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Dr Bob och Bill W

Ja vad kan man säga om AA:s två grundare? Möjligtvis att de två var alkoholister som du och jag. Idag slås jag också av tanken att de hade säkert samma problem i nykterheten som jag. Med tiden i AA så slås jag av hur lika vi egentligen är. Troligtvis är det sjukdomen som tar sig samma utryck i oss. Hmm. Nu har vi hunnit till denna sida med engelska texter! Här kan vi hitta följande; Dr Bob´s Farewell, Bill W at Guest House, Three Legacies samt ett brev Bill skrev till Grapevine. Lycka till!

• dr bobs farewell
• bill w at guest house
• three legacies
• emotional recovery

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Dr Bob's Farewell

My good friends in AA and of AA. I feel I would be very remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to welcome you here to Cleveland not only to this meeting but those that have already transpired. I hope very much that the presence of so many people and the words that you have heard will prove an inspiration to you - not only to you, but may you be able to impart that inspiration to the boys and girls back home who were not fortunate enough to be able to come. In other words, we hope that your visit here has been both enjoyable and profitable.

I get a big thrill out of looking over a vast sea of faces like this with a feeling that possibly some small thing that I did a number of years ago, played an infinitely small part in making this meeting possible. I also get quite a thrill when I think that we all had the same problem. We all did the same things. We all get the same results in proportion to our zeal and enthusiasm and stick-to-itiveness. If you will pardon the injection of a personal note at this time, let me say that I have been in bed five of the last seven months and my strength hasn't returned as I would like, so my remarks of necessity will be very brief.

But there are two or three things that flashed into my mind on which it would be fitting to lay a little emphasis; one is the simplicity of our Program. Let's not louse it all up with Freudian complexes and things that are interesting to the scientific mind, but have very little to do with our actual AA work. Our 12 Steps, when simmered down to the last, resolve themselves into the words love and service. We understand what love is and we understand what service is. So let's bear those two things in mind.

Let us also remember to guard that erring member - the tongue, and if we must use it, let's use it with kindness and consideration and tolerance. And one more thing; none of us would be here today if somebody hadn't taken time to explain things to us, to give us a little pat on the back, to take us to a meeting or two, to have done numerous little kind and thoughtful acts in our behalf. So let us never get the degree of smug complacency so that we're not willing to extend or attempt to, that help which has been so beneficial to us, to our less fortunate brothers. Thank you very much.

Bill W at Guest House

Transcribers note: The following address was delivered by Bill W. at Guest House, a treatment center for alcoholic priests in Lake Orion, Michigan shortly before his death, possibly in 1968 or 1969. Where words are unintelligible, best guesses appear in brackets.

Well, I like the informal discussion type of approach. It seemed to me that on an occasion like this questions have something of infinitely more value than a lecture or a story. But [Roop] suggested that I make some remarks here tonight, and I'm only too glad to do that. And coming down on the plane, I got speculating with myself about the early days of AA and about the meaning of them in terms of the grace of God. I read somewhere that if a grain of wheat which has been stored for centuries in a dry place is exposed to the right soil and the right climate and to enough light from above it will manifest life and it will unfold and it will grow. But this presupposes the right soil, the right climate and, above all, enough light. Well, I think it's that way with AA. I remember, years back, when we first began to get publicity, and the first very large occasion was a feature piece done in the Saturday Evening Post which all at once produced us about six thousand members.

This was in '41, and by then a number of medics had become close friends, some of them psychiatrists. And these fellows allowed their names to be used (a rather audacious step in those days, I assure you) their names were used in the Post article. I make this point because, when later asked to testify on another occasion, they refused to do it, and these were the circumstances: the first gal that got sober in AA is one known to many of you as Marty, still very much a going concern in the educational field. Marty was a most difficult case. God knows we're all complex, but Marty was really a champ. And she had been under the care of a Dr. Foster Kennedy, a man of very wide repute in that time, worldwide renown, a neurologist. And he watched Marty as she was planted in the new soil. He watched her receive this light. Well, he was tremendously impressed. He came to some meetings and soon he said to me, "Bill, would it be possible to have two or three of the psychiatrists in institutions who have seen recoveries of very grim cases, people that you say are friends of yours and who have testified for you in the Post piece, couldn't we get a group of this sort to come to the Academy of Medicine and explain what they have seen?" Well, we thought this was just great, because in those days there were few friends, indeed. So shoring by these people, by reason of Dr. Kennedy, well, what could be better? So, one by one, we went to them, and we said would they come to the Academy and we supposed they would. After all, some of the Kennedy glory could brush off, and, you know, they were friends anyhow, and they'd proved it, so why not? And not a one would do it! And, when pressed for their reasons for not doing it, each one of them separately said the same thing. In effect, each said, "Look, Bill. You folks have added up in one column more of the resources which have been separately applied to alcoholics than anyone else. For example: you have this kinship in suffering; you have possibilities of communication that others don't have; you have a crude form of self-examination or analysis and of catharsis; you have a great new outgoing interest; you reduce guilt by restitution and you have this great compelling interest in helping others. And then there is the religious factor. And then there is this factor of the hopelessness, so far as the resources of the individual are concerned, of this malady. Now this is a formidable list of forces, but we still can't come to the Academy." "Well, why not?" "Well", said they, "we see in AA, sometimes in weeks, in a few months, shifts in motivation that even the sums of these forces couldn't begin to account for, because we all too well understand the difficulties of this subtle compulsion."

And the sum of them won't add up to the speed of these transformations in these very grim cases. So, for us, there is an unknown factor at work in AA. And, among ourselves, being scientists we call it the "X" factor. We believe you people call it the grace of God. And who shall go to the Academy to explain the grace of God to that body? No one can. And we simply won't.

So, I think it is just as futile as ever for any of us to presume to explain this matter of grace around which our entire galaxy of principles and activities gathers and clusters. We can't do that, but we can examine this matter of the soil and this matter of climate and this matter of illumination [for] which, for some reason or other, we have made ourselves ready. Clearly, God's grace is in and through all. "So," it might be said, "why haven't alcoholics sobered many times more often through grace than they have? It's available. Why hasn't religion been more successful, numerically at least? Why hasn't medicine been more successful? How is it that laymen seem to be doing this thing?" So I would like to tell a story depicting, at least as it seems to me, what the soil is and what the climate is and what the light is, these things of which we have been placed in such treasured possession.

There is no doubt that in an ordinary sense of time AA began in the office of a psychiatrist, and we might be mindful of this when we criticize people in this profession. Of course, for most of us, the origin is two thousand years old, for some of us perhaps older. But I am speaking of the situation in an immediate sense: how was it precipitated? This too is a matter of conjecture, but here's how it seems to me.

There was a certain business man of great attainment. He's cut down by the grog, he runs the gamut of treatments in this country, and this would be in the year about 1932 when he was just about at the end of his tether. So, he went abroad and became a patient of Dr. Carl Jung. And, as all of you know, Jung was one of the founding fathers of the "art" (I prefer that instead of "science") of psychiatry. And Jung, Adler, Freud were the three founding fathers, but, of these, only Jung seemed to think that man is something more than two dollar's worth of chemicals, a bundle of instincts and an uncertain intellect. Jung thought that man had something beyond this, that man has soul. So our traveler had found a truly great human being, great, indeed, as events [spell or fell] out. He placed himself under that dear man's tutelage for a whole year, becoming more and more confident that the hidden springs of this baleful compulsion to drink were being understood and removed and cast away. He began to feel more free. There was no drinking while he was under treatment. At the end of a year, he left Carl Jung and in one month he was tight. And the bender was terrific. So, in infinite despair, he came back to Carl Jung and said, "Is there anything now for me? You were my court of last resort." And this great man said, "Roland, I thought for a time after you first came that you might be one of those rare cases in which my art has been helpful. Otherwise I should not have encouraged you to stay. But, alas, I am obliged to conclude that you are not, and that there is nothing that I have to offer you. My art has failed you." I need not say that, coming from a man of his eminence, this was a statement of beautiful humility. And the whole destiny of AA, you and me and all of us, has since hung on that sentence. So then Hazard found that agony was added to despair, and he cried out, "But is there nothing else?" And this was the answer he got: "Roland, time out of mind, alcoholics have recovered here and there, now and then, through religious experiences, spiritual experiences let us say, or very truly through conversion" (a naughty word for us AAs; we don't use it for obvious reasons. "But", said the doctor, "this benign lighting seldom strikes, and no one can say where or when it will, or for the resuscitation of whom. So I simply would advise you to place yourself in a religious atmosphere, remembering the hopelessness of your doing anything about it on your own remaining resources alone, and cooperating with your associates and casting yourself upon whatever God there may be."

So Roland aligned himself with the Oxford groups of that time, a rather evangelical movement, rather aggressive (very easy it is to criticize). It was nondenominational, however, and it used simple common denominators of religions, simple moral principles. It called upon its members to admit that they could not solve the life problem on their own. It called upon them for self-examination. It called upon them for restitution. It called upon them for a kind of giving in the Franciscan manner, the kind of giving that demands no return in money, power, prestige and the like, the losing of one's self in the lives of others. Such was the nature of the crowd with which he became associated. Unaccountably, to him, the obsession to drink left. And for some years he had no more trouble. At the time in the groups there were a few alcoholics sober. There is one now at Ann Arbor that goes back to that time, an old friend who never became an AA. Sobered up in the Oxford Groups.

So Roland returned to America. And the groups here in those days were headed by an Episcopal clergyman called Sam Shoemaker. And in his congregation and among the groups were two or three other alcoholics that, for the nonce, were staying dry. And Hazard had a summer place near Bennington, Vermont. And these friends, one of them son of a local judge and himself an alcoholic, described the plight of a boy who was a school-time chum of mine, Ebby Thatcher. And Ebby had been deteriorating horribly. There were summer folks in the town above Manchester. Ebby had run his car into the side of the farmer's house, pushed the wall of the kitchen in, the door could still be opened to the car, Ebby stuck his head out and, to the poor woman cowering in the corner who hadn't been hit, he said, "Hey, what about a cup of coffee?"

Well, the town fathers had had it. They were going to commit Ebby for alcoholic insanity, so the judge's son and Hazard picked up the man who was to become my sponsor. Meanwhile, I had gone the route with which you're all familiar. I had sobered up the summer before, scared to death by the verdict of my doctor, Dr. Silkworth, the one we have since named "the little doctor who loved drunks," and must have then because in his lifetime he dealt with some forty thousand of them as a hack doctor in a drying out place. And he had an idea that this thing was an illness having several components: a spiritual illness, a moral illness and also a physical illness. And, perhaps oversimplifying, he was apt to describe an alcoholic as a person condemned by a compulsion to drink against his own interests, to drink in spite of his perfect willingness to stop, and that this drinking was coupled to an increasing sensitivity of the body which, if the drinking went on, guaranteed his insanity and, one day, his death.

So this sort of a sentence had been spoken to Lois at long last by my doctor, Dr. Silkworth. So you see the soil was under preparation. We were beginning to learn a little more about climate. Ebby and my other friend Roland had received a considerable amount of light.

Well, I got drunk in about two months, even in spite of this sentence that I would have to be locked up or go nuts, maybe within a year. And then my friend Ebby, who had been brought to New York from Vermont, who had unaccountably sobered up for the time being in the Oxford Groups, came to visit me for I too was in great despair. Despair is the primary ingredient, indeed, of this soil. In the medical jargon we might call it "deflation at depth." Some deflation, huh? So, Ebby came to see me. And he pitched at me this list of moral (you might say) cliches.

Nothing so new about that. I was in favor of honesty. I was in favor of helping other people. I was in favor of practically everything he had to say except one thing: I was not in favor of God, for I had received on of these magnificent modeled modern schoolings, scientific schooling, that assured that by a series of stages, picking up increments from somewhere as they went along, I could be traced back to a single piece of ooze in prehistoric seas. And this was my faith. And science was my god. So along comes Ebby, and along comes Jung, for whom I had respect, and here was my doctor: Science can't do it; medicine can't do it; psychology can't do it. Religion? Sometimes. That was his story. But how could I buy religion? So I felt trapped. In other words, I was gripped in the trap which we every day construct for the drunk who appoaches us saying, "Well, I think the group life must be great. Helping other people? I'm for it. But I couldn't get the spiritual angle (as our jargon has it)." Now, as you know, this gentleman is the newcomer, like me, is being caught in this trap. When you and I talk to another alcoholic, and we identify ourselves as having been denizens of this strange world, and, having emerged, and we describe this malady in the terms of our god, Science, and THAT god pronounces the sentence of hopelessness upon us, the sentence, we are deflated at depth. And then we learn that now we have accepted our personal hopelessness, there still isn't any hope because we cannot go for the God business.

And this was the awful dilemma into which I was cast by my friend Ebby, bringing, on the one side, all of this bad news, but on the other side, the spectacle of his own release, and that was the word to use. He didn't say he was on the water-wagon; the obsession had just left him as soon as he became willing to try on the basis of these principles, and, indeed, as he became willing to appeal to whatever God there might be. And this was reducing the theological requirements an awful lot.

Well, I went on drinking about three weeks, and in no waking hour could I forget the face of my friend, a spectacle of release as I looked out through a haze of gin into his face, as he pitched this "synthesis" at me. So I thought,"well, I better go up to the hospital and get sobered up. A conversion experience is not for me: I'm an obstinate Vermonter. Besides, I can't buy it. People say to me, 'Have faith.' And I believe I'd have faith if I could have it but I can't. But anyhow, I'll go and get dried up." So I went to the hospital. I must have had a little optimism, because I came in with a bag of beer (I had tried to share it on the subway up). I was waving a bottle. Dear little Dr. Silkworth came out and I yelled at him, "This time, Doc, I got it!" He said, "I'm afraid you have, Bill. You better get upstairs and go to bed." And he looked very sad, for he loved me. So I went upstairs, and went to bed. I was there while I entered the D.T.s. So, in about three days, I was all in the clear. But, the more sober I got, the more awful the despair, the depression. So, I think it was the morning of the third or the fourth day that my friend Ebby showed up in the doorway, and my feeling was ambivalent at once. So I said, "Well, this is the time he's going to pour on the evangelism." And on the other hand I was saying, "Well, he should be looking for a job. Why is he up here at eleven o'clock in the morning to see me? He does practice what he preaches."

So, Ebby knew my prejudices, and so he waited for me to ask him again for that neat little formula through which he had achieved release. And dutifully he went through it: you got honest with yourself, with another person in confidence; you made restitution; you helped others; and you prayed to God as you understood Him (I think he might have even used that phrase). And without much more ado, he was gone. No pressure. And again I couldn't have truck with the God business. And again the despair deepened until the last of this prideful obstinacy momentarily was apparently crushed out. And then, like a child crying out in the dark, I said, "If there is a Father, if the is a God, will he show himself?" And the place lit up in a great glare, a wondrous white light. Then I began to have images, in the mind's eyes, so to speak, and one came in which I seemed to see myself standing on a mountain and a great clean wind was blowing, and this blowing at first went around and then it seemed to go through me. And then the ecstasy redoubled and I found myself exclaiming, "I am a free man! So THIS is the God of the preachers!" And little by little the ecstasy subsided and I found myself in a new world of consciousness. And one of the early reflections in this world of great peace which stole over me was that all is well with God. I am a part of His cosmos at last. Even evil in His hands can be transmuted into good. So I had been deflates at depth by a fellow sufferer who used the scientific verdict to deflate me, who used his ability to communicate to me through our kinship of common suffering, and who made the example of a person who practiced what he preached. So, then, for me, here indeed was the soil, here was the climate, and, God knows, the light was great.

Now, I venture this assertion [that every member] of AA has a spiritual awakening or experience of exactly this character. Certainly it is not for me to dicker with theologians, but let me say I prefer to think that there is no essential difference between what happened to me and what happens to each sound AA, excepting the time element. Going back to those psychiatrists who said, "We can't understand this tremendous shift in motivation despite all your resources." Well, in my case the shifts ...[tape paused].. but the fruits have been the same. And one of the most terrible compulsions and obsessions known has been expelled from us almost wholesale. It's true, this happy synthesis of medicine, religion and our own experience in suffering, in recovery and sharing the grace of this, one with the next. So, fellas, there's my speech.

Bill, is that light relative in the sense of illumination? It must be. Not every one of us has gone through the experience of ecstasy or any light shining or ...?

OK. Maybe... You know, this is a curbstone opinion, but here's how I look at it. You go to AA meetings and somebody gets up, and this happens time after time,and he says, "Now, folks, I ain't got the spiritual angle. Yet. I'm making the group my Higher Power. They're sober and I wasn't. So I got a Higher Power, I ain't go the spiritual angle the way you fellas did. And as for Bill's thing, well, he looks sane in other respects, but, you know." Now, this guy will get up there and tell a story of losing this compulsion and of its being cleared out of him and his being re-motivated in many other ways, just like those psychiatrists said, in a matter of months, or of six months or a year. Now just take one of those fellows and try to imagine all of those shifts in motivation taking place within six months, or within six minutes instead of six months. I think, had this happened to that fellow, he too would have had ecstasy. So I think it's a time element, and I personally see no great advantage in these tremendous experiences, save in my case only one. It did give me an instant conviction of the presence of God which has never left me from that moment, in spite of the worst I can do (and it's often been damned bad), and no matter what the pressure. And I feel that that extra dividend may have made the difference whether I would have persisted with AA in the early years or not. Actually, it has some liabilities, and I've seen it in others who have had these experiences in AA, and there are quite a lot. And this is the penance, and I think you theologues give us some excuse for it too, of beginning to think that, because we have these tremendous illuminations, that WE are something special. So, you begin to develop a kind of a paranoia alongside of a perfectly valid experience. And this is just what happened to me. I damned near botched up the whole works by coming out of this working furiously with drunks and, before anybody had been sobered up, I got so far off base as to loudly declare on time to an audience by no means spellbound that I was going to sober up all the god damned drunks in the world! Now THAT is pure paranoia if you ever... So, don't long for the illumination. I think you're apt to have the experience that's appropriate.

Well, I'm not longing for it.

Well some people do. You know: "Oh, my God! If I could only have one like Bill's!" Now, actually, this may be said very sincerely because this may be a guy who's slipping around, but he may be slipping around on account of the fact that he's a little schizy and needs some of them vitamin B3s, so now we'll put on Hawkins.

Moderator: Well, you it from the horse's mouth, fellas. Very inspiring and illuminating, the things that Bill [tells] of how this all began. Now you've gone with him you know what the purpose of their meeting is here: is on niacin. And tomorrow we'll have Dr. Hoffer and Dr. Osborn and a couple of other people. But one of the most active in the field with some startling developments is Dr. Dave Hawkins in New York, and I'll read you a little bit of his background: both his Bachelor of Science degree and medical degree were received from Marquette University. He interned in Columbia Hospital in Milwaukee. He the graduated from

Transcriber's note: According to "Pass It On", Dr. Humphry Osmond (not Osborn) and Abram Hoffer were English psychiatrists working in a mental hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, principally with alcoholics and schizophrenics. It was they who introduced Bill to LSD.

Later, they gained some success in treating alcoholics by administering vitamin B3, also known as niacin. Bill felt strongly that this was the key to the "allergy of the body" that Dr. Silkworth had suspected, and spent the remaining years of his life actively promoting niacin therapy (much to the consternation of the AA fellowship).

Transcribed from duplicate audio tape by Steve C.

Three Legacies

The Legacy of Service affirms our faith in the democratic ideal of major decision, the group conscience, basic decency, and the collective wisdom of AA representatives in the General Service Conference, together with the Trustees of the General Service Board of AA, both AAs and nonalcoholics. The spirit of this Legacy can be summed up best exactly as Bill wrote about it:

"We expect that our Conferences will always try to act in the spirit of mutual respect and love -- one member for another. In turn, this sign signifies that mutual trust should prevail; that no action ought to be taken in anger, haste, or recklessness; that care will be observed to respect and protect all minorities; that no action should ever be personally punitive; that, wherever possible, important actions will be taken in substantial unanimity; and that our Conference will ever be prudently on guard against tyrannies, great or small, whether these be found in the majority or minority."

"The sum of these several attitudes and practices is, in our view, the very essence of democracy - in action and spirit."

The Twelve Traditions stand for the Legacy of Unity. The pith of the Traditions is clearly expressed in the familiar Preamble that is usually read before AA meetings. And they include suggestions concerning common welfare, group structure, organization, public relations, and anonymity. Bill's reflections upon the wisdom and humility of the Traditions are heartwarming: "Implicit throughout AA's Traditions," he said, is the confession that our Fellowship has its sins. We confess that we have character defects as a society and that these defects threaten us continually. Our Traditions are a guide to better ways of working and living, and they are also an antidote for our various maladies. The Twelve Traditions are to group survival and harmony what AA's Twelve Steps are to each member's sobriety and peace of mind."

And our Twelve Steps themselves -- the Legacy of Recovery --what principle do they affirm?

For Bill, they centered on the priceless value of every individual human being as an image of his Creator and as a potential instrument of His will, no matter how befogged his mind or how far destroyed his body by the ravages of alcoholism. None of us who are sober today in AA could have heard, in the desperate final moments of our last hangover (while guilt, remorse, and nausea wound our nervous system into tremulous, sweaty knots), any words sweeter than Bill's steady faith that "AA's Twelve Steps are a group of principles, spiritual in their nature, which, if practiced as a way of life, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole."

Many of us, upon first seeing those words, asked ourselves the question "Can it be just that simple?" -- and then heard a voice inside us answer "Yes."

Bill's application of AA principles to ever-changing circumstances was another of his remarkable talents. Day in and day out, letters would arrive at his desk asking for his "last word" on a matter of AA policy. And, in answer after answer, Bill would fall back upon the basic principles of AA's three Legacies, tempered by wisdom, humor, perspective, and regard for the feelings of others.

One warm example occurred in 1968 when a well-meaning AA wrote to Bill, in deep concern, about an influx of youthful hippies or flower children to local AA groups, along with their distinctive manner of dress, sexual mores, and other unorthodox behavior, including the use of drugs. The writer feared that this particular invasion might be "a very real threat to our wonderful, God-given program."

Bill's reply was typical of his use of AA principles to meet new challenges.

Your letter about the hippie problem, so-called, was mighty interesting to me. I doubt that we need to be alarmed about this situation, because there have been precedents out of the past. All sorts of outfits have tried to move in on us, including communists and heroin addicts, prohibitionists and do-gooders of other persuasions.

Nearly all of these people, who happened to have an individual problem with alcohol, not only failed to change AA, but, in the long run, AA changed them. I have a number of them among my closest friends today, and they are among the best AAs I know.

You also have some people who are not alcoholics, but are addicts of other kinds. A great many AAs have taken pity on these people, and have actually tried to make them full-fledged AAs. Of course, their identification with alcoholics is no good at all, and the groups themselves easily stop this practice in the normal course of AA affairs.

Thoughtful AAs, however, encourage these sponsors to bring addicts to open meetings, just as they would any other interested people. In the end, these addicts usually gravitate to other forms of therapy. They are not received on the platform in open meetings unless they have an alcohol problem, and closed meetings are, of course, denied them. We know that we cannot do everything for everybody with an addiction problem.

There has also occurred lately a new development centering upon hippies who have LSD or marijuana troubles - not so much stronger stuff. Many of these kids appear to be alcoholics also, and they are flocking into AA, often with excellent results.

Some weeks ago, there was a young people's convention of AAs. Shortly thereafter, four of these kids visited the office. I saw one young gal prancing down the hall, hair flying, in a mini-skirt, wearing love beads and the works. I thought, 'Holy smoke, what now!' She told me she was the oldest member of the young people's group in her area -- age twenty-two! They had kids as young as sixteen. I was curious and took the whole party out to lunch.

Well, they were absolutely wonderful. They talked (and acted) just about as good a kind of AA as I've seen anywhere. I think all of them said they had had some kind of drug problem, but had kicked that, too. When they first came around, they had insisted on their own ideas of AA, but in the end they found AA plenty good enough as it was. Though they needed their own meetings, they found interest and inspiration in the meetings of much older folks as well.

Perhaps, as younger people come into AA, we shall have to put up with some unconventional nonsense -with patience and good humor, let's hope. But it should be well worth the attempt. And also, if various hippie addicts want to form their own sort of fellowship along AA lines, by all means let us encourage them. We need deny them only the AA name, and assure them that the rest of our program is theirs for the taking and using - any part or all of it.

For these reasons, I feel hopeful and not a bit scared by this trend. Of course, I'm no prophet. I may be mistaken, so please keep me posted. This is a highly interesting and perhaps significant development. I certainly do not think it ought to be fought. Instead, it ought to be encouraged in what we already know to be workable channels. In affection ... Bill.

Bill's old desk is clear today. His voice is as lucid as ever, on tape, in books, in filing cabinets. He still has much to tell us.

Two of Bill's familiar concerns about ' AA's future bear repetition here. The first concerns the destiny of AA; the second concerns the memory of Bill himself in the unfolding of that destiny.

Of our Fellowship, he said, "Beyond a Higher Power as each of us may vision Him, AA must never, as a society, enter into the field of dogma or theology. We can never become a religion in that sense, lest we kill our usefulness by getting bogged down in theological contention."

And he made the caution still clearer: "As a society, we must never become so vain as to suppose that we have been the authors and inventors of a new religion. We will humbly reflect that each of AA's principles, every one of them, has been borrowed from ancient sources. We shall remember that we are laymen, holding ourselves in readiness to cooperate with all men of goodwill, whatever their creed or nationality".... "There are those who predict that Alcoholics Anonymous may well become a new spearhead for a spiritual awakening throughout the world. When our friends say thesethings, they are both generous and sincere. But we of AA must reflect that such a tribute and such a prophecy could well prove to be a heady drink for most of us -that is, if we really came to believe this to be the real purpose of AA, and if we commenced to behave accordingly. Our society, therefore, will prudently cleave to its single purpose: the carrying of the message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Let us resist the proud assumption that since God has enabled us to do well in one area, we are destined to be a channel of saving grace for everybody."

In these paragraphs, Bill asks us simply to preserve our humility as a fellowship.

Much the same humility was infused into Bill's confidence that Alcoholics Anonymous would continue into the future -- and continue in health -- without him.

Once he wrote: "It seems proved that AA can stand on its own feet anywhere and under any conditions. It has outgrown any dependence it might once have had upon the personalities or efforts of the older members like me. New, able, and vigorous people keep coming to the surface, turning up where they are needed. Besides, AA has reached enough spiritual maturity to know that its final dependence is upon God."

For those of us who might wish to see our Bill regarded by posterity as a saint in the pantheon of modern gods, now is the time to reflect carefully upon his humility and wisdom. For, in truth, Bill was not a saint. He would have recoiled -- and did -- at the suggestion. He was a plain man.

His words of warning apply as much to sweet memories of him as they do to other beloved ghosts of our own pasts who settle in our recollections today: "Nothing can be more demoralizing than a clinging and abject dependence upon another human being. This often amounts to the demand for a degree of protection and love that no one could possibly satisfy. So our hopedfor protectors finally flee, and once more we are left alone -- either to grow up or disintegrate."

So long, Bill.

Emotional Recovery

This letter from Bill to a friend appeared in the January, 1958 A.A. Grapevine. Bill refers to faulty emotional dependencies, which today we call co-dependency.

By: Bill W.

I think that many oldsters who have put our A.A. "booze cure" to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in A.A., the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relationships with ourselves, with our fellows and God.

Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security and perfect romance, urges quite appropriate to age 17, proved to be an impossible way of life when we are at age 47 and 57.

Since A.A. began, I have taken immense wallops in all these areas, because of my failure to grow up emotionally and spiritually. My God how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible and how very painful to discover, finally, that all a long we have had the cart before the horse. Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.

How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy and good living? Well that is not only the neurotic´s problem, it is the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to the right principles in all our affairs.

Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That is the place so many of A.A. oldsters have come to. And it is a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious, from which so many of our fears, compulsions, phony aspirations still stream, be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want. How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden "Mr. Hyde" becomes our main task.

I have recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones, folks like you and me, commencing to get results. Last autumn, depression, having no real rational cause at all, took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I have had with depression, it was not a bright prospect. I kept asking myself "Why can´t the 12 Steps work to release depression?" By the hour I stared at the St. Francis Prayer . . . "It is better to comfort than to be comforted." Here was the formula all right, but why didn´t it work?

Suddenly, I realized what was the matter. My basic flaw had always been dependence, almost absolute dependence, on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.

There was not a chance of making the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away.

Because over the years I had undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before so starkly revealed. Reinforced what grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon A.A. , indeed, upon any act of circumstances whatsoever.

Then only could I be free to love as St. Francis did. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love and expressing love appropriate to each relation of life. Plainly, I could not avail myself to God´s love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would love me. I could not possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.

For me dependence meant demand, for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.

While those words "absolute dependence" may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of the return to me.

This seems to be the primary healing circuit, an outgoing love of God´s creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the real current cannot flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.

If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependence and its consequent demand. Let us with God´s help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love. We may then be able to gain emotional sobriety.

Of course, I haven´t offered you a really new idea . . . only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my "hexes" at depth. Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. "I have been given a quiet place in the bright sunshine."