TheHi bill alcoholic . I am a member of the best dam home group on a Monday night.any night for that matter. It is a mens big book study. Not. A just a discussion meeting. We have a lot of new guys from many of the homeless shelters and treatment centers . We are not a people who would normally not mix. For sure . I missed it because I have health reasons. So I get there early because that's when the work is done . Forth steps being written up guys reveiwing them guys with there sponsors going out of the book and experience. On of my new guys comes there for the 1st time. Middle of inner city. The language is in your face no nice guy stuff .normal to me but he was a little nervousm.he told me after that he was shoked that we do not fellowship.you know talk about every thing but the program. My home group save my life all those years ago. I studied the book so you can't trick me.the men there showed me how to work these steps and they show me how to live a different way of live. We have a place where we can go and treat our disease. People pay to go to weekend retreats and I have it every Monday at my home group. Where the message is in the doing and the showing. Talk better have purpose and we do not want opinion. We don't put up with telling stories. Experierience is mandatory unless its your question or topic tabled.I love my home group and my support group.these men are just like me. They can see me when I can't. Years do not matter . The solutuon that's all that we have and the approach is for the desperate ones only of the hopeless variety. Never organised. But the spirit of a higher power is present. I found a place where I can go to get the solutuon to save my live mfrom people I I would have never met or boned withmthank god for a 12 step program. And the best dam home group ever. We are in the schedule. We serve the heart breakers the real alcoholic the guy just like me.
Thank you for your share. your home group sounds great, doing outstanding work! my home group is a bit softer, mostly middle aged middle class people. we do get some court appointed newcomers, (i was one) and we have a few repeats coming in and out. there is a strong support system for those who want to take advantage of it. whether we attend topic nights, Big Book Study night, or in the summer months a potluck night, AA is helping us share with the newcomer and keeping us sober and growing. jj/sheila
Having a good home group has always been very important to me, as the years went by I've had a few, but my favorite was also a Monday night, I started going because it was near my house, it was small and it was out of the trendy limelight, there were maybe 6-12 of us, and one night I opened up my mouth to share some of my great insight and incredible wisdom and I don't know what happened but the side of my neck opened up and the truth about what was REALLY going on came out of my mouth, I have NO idea who was sharing but it wasn't me...
Afterwards I just sat there in shocked silence, and no one counter shared, no one offered advice, and no one approached me after the meeting to tell me what I SHOULD do or what THEY would do if they were me
I felt safe, I felt accepted
Over the years I told a few friends about it and some of the other members told a few friends and after awhile we had a group of about 30 of us, it was listed in the schedule as a newcomers meeting so we had a steady stream of newcomers coming in, but I can't convey the closeness, the cameraderie, the sense of walking together side by side that evolved over the years, the building of trust, the sense we were growing together
We backed our trusted servants, who kept a -tight- rein on crosstalk, countersharing, and would shut down the giving of advice immediately, the sense of safety, trust and love was a palpable force felt by anyone who walked through the door
Years passed and I was secretary and I got a guy named Dr Gil to speak, he was pretty well known in our parts, he was sitting there and he was having deja vu, 1/2way through the meeting he realized why, he had started that meeting approximately 35 years before, we all just sat there and loved him
I will never be able to convey in words what we shared in that room, I went back a few years ago and it has been discovered by MCYPAA and become a "young peoples meeting", one of my old sponsees was secretary so I went and there were many of the original members, maybe a dozen or two surrounded by 150 kids, high school age up to maybe 25, I have to admit the speaker didn't really flaot my boat, as 20 minutes into her pitch she was just getting to eating paste in 3rd grade in her "what it was like" portion, but for those few years, those people were my family
As I sat at the coffee shop down on the corner waiting for the meeting to start I was watching a sponsor take his sponsee through the big book, the sponsor was about 23, the sponsee about 17, and it sounded so familiar, the sponsor kept saying things I used to say, finally he he stopped at a spot and used one of my speeches verbatim that I had paraphrased from Joe and Charlie and my Grandsponsor so I interuppted them, "I'm sorry, but I have to ask, who is your sponsor?" I didn't recognize the name, who is his sponsor? no luck, and HIS sponsor? drew a blank, what about HIS sponsor?
His great great sponsor was my sponsees sponsee, I got goosebumps, here I was hearing words spoken to me by a man who got sober in 1942 being spoken by a kid who was born nearly the same time as this man was speaking them to me
I knew AA was going to be OK, that regardless of what happened, no matter how badly the fellowship veered off course, as long as we had that book, and one alcoholic talking to another AA would be OK
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it's not the change that's painful, it's the resistance to change that is painful
"...we do not fellowship.you know talk about every thing but the program..."
Never heard it put quite that way, but the heart of this describes perfectly the degree to which "old school", straight-up AA seems, in some areas, in some meetings, to be getting diluted and lost in the shuffle of socio-cultural change among the "recovering" community. It seems that some of the foundational concepts and lessons of AA history are being swept away, even dismissed and discounted, by a growing overemphasis on "sharing", soft talk-therapy-by-proxy, "take what you like and leave the rest", because after all, the steps and traditions are "only" a bunch of suggestions.
Seems there is also an emerging push, in some areas, to reinterpret A.A. to be something other than what it is, as though a program for alcoholics living with alcoholism is somehow subject to criticism for remaining true to its singleness of purpose. The growing inclusiveness (re: the recognition of multi-forms of addictive disease) of addicts in AA (and I am one) is great, until the Big Book study meeting is almost totally focused on "sharing" (drugalogs) about oxy and H and ice and the "old timer" (that would be me) gets chastised for suggesting we confine our discussion to the topic of alcohol. In an AA meeting of all places...go figure!
