Something more than us

When I need a definitive guide to the Traditions, The Concepts, The Legacies or anything else then I make use of my fellows and our conference-approved literature; “Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions”, the UK Service and Structure Handbooks and even the North American World Service Manual.

So I think I can be most useful here by sharing my personal experience: how other alcoholics carried the message to me on September 21st 2019 that has kept me comfortably free from alcohol ever since. And how I in turn, to maintain this blessed state, have tried to do the same for others.

The long form of Tradition 5 states that.

“Each Alcoholics Anonymous group ought to be a spiritual entity having but one primary purpose—that of carrying its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.”

Then there’s a quotation from the Bill Wilson’s essay Problems other than alcohol:
“Sobriety – freedom from alcohol – through the teaching and practice of the Twelve Steps is the sole purpose of an AA Group”
As a shivering, traumatised and in my case grieving newcomer I wasn’t exactly good at taking in new information. But I happened upon a group where people shared their stories in a way that gripped me. Some of it was the language of the heart: complete strangers told me about lives dominated by the “bedevilments” that I later saw on page 52 of the Big Book. Then they told me how, for a while, alcohol seemed like a full and complete solution to that lonely suffering. From the Big Book I read my own death sentence, delivered in ‘The Doctor’s Opinion’.

I spent my first sober Christmas Eve I at the dry house with some of my new AA friends. I vividly remember sitting at the kitchen table with a man who I then hardly knew. We agreed, without self-pity and with genuine good cheer, that neither of us had particularly wanted to survive by the time we came to AA. Last year I was at his wedding, surrounded by the gratefully reconciled members of two loving families and a host of celebrating AA friends.

This change in my outlook and his fortunes is nothing to do with abstinence from alcohol. I’d been dry, once or twice, for weeks and months and found that sober life had become a despairing round of joyless chores. I knew with absolute certainty that ordinary life just didn’t have enough to offer.

Here’s what happened: the AAs I met showed me a way out on which they could absolutely agree. They’d tried and failed at everything I had tried and failed at. The only thing that had worked for them was asking another alcoholic to take them through the Steps and building a new life based on spiritual principles. Now that I have done just that, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world. Back then the Steps looked obviously wrong. They looked like they’d hurt. I thought they might even finish me off. The also looked like they depended on faith and I had no belief whatsoever in anything supernatural.

I was also told that I would have to allow somebody else to share their sane experience and guide me in the work that would restore me to sanity. At some point I knew I was going to have to share things with that person that I really didn’t want to share. This also seemed like a relationship that might not increase my happiness. But I did it. Nobody won an argument with me. What happened was that I resigned from the debating society internally. A huge part of this was becoming immersed in a group who wanted me to discover what they had found for themselves. They knew, before I did, that I would have to get a sponsor and a Big Book and take the 12 Steps. They also had the integrity and conviction to hammer home these fundamentals over and over again. I believe every newcomer should hear this as the living experience of another alcoholic. I’m saying it now because it keeps me sober and because I believe I owe it to the next lost soul like me.
The long form of Tradition 5 says “Each . . . group ought to be a spiritual entity”. This always makes me think of my first meetings. There was something operating in this group of strangers that seemed to amount to more than the sum of its parts. I hated even the word “spiritual” but here there was purpose, direction, a sense of life and presence. I thought I might have broken something that could never be mended, and I seriously considered that I might not be worth saving. But the ethic of service in my home group somehow transmitted something vital and benevolent which I now believe to be at heart of AA. I often hear people share that The Power of the AA Home Group is a perfectly acceptable Higher Power. This is absolutely true in my experience.

I think that everything we do carries a message. My advice to myself had been “Do sweat the small stuff”. There are some customs in my home group that I wouldn’t impose elsewhere. That’s at least part of Tradition 1. But I fall in line with these because they require that I give freely of myself, sometimes a little bit more than I think I should have to. The literature is very specific about the necessity of “work and self-sacrifice” and I try to maintain these because I see the cost of going backwards. I smarten up for meetings, turn up early, stay for coffee afterwards, do what I am asked to do as well as I can and bring my whole self to AA. These things that run so contrary to my natural selfishness and self-centredness have kept me safe, sane and sober. These are the acts of love and service that showed me the way out against all odds.

Will B, Road To Recovery, Plymouth, March 2026