AA MINORITY REPORT 2017 (revised)

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Friday 28 November 2014

The Synanon cult infiltration of AA (Grapevine articles 1968-1979)


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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