A. If you’ve never listened to “The Big Book Comes Alive,” the Joe and Charlie program on the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, you’re missing something great. When I got sober, I had to order the cassettes, and then put them on my Walkman.X That was a long time ago. Today, you can find their show online for free in a variety of places. So give up Facebook for a few hours and tune in to Joe and Charlie.
If I could change one thing about Twelve Step recovery,XI I would ban smartphones from the rooms. Not just their use during the meeting—and I confess that sometimes when I’m really bored or antsy, I will check out something on my own phone—but before and after the meeting as well. It used to be that you came into a meeting room and everybody was talking.
There were little conversation clumps here and there. Big meetings offered the same friendly, expectant buzz you heard when you entered a good bar.
Today, by contrast, because of smartphones, stepping into a Twelve Step meeting room is like stepping into the public library. Nobody’s talking. Everybody’s just sitting there, atomized, spacing out on their smartphones, getting the dopamine high that an ongoing flow of fresh information provides.
It’s antisocial. It’s no fun. There’s no exchange of ideas, no flirting, none of the socializing that the fellowship traditionally offered. Alcoholics and addicts need to know how to hold conversations with other people. We know how to get over on people. We know how to connive. We know how to beg for sex without making it look like we’re begging for sex. But the art of conversation is rapidly becoming a lost art for folks like us, because people sit down, take out their phones, and punch away. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear people were staring at their own genitals, because most people tend to keep the phone right over their private parts, like the fig leaf in a medieval painting. If I could change one thing about Twelve Step recovery, it would be to ban phones from meeting rooms.
It’s not just banter and the development of essential social skills that’s lost. It’s much harder to identify a newcomer. When you’ve got five members talking over here, and three members talking over there, and one guy standing there with a cup of coffee and a deeply uncomfortable look, it’s easy to spot the newcomer, whether it’s your home group or not. There he is—the guy I need to go over and talk to.
What do you say to a potential newcomer? Ask him how his day is going. Ask if this is his home group. Ask if he’s been in the program a long time. Get his phone number. Give him yours. The presence of smartphones in the halls diminishes the ability of members to carry on Twelve Step work, because newcomers are just as buried in their smartphones as are the old-timers.
But I digress.
I mentioned Joe and Charlie here because they made a fascinating point about the early history of AA: that the fellowship owes a great debt to three physicians, who were neither alcoholics nor addicts themselves. Let’s take a look at who these fine gentlemen were, what they offered the nascent AA fellowship and Twelve Step recovery in general, and why they still matter today.
Contrary to myth, the program did not emerge suddenly and completely from the forehead of its wise cofounder, Bill W. Bill’s genius, and it was genius, consisted in stitching together vital ideas from a variety of sources that, taken together, became the foundational ideas of AA. Joe and Charlie pointed out that three MDs, all nonalcoholics, were the sources of some of these key ideas. Let’s look at each in turn.
We’ve talked a lot about the concept of the spiritual awakening and how essential it is to real recovery in Twelve Step programs. But where did the concept come from? The answer is Carl Jung, the pioneering Swiss psychologist who recognized that there was more to people’s inner lives than the Freudian complexes that dominated the conversation about human psychology during the early twentieth century.
Jung grasped that people were more than bundles of subconscious, suppressed sexual desires and other seemingly negative traits. Jung was a psychologist who recognized that human beings had souls.
So what’s the connection between AA and Dr. Jung?
In the late 1920s, a wealthy American businessman, Rowland Hazard III, or Rowland H. to folks like us, uprooted his entire family from New York to Switzerland so that he could have Dr. Jung treat his alcoholism, for which, up until then, he had found no cure. After a year of work with Rowland, Dr. Jung broke the sad news, the story of which is recounted in chapter 2 of the Big Book.
Jung told Rowland there was nothing medical science could do to cure his alcoholism. The only solution Jung knew of was to employ “huge emotional displacements and rearrangements” of a spiritual nature. That, Jung said, was the only hope that Rowland or any alcoholic or addict had for recovering from the “seemingly hopeless state of mind and body” known as active alcoholism.
Rowland returned to the United States and found his way into the Oxford Group, seeking a spiritual solution. The Oxford Group, which we’ve talked about earlier, formed “drunk squads,” whose mission it was to convince alcoholics to stop drinking. Rowland, freshly returned from his stand with Dr. Jung, entered the Oxford Group and had the kind of spiritual awakening that would later be described in the Twelfth Step.
He then turned around and helped get sober none other than Ebby Thatcher, who visited Bill’s apartment a few months later and carried the good news that he had gotten sober, and so could Bill.
So that’s the chain of events—Dr. Jung to Rowland to Ebby to Bill and, decades later, from their successors to you and me. We are the beneficiaries of that early connection between Jung and what would become Alcoholics Anonymous, which was used as the foundation for hundreds of other Twelve Step programs.
Bill Wilson actually entered into correspondence with Dr. Jung. There is a degree of controversy surrounding the correspondence they allegedly shared. There’s a letter in Bill’s archives purportedly from Dr. Jung, expounding on a concept of a spiritual awakening as it pertains to alcoholics. People who really study these matters will tell you that the rubber stamp used to sign that letter was not something Jung used in the decade that he wrote that letter, calling into question its legitimacy.
The bottom line, however, is that Jung’s influence on the program remains intact to this day: the need for a spiritual reorganizing, or awakening, in order to counter alcoholism and addiction. Imagine how dismal Twelve Step recovery would have been had Sigmund Freud, and not Carl Jung, been its primary source of psychological and spiritual belief.
Since Freud believed in analysis, our Fourth Step would have been the First Step, which means that alcoholics and addicts would have been launched into self-examination even before they had understood or accepted the need for spiritual help. So let me go on record as saying that I’m grateful that Freud did not have a hand in early AA.
In Dr. Bob’s final speech, he addressed the issue squarely: “Let’s not mess this up with Freudian complexes,” he told his audience, words that hang in a thousand Twelve Step meeting rooms.
As a result, Twelve Step recovery, no matter how old it gets, remains forever Jung.XII
The second nonalcoholic MD to whom the program owes an enormous debt is the founder of the Oxford Group, Dr. Frank Buchman. The idea behind the Oxford Group was that people needed to dedicate themselves to honest, sincere, spiritually pure living. If people were better, Buchman reasoned, the world would be better. He created for his members a six-step program toward that better way of life.
As we have seen, Bill took Buchman’s six steps, applied them directly to the problem of alcoholism, and doubled their number to twelve. If it had not been for the second nonalcoholic doctor, Frank Buchman, Alcoholics Anonymous would never have had a concept of Steps upon which to draw.
Amusingly, I once heard an audio recording that stated that Bill deliberately chose the word took as in, “these are the steps we took,” reasoning that alcoholics are takers. Told they would have to work the Twelve Steps, they would have been too lazy, but taking is right in their wheelhouse.
The third of the nonalcoholic doctors who provided pivotal guidance to AA was Dr. William Silkworth, who ran the drying-out hospital for drunks where Bill would repair when he had gone on a particularly bad bender. Think of it as Airbnb for people with good credit and bad hangovers. Silkworth and Bill apparently became very good friends—Bill was there often enough.
One of the most important moments in AA history came after Bill had experienced his life-changing visit with Ebby. In fact, it wasn’t life changing enough for Bill to quit drinking on the spot. He went on one more spree, to use the then-popular term, and landed in a bed once again in Dr. Silkworth’s Towns Hospital. There, defeated by alcoholism for the umpteenth time and convinced that he was going to finally die of the disease, he thought back on his conversation with Ebby and commanded that God reveal himself.
Bill then had a sudden spiritual transformation—a literal white light experience that shifted his entire being. God came to him suddenly, as he later recounted, both in the Big Book and countless times in front of AA audiences. (You can find Bill’s story, which he named “The Bedtime Story,” online; he took two hours to tell his story, punctuated by a ten-minute cigarette break.)
Dr. Silkworth also realized that Bill was a changed man. Bill, a hopeless alcoholic to that point, never drank again. He died in 1971.XIII
Dr. Silkworth and Bill both recognized that Bill’s “white light experience” was transformative. Bill left Towns Hospital shortly thereafter with his sobriety and a new plan. He then threw himself into the idea of convincing other alcoholics to quit drinking by pursuing the same sort of spiritual experience that Bill had enjoyed. If you can imagine this, Bill barhopping, trying to persuade drunks on barstools to give up their alcohol and follow his path. Unsurprisingly, Bill converted exactly no one to sobriety.
He went back to Towns Hospital—not as a patient but rather to detail to Dr. Silkworth his feelings of failure in helping others to stay sober. Dr. Silkworth pointed out the obvious—by trying to carry a message to other drunks, Bill had stayed sober himself. And this was the third leg of the stool, a barstool, if you like, of AA principles—the idea that when you carry the message to others, you are enhancing your own recovery.
Dr. Silkworth conveyed the idea to Bill that alcoholism was a disease, not a moral issue. This was a huge shift, because until then, if you were an alcoholic or an addict, you were a bad, weak, even evil person. No longer. Dr. Silkworth singlehandedly removed the moral stigma from addiction, an idea Bill popularized through Alcoholics Anonymous.
This is the third of the ideas from the three nonalcoholic doctors that Bill synthesized and from which he created Alcoholics Anonymous.
To recap: You’ve got the idea of the spiritual awakening, from Dr. Jung. You’ve got the concept of a Step-based recovery program, from Dr. Buchman and the Oxford Group. And you’ve got the idea of alcoholism and addiction as a disease and not a moral issue, impressed upon Bill by Dr. Silkworth at Towns Hospital.
Bill didn’t invent AA from whole cloth. His genius—and I use that word again, and purposefully—consisted in recognizing the value of those three ideas and how, when combined, they created the atmosphere in which AA grew and prospered.
Bill was a lot of things—not all of them pleasant. In short, he was a complicated man. He was human. But could any other human being have recognized and combined those three vital ideas into a fairly simple approach to recovering from one of the worst problems that human beings face?
God bless Bill W. He recognized essential concepts when he saw them, and he put them together the way probably no one else could have. That’s why we love him. Yes, that’s why we still love Bill.
Okay, so now you know a ton about Twelve Step programs. But the Big Book chapter isn’t called “Into Knowing” or “Into Thinking.” It’s called “Into Action.” So let’s get into action . . . and actually take those first three Steps.
I. While the practice is to protect one’s anonymity in Twelve Step programs, I’m using the full names for Bill Wilson, Dr. Bob Smith, and also Lois Wilson and Ebby Thatcher, because these individuals are historic figures and are often named in full in Twelve Step circles.
II. Ideally, not people to whom you are attracted. Keep your focus. Remember that these meetings are part of working a program for your sobriety and a better way of life. Do everything you can to prevent things from getting romantic, sloppy, and ultimately messy.
III. Okay, you’ve seen that line before in this book. Guess what—you’ll hear it again.
IV. Just call me “Someone.” It’s better than what my sponsor used to call me, which is “Some.” As in “Some are sicker than others.” He also said I could turn my will and my life over to the care of any empty room and get better results. He also said that I may not have had a happy childhood, but I sure am having a long one. What a mean sponsor I have.
V. Maybe the fact that the restaurant was called “Sizzler” was a sign that God did not have bigger fish to fry.
VI. As the late, great Peppermint John—a legend in Southern California AA—used to say, this is proof that “AA has specialized in a**holes from the beginning.”
VII. By that same logic, I shouldn’t have an author photo on this book. So I don’t.
VIII. The beauty of attributing a statement to Einstein is that it becomes irrefutable. Who the hell are you to argue with Albert Einstein?
IX. How I hated those old-timers with their derisive snorts. Now that I’m one, I try very hard not to snort derisively within twenty-five feet of any newcomer.
X. As the expression goes, I’m dating myself, but I’m not sleeping with myself.
XI. There I go again.
XII. Couldn’t resist.
XIII. He did become interested in LSD, the taking of which, in the 1960s, was not considered a slip.