“Hi
fellas
I went to
Tadley Monday Newcomers meeting for the first time in November and
noticed some things that tripped my cult radar, so I decided to
return a few times and delve a bit deeper.
This is a
very weird little group. It meets in one of the small rooms in the
village Community Centre, and its regulars struggle to make
themselves heard over either the aerobics class in the main hall or
the wannabe pop stars strumming out the same riff for an hour in the
next room. When they do raise their voices above the background din,
they love a cross share down Tadley way. Advice offered to anyone
bold enough to share a difficulty ranges from the cult standard 'WORK
THE STEPS HARDER!' to sagacity that doesn't appear to be based on any
sort of sober experience of the problem on the part of the adviser.
The
meeting appears to have been set up by a chap named R....... He
flounced out of Basingstoke AA with about nine months sober just over
a year ago and set up Tadley Monday on a resentment that some people
were not content to watch him scare the living daylights out of every
newcomer who came within a quarter mile of the town's meetings. He
seems to have quickly risen to guru status in Tadley, despite several
of his disciples getting spectacularly pissed. These slippers don't
seem welcome back at his meeting. I witnessed him literally bawling
one of them out not long after I first went. Mainstream AA is left to
comfort these castoffs, however Tadley regulars are rarely seen at
any other meetings or getting involved in wider service work.
Yet what
is most worrying is the cult of newcomers sponsoring other newcomers.
The Tadley meeting takes this practice to ridiculous extremes. At the
moment, the group has one girl with 9 months (sponsored by R.......,
naturally), who is sponsoring another with 3 months who in turn has a
sponsee of 2 months. All have one eye on the door to pounce on the
next unfortunate who really just needs a welcome, a coffee and a bit
of time to find their feet and get some identification.
To any
questioning of their methods they hide behind the often quoted dogma
that they are glad Bill and Bob didn't wait two years to sponsor
anyone. When those with slightly less evangelical tendencies point
out that we have a very different fellowship today, and that
"obviously you cannot transmit something you haven’t got"
(page 164) it sadly doesn't seem to cut much ice. They just get
entrenched with intensive work with others to save their own hides,
no matter what the consequences for the poor unfortunates they put at
grave danger with their lack of experience.
I'd
appreciate your help in exposing these zealots and making the
Northdown area a bit safer for those yet to come to the rooms.
Keep up
the good work.
Love in
fellowship”
“Hi
fellas
…......
I believe
there may be some connections to the Design For Living Group that
spread from South-West London and got a brief foothold up the road in
Greenham before it shut last year. Greenham and Tadley sprung up at
around the same time.
So far we
have been reasonably lucky in keeping Visions and Primary Purpose off
this patch. There is a Basic Text group in Theale, but having been a
few times they seem to be a few harmless fundamentalists studying the
book really intensely. There is no big recruitment drive, father
figure or cult of sponsorship so it seems relatively (I use the term
advisedly) healthy.
Keep up
the good work.”
Cheerio
The Fellas
(Friends of Alcoholics Anonymous)
PS Our
usual thanks to our local reporter
