A. If you’re new, you don’t have to share. The Twelve Step meetings were meant to be like the classroom, where the people with time share their experience, strength, and hope about recovery. You are under no obligation to speak.
In some old-school AA meetings, there’s a very strong bias against newcomers speaking. In one of my favorite meetings, the Sunday morning men’s group in Lynn, Massachusetts, when newcomers start professing about recovery, when clearly they don’t know much, the other members start dropping quarters on their metal folding chairs as a sign of protest. It gets worse. The next person to speak will raise his hand and ask a rhetorical question: “What should a newcomer do in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous?”
(If you really want to have fun, read the following responses out loud with a strong north-of-Boston accent.)
Another person will raise his hand and say, “He should keep his mouth shut and his ears open and try to learn something.”
The next person will say, “He shouldn’t say anything. If we need to know about alcoholism, we’ll call on him. Otherwise, he should just try to fill a seat.”
And the next person, and the next person, and the next person, will voice grave displeasure at the idea of a newcomer going on too long.
It’s funny, but it can be a little unnerving, so don’t put your hand up in the Lynn Men’s Meeting until you’ve been around a while. Sometimes the newcomer is so insulted that he doesn’t come back, which is never the intention. The serious point is that you are not obligated to speak. Discussion meetings in most Twelve Step groups can turn into what my friend and AA archivist Wally P. calls “group therapy sessions without a therapist.” Such discussions help no one and can actually be dangerous. If you are talking about your feelings and no one says anything, because of the rule against cross talk, you can end up feeling worse than if you had never said anything at all.
The best thing to talk about in a Twelve Step program is something that will give hope and sustenance to the newcomer. You might say, “But I am the newcomer!” The reality is that other newcomers will listen to you far more carefully than they will to the old-timers. First, they don’t relate to the old-timers as much as they relate to a fellow newcomer. They may think the old-timers are lying about how much time they really have. The story goes that the newcomer turned to the person on his left and said, “How much time do you have?”
“Ten years.”
Whereupon the newcomer turned to the person on his right and asked, “How much time do you have?”
“Ten days.”
“How did you do it?” the newcomer asks the guy with ten days.
You get the point—if you have been sober for only a short amount of time, your experience of staying sober is going to be more powerful than the experience of the person with a lot of time. It may sound perverse, but it’s true. So keep in mind that if you share about your problems, you will help no one, probably not even yourself. But if you share a solution on any level—any sort of hope that things are going to get better for you because you are working this Twelve Step program—you will give hope to the next person. You will help save that person’s life. And isn’t that why we’re in the meeting in the first place?