Traditions! What Traditions?

Extract from the aacultwatch forum (old):

“I remember during my involvement with the Vision for You cult in the late 1990's there were many splits and breakaways, usually over the most trifling and trivial of matters.

Outside the cult fold the Vision group earned itself the nickname "Division for You" ! The Vision itself was a breakaway from Joys. No doubt there have been subsequent splits and factions. It's the tedious nature of the Beast !

These cult groups break the Traditions in so many respects it is difficult to know where to start. Of course, they are always personality centered, with a "Leader" - a chief sponsor who fancies himself as a guru. The real requirement for membership of these groups is not a desire to stop drinking (as set out in the AA Traditions) but a desire to agree with and be obedient to this chief know-it-all sponsor in every respect. This is how these groups pervert the message of AA.

We now have a situation where some cult meetings are no longer referring to AA conference approved literature at all, but to something some headcase sponsor-guru has made up, as in Ealing right now, where an "abridged" version of the Big Book called the "Yellow Book of Big Book Quotes" is being used. This 28 page booklet is minus many serious omissions from what the Big Book actually says, and may well be in breach of copyright as it uses quotes from later editions of the Big Book. One individual personality - "Happy Dennis" - cobbled this perverted opus together and, aside from some dogrel "poetry" composed by Dennis himself, the AA name is linked to and used to promote an outside enterprise - a non-AA website largely concocted by David "The Icon" C which purports to be Big Book recovery but is actually no more than a collection of his private and narrow-minded religion-based opinions of what is in the Big Book.

These groups really are shameless in their disregard for AA Traditions. And the culture of these groups is dismissive and contemptuous of the fellowship as a whole. I know because I used to be part of it - to my past shame, yes, - but, believe me, experience is the best teacher!”

The Fellas (Friends of Alcoholics Anonymous)

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