholic desperately needs to admit what’s wrong with him. To us in AA, it isn’t surprising that the drinking alcoholic doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, though everybody else does. But this is the nature of the disease, isn’t it? It blinds us to what we’re doing and what’s happening to us. Oh yes, we know we’re having some sort of trouble with alcohol, but we blame it on others; we look outside ourselves.

Here’s another priceless gift that AA provides: frank, sometimes brutal, but loving confrontation with our problem. We give all our excuses, and the AA guys laugh at us. Even if your wife was as beautiful and loving as Venus (they say in effect), even if your boss was the most wonderful guy and was going to give you a raise, even if the Democrats were going to win next year, it wouldn’t make any difference. You still couldn’t drink! Over and over again, they tell us. The evidence is too strong to withstand, and finally they get us to admit that we are alcoholics.

We’ve got to begin here—but admission is just a cerebral function. When I was a reporter in Philadelphia, I often wrote about Joe Blow, who was arrested by the police beside the open door of a store, with a lot of stolen goods on him. But only after questioning would he admit the robbery. And that’s what frequently happens in the case of the alcoholic. AA members back him into a comer he can’t get out of. They use every argument until he finally says, “Okay, okay, I admit it—I’m an alcoholic.”

The admission is not enough. Down inside, something is saying, “Yeah, but if I get my job back, my health back, if I get my wife back”— if this, if that —“I’ll show these guys!” We talk a lot about resentment in AA. Here is the basic resentment of all we’ve got to deal with, the resentment that “I’m an alcoholic. Who am I that God should point his finger at me and tell me that I can’t drink? My wife can drink, the kids can drink, the stupid guy next door who hasn’t got enough sense to come in out of the rain can drink, and I can’t. It’s unfair. It’s un-American!”

After admission, the alcoholic needs to learn acceptance. I first heard this beautiful word from Harry Tiebout, when he talked about surrender in AA. Acceptance is a different process—not a cerebral, but an emotional response to alcoholism: “Okay, I quit. I can’t help it. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

Now the Serenity Prayer begins to take on a new meaning for this guy. This is one of the things he can’t change. This is what he’s asking serenity for—the basic serenity, to accept alcoholism and stop battling it. All of us who have gone through this move from admission to acceptance know the enormous weight that rolls from our shoulders when we can stand up and say, “I don’t have to worry about being an alcoholic anymore. It’s just the way I am. Like the color of my eyes.” The alcoholic desperately needs to accept his own alcoholism.

Now there’s another act of acceptance that has to take place, I think, and AA helps with this. The alcoholic has to accept himself. As you think back on your own life, as you think of the alcoholics with whom you’ve talked, haven’t you discovered that all of us have a very naive conception of what it means to be a human being? At an AA meeting, I heard a guy say, “Before I came to AA, I used to be an idealist.” The implication is that once he got into AA he threw all his ideals away. Well, this is not what he meant at all. He meant, “Before I got into AA, I was a Utopian.” A Utopian is one who believes that human beings can be perfect. The speaker thought he could be perfect himself, so other people should be perfect. He found out they weren’t, and so he settled for being a junior-grade cynic.

I often think of this in terms of William Steig’s wonderful cartoon showing a dour old man sitting inside a box, with a caption saying, “People are no damn good.” This is the attitude of many drinking alcoholics: People are no damn good, because they’re not perfect.

AA teaches us the truth about people by letting us rub shoulders with it. For example, the newcomer soon finds out that his sponsor, perhaps idolized at first, puts his pants on one leg at a time—that he’s a human being. The newcomer finds that the finest members still do make mistakes. He reads Step Ten and sees that the AA program isn’t written for Utopians. It’s written for human beings who are going to make mistakes over and over again. We make mistakes; we admit them; we try to clean up the mess we made; and we go on.

Finally, the alcoholic comes to the point where he can accept himself as a human being, with all his strengths and weaknesses—that mixture which we are—and live with himself, and once he is tolerant of himself, he can be tolerant of other people. Now this, I say, is something that happens in AA. I’m convinced it’s a vital part of growing up in AA.

Another of the alcoholic’s needs is pointed out in the AA program strongly and emphatically: the need to accept God as each of us understands him. To somebody like me, born in a preacher’s house, brought up on the Bible and church, it isn’t very difficult to conceive what God is like. But for many alcoholics, it’s a tough row to hoe. When I talk about the Twelve Steps, I counsel newcomers not to be surprised if Steps Two and Three do not happen overnight. We have to work into them and through them. For many of us, God is a somewhat threatening figure. To turn life and will over to a figure like that takes either courage or desperation.

A friend of mine is now about as spiritual-minded a man as I know. I heard him tell an AA group about his first efforts. He said, “I heard these other guys talk about it. I had to stay sober, so I said I’d give it a whirl.’’ In the morning, he told us, he would get up and say, “Oh God, if you’re there, help me stay sober.” At night, when he got home, he’d say, “God, if you’re there, thank you.”

My own feeling is that this is the kind of approach God understands perfectly, and which he welcomes. But that isn’t the end of the story. Hank went on with his prayers until one night, when he said, “Thank you,” he swears he heard the answer, “You’re welcome.” He can’t prove this. But you’ll never make Hank believe it didn’t happen.

Fortunately, AA never discusses theology, never talks about creeds, and never formulates any concept of the nature of the Deity to be forced upon anybody. But, whether we realize it or not, we in AA are practical theologians—we learn by doing. The first inkling comes when we try to understand what AA is talking about in the sign that hangs in countless meeting rooms all over the country—“But for the Grace of God.” New members come to feel that it isn’t just the empty repetition of ritual. When a member stands before a group and says, “I’m here tonight thanks to the grace of God and AA,’’ the first part of that phrase means something. What is it?

He begins to think back. When he first came up that flight of stairs, he didn’t know any of these guys. They didn’t owe him anything. And yet he was welcomed. They did what they could for him; they nurtured him, sustained him, criticized him, told him where he was wrong, told him where he was right. Why? Some people have waited three months for someone in AA to send them a bill. This is natural. The motto of America is “Nothing for nothing. You pay for what you get.” And yet we have been given life, the most precious thing of all, which all the money in the world cannot buy—nor all the intelligence, all the education, all the position.

Why did these AAs do it? I think we all find an unavoidable association between what AA does and the grace of God. AA reflects, in an limited, human sense, the way God works with us. AA people love us when we’re newcomers, not because of what we’ve done, but in spite of it, not because we’ve earned love, but because we need it. And so, I think, comes the final great acceptance of the AA member: the realization that I have been accepted by God—that, when I staggered up those stairs for the first time, God was there waiting for me.

J.L., Santa Fe, N.M.