Extracts
from the aacultwatch forum (old)
“Winds
of Change” AA Grapevine March 1968 Vol. 24 No. 10
http://da.aagrapevine.org/
New
kinds of AA meetings
THIRTY-THREE
years ago, when AA's co-founders, Bill and Dr. Bob, met, it was an
Oxford Group member who put them in touch. The earliest meetings of
what was later to be called Alcoholics Anonymous were intimately
connected with the meetings of the Oxford Group, religious pioneers
of the day, who stressed honest disclosure about oneself to one's
peers in the "group" as an essential step toward change of
character and correction of troublesome behavior patterns.
As AA
grew, it became more independent of the Oxford Group influence
(although, as Bill W. has acknowledged, the influence on AA of an
Oxford Group leader, the Rev. Canon Samuel Shoemaker, continued to be
deep and pervasive for years). AA meetings as we know them today
began to take shape. Since then, it has been traditional that in AA
talks and at discussion meetings certain kinds of self-revelation are
out of bounds. Evidently, in the early days of the Fellowship, among
the small groups of members who knew each other intimately, the need
for complete honesty with at least some others was fulfilled by
private conversations. This remains true for some AAs in some
circumstances today. But there has grown up a tendency, even allowing
for the Fifth Step, for many AAs to attempt a spiritual life based on
new principles without anything like adequate elimination of "old
ideas" and the behavior that resulted from them.
Understandably,
then, there is within AA growing pressure to discover new ways to
resolve those emotional and spiritual problems which result from
hanging on to old ideas and from continued entrapment in habitual
misbehavior. Three articles in this issue, on the next eight pages,
illustrate that pressure. We predict that there will be more such
articles in future Grapevines. There is exciting ferment today in the
fields of psychology and psychiatry; in more than one center of
learning and research there is a new willingness to study and adopt
methods of character change based on the spiritual principles of
rigorous honesty and full responsibility for one's life and behavior.
AA's thirty-three years' experience is proving a vital model for
these studies. The AA demonstration is incontrovertible: Hundreds of
thousands of alcoholics have found a way out of deadly addiction
through spiritual action. Turnabout, AA is certain to gain--is
already gaining--new vigor and insight as it proves willing to learn
from those workers in related disciplines who are exploring and
extending the techniques of spiritual recovery and regeneration as
they apply to many different kinds of psychophysical inadequacy.
The
Editors”
“40-hour
Marathon Meetings” AA Grapevine March 1968 Vol. 24 No. 10
http://da.aagrapevine.org/
".
. .The long hours in marathon bid fair to open the heart. . .
IT'S
EASY to assume that we aren't going to see much change in the AA way
of doing business in years to come. There are signs this is much
too easy an assumption.
From
the East Coast and the West Coast come separate reports[1] of a new
kind of small, intense AA meeting, not confined to AA members, but
including anyone who will abide by the rules of the meeting. The
purpose of these meetings is self-inventory: how I am doing now. They
are either Fifth Step or Tenth Step meetings, or both, and they are
designed to furnish a place for in-depth disclosure of the
difficulties members may be having in working the program--practicing
these AA principles in all our affairs. Frank talk by others at the
meeting helps me to take my inventory. I'm expected to come out of
the meeting with a commitment to shape up, to change my behavior, or
to do something about one or more Steps of the program where I'm
remiss.
The
main emphasis is on truth--the whole truth, not the abridged version
which has become expected and appropriate at AA open meetings. Ah,
you say, that's all very well, but you surely don't mean the whole
truth, do you? Sex, perversions included. Thefts. Slanders. The
really nasty stuff?
Evidently
those proposing the new meetings do mean just that: the whole truth,
including all the etceteras, as corrective for an AA which is tending
to become conventional, even evasive. They propose the whole truth as
a resource especially for those with a terrible burden of guilt which
they can no longer lay down in public in AA.
As one
reads the history of AA, it seems evident that in the beginning,
among the close, small groups of the first days, any guilt could be
unloaded. The price for freedom from the guilt was willingness to
change, willingness to stop doing whatever was producing the
guilt--starting with stopping drinking. As time has gone on, AA
members have laid down the guilts associated with drinking in their
open-meeting tales. They have laid down the guilts of the rest of
their lives in the Fifth Step--if they have taken the Fifth Step.
Many AAs haven't really taken it--ever. People who slip a lot show up
deficient in this area especially, it seems. And all too often, those
who have taken a solitary Fifth Step with AA sponsor or spiritual
adviser have returned to a former pattern of guilt-making behavior.
They have not used the AA group to help them keep from that return.
After all, the group doesn't know about the misbehavior, so how could
it in any way help?
The new meetings are designed to put all those participating in them in a position to furnish real help to a member wanting to change. The group is going to ask him for a commitment to stop whatever he is doing wrong, and it will expect him to report back regularly to the group on progress--admitting failure, without breast-beating, when he has failed. You're alarmed, you say? This is much too much invasion of privacy by the group? Not so. Remember, one is a member of the group by free choice. One is in the group precisely to get the help the group offers. One wants to change. One wants to be shut of, say, a sex hang-up, or a crippling anxiety. But solo efforts have failed. Now we try the group.
These truth-centered Fifth/Tenth Step meetings can furnish real help. The whole program is involved: Greater Power in the Third, Seventh, and Eleventh Steps; help from others in the sharing of experience, strength, and hope; self-help in the willingness to go into the meetings prepared to tell the truth about myself, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The quintessence of the new kind of meetings is the "marathon." Evidently the idea for these comes most directly and recently from the programs for narcotics addicts called Synanon and Daytop. Both of these came out of AA, as a matter of historical development, but they are changed in important ways from the original AA program. The parentage is still evident, however, and nowhere more so than in the appeal to rigorous honesty. The climate of Synanon and Daytop, as best one can tell from reports and from minimal direct exposure, is much closer to the tone and intention of the fifth chapter of AA's Big Book than are most AA meetings today. While AA has waxed genteel, and eager to avoid discussion of unpleasant truths, drug addicts are willing--indeed obliged--to go to any lengths of honesty to be rid of their sociopathic or psychopathic behavior patterns.
Thus
the marathon--forty hours of continuous meeting with a five-hour
sleep-break halfway through. In two experiences of mine--one in a
non-AA and one in an AA setting--thirty-five hours has proved barely
sufficient for the "Fifth Steps" of some sixteen people
assembled for the adventure. Marathons, unexpectedly, do not prove
physically exhausting. One gets a second wind after eight or ten
hours. (Food is provided at regular mealtimes.)
You
get out of a marathon what you put in. If you put in the truth about
your hang-ups, you get out relief and insight, and new power, through
God, to do something about what is most troublesome in your own
behavior. If you block, and conceal, and choose to talk
trivialities and generalities, instead of the truth of past and
present feelings and deeds, you get little enough, although perhaps
it is impossible not to gain something from so intensive a sharing by
at least some of the others.
There
is much more to be said about these marathon Fifth Steps, but my own
experience indicates that it is best not to attempt a travelogue, but
to settle for urging others merely to try the trip. Somewhere in the
area of the marathon, a vital new tool for sobriety and real sanity
is being forged. (Or perhaps it would be better to say that an old
tool is being restored to us?) The most promising purpose for
marathons which has turned up so far is in trying to blast loose the
ice that has formed at the heart of the long-term slipper, the
seasoned AA failure, whose hope for himself has congealed, and whose
idea of himself is layered over with self-deception. For this chap,
as for so many with extra, major hang-ups beyond alcohol (sex is the
most obvious one that comes to mind), the long hours in marathon bid
fair to open the heart in a flood of powerful emotion. One can come
very near to God under these circumstances as one comes near to one's
fellow human beings in trusting and honest self-revelation.
1*See Pages 6 and 9 --Ed.
Anonymous"
Cheers
The
Fellas (Friends of Alcoholics Anonymous)
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