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By Christine R.

As a newcomer to the Program, commuting by bus into San Francisco to a stress-filled office, I would jealousy keep the last remains of the Cabin coffee in my cup. Certain that even the home group’s drops of coffee would keep me sober. In a way – they did and still do. Here’s how.

Looking into the one dark eye of my coffee cup, I could recall the Cabin. The knotty pine walls. Who said what. What the reading was. Who attended. “Maggie sat there. Barbara over here.” The entire session would replay in my mind’s eye. In a way, I had what you’d call an “Insta-Meeting.” Now playing in theaters and coffee cups near you. Savoring the good-luck-drops from my home group keeps me sober even now. Not just a travel-mug, a meeting-mug. Sobriety and love travels with me.  

Speaking of coffee comes the Coffee Commitment. You know the one where you have to arrive early? To keep a Coffee Commitment at a 7am meeting like mine, you have to get up and out the door by 6:30. Heaven help us if the coffee is not ready by 6:45am, fifteen minutes ahead of time, for a gathering of happy alcoholics. 

As a newcomer, I couldn’t understand how making coffee enhances sobriety. I wanted an easier, softer way than the early morning sprint. With time came the awareness of undiscovered benefits. First off, comes the enjoyment of my home group itself. A beautiful antique cabin by a running stream in the woods. Arriving early I enjoy the quiet morning hours. The hooting of the owls. The freshness of the trees.

From here, I learned to think of others. As one would do for guests at home, there’s creamer, sugar, and spoons. Table cloth, plates and cups make the place cheery and inviting. Arriving early I began to talk with people, the last thing I wanted to do when I was new. Got their numbers and shared mine. I learned where the great meetings are.  

Eventually, like the line we cross from being a problem drinker into an alcoholic, so comes the line we cross from being an outsider looking in to an insider looking out onto that “host of friends” they talk about in our literature. A “host” meaning more than one. 

“We can be the ones who take on the unspectacular but important tasks of good Twelfth Step work arranging for the coffee…where so many skeptical, suspicious newcomers have found confidence and comfort in the laughter and talk.”  Some of the best twelfth step work comes from get-togethers with a sponsor or sponsee before or after a meeting at the local coffee house.

In olden days they used to say, “All it takes to create a meeting is a Big Book, a resentment, and a pot of coffee.” There’s something about a warm beverage that keeps body and soul sober and sane. Admittedly there are times when the coffee smells better than it tastes. If that’s the case – take up the Coffee Commitment. Come learn how to make the best out of Maxwell House. 

The Coffee Commitment, the Clean Up Commitment, the Butt Can Commitment (mine for years) are among countless commitments to support sobriety. You may have heard, “We go out when we stop going to meetings, we stop going to meetings when we stop having commitments.” Meeting makers make it. Make some coffee and make it.

By Dede H.

Grounded in true core values
Alcoholics Anonymous was new
Among sick unprincipled drunks
Love, courage, and honesty?
We know how low they’d sunk
Sure, we come in crawling
On our knees—not dancing
Not laughing and not singing
Nasty bottoms horrible things
Nowhere to go but up?
No, we have a choice!
One is alive so yes we do
Not just noise we’re poised
To experience happiness too
Hot coffee and a ride or two
Joy, friendship, and laughter
People really learning to cope
Sisters sweet brothers sharing
Experience, strength, and hope
An inclusive path to recovery.

By John W.

It was difficult for me to see how that small untruth was hurting anyone, it was just helping me to keep peace around the homestead. The lie was after all only allowing me to enjoy a small repayment for why I was working so hard in the first place. I had seen “Dallas” as a kid growing up, the stars always had a drink in their hands. They would walk into a room and the first thing they did was go to a fancy looking table, get a nice looking crystal glass and put some brandy in it. Then they would talk of all manner of life and problems and solutions, always it seemed with a drink in hand. I figured if it was good enough for the stars on TV, it certainly would do me no harm.

So as a young married man, starting a family, when the question was posed: “Did you stop for a drink on the way home?” I always told just a little white lie, responding wholeheartedly: “No.”

Like Dover’s White Cliffs eroding over time, I was losing my Integrity little by little and there was nothing I could do about it. I could not stop the conduct which necessitated the lie, despite my best efforts to try. I had already learned the hard way that the trouble that came with my drinking lessons kept me locked in my hidden past. That’s why these little falsehoods were harmless. I could take a gentleman’s pleasure after a hard day at the office before returning to the home that hard work sustained. It was just another of life’s delicate ecosystems, one activity bolstered another, was sustained by a third, so that a fourth could persist, and so on, and so on.

But the erosion of my soul was occurring, just like those White Cliffs. The first time the Truth intervened, at that couple’s session with the ill-fated marriage counsel, when I volunteered out of the blue that I drank the way I did because I was an alcoholic, that was quite a show stopper.  Almost two decades later I still don’t know from where that nugget of Truth emerged. But the admission was a game changer, no doubt about it. It did not save the marriage and has not yet patched things up with the children, but it unlocked a Truth that had been hidden until that moment by the blanket of my denial for all of my waking life until then. So too it was the first time I admitted I was a Newcomer to the 7:00 am group I had been attending for months, each morning still bent from the night before. The lie not told, the lie of omission, had been just as damaging to my Integrity, as I was later to learn. After I embraced sobriety, I found that not only had these lies taken their toll, but the marks they had left on me became the signposts on the path I was to follow to become the man I always wanted to be, they were the signposts on my road called “Change.”

I had to be searching and fearless with my inventory, and my Decision had given me the courage to accomplish that. But then I had to “admit” this inventory. First an admission to my Higher Power, who I could not see any way, so that was no big whoop. Then to myself, but I had penned the inventory, so no surprises there. But the admission to another human being, this was raising the bar quite high indeed. I had to be honest with this guy, my sponsor it turned out, face to face, about everything. As if it was necessary to underscore the value and need for this, I heard the horror stories about how those who did not employ Integrity in this admission, that often a drink, a slip, was their dubious reward and for me, to drink was to die.

So here it was, put out all my cards face up, no tricks, nothing up my sleeve, nothing, nothing at all, held back. Otherwise, be prepared to pack it in and let my disease do what it wanted to do, take everything from me until I had nothing more to give, then take my last breath too. As I had lost my Integrity, one white lie at a time, so too I gained it back by the daily halting of that practice. Although it had been daunting and difficult, that first Fifth Step (there have been others over the years) gave me the tool I needed to speak the Truth.  As the challenges have come since, that tool of Integrity has been often used and it has served me well. I learned in its use, that it was the Willingness to try that put my Integrity into the space it needed to do its work, a space the Courage I had found in taking my inventory had made for that very purpose.  

By Judy R.

For J. L.

By day in a tower
with windows frozen shut
I breathe dry, canned air
preserved in steel and glass
where I ascend at high speed
for the boardroom to suffocate
while our heads untethered
from their suits pronounce
words like “objectify”
or “systematize.” In Human
Resources a sign says feelings
need not apply. Day’s end I leave
feeling less visible than dust.
By night in a basement
with doors swung open
to characters of my
own kind, we tell stories
of our broken ways, like
a tribe around a campfire–
a circle where love is breathed
not always spoken. I share
the day another boss said, “Go,
go right now.” We laugh, again.
Then someone gallant and intent
as Inspector Clousseau glides across
the room, takes my hand, kisses
me on one cheek, then the other
and without a spoken word
makes me feel seen and heard,
makes me feel…

We Failed Idealists Need Attention

By Rick R.

I came from a family riddled with alcoholic drinkers and many of them had the same problem as I did. I recall the first month or so, when I got sober, still hanging out with them at our favorite watering hole, drinking ginger ale. I would slip out every night at 8:00 p.m. and go to the AA meeting at 8:30 p.m. and return at 10:30 p.m. without telling anyone where I was going. I didn’t want anybody to know I was checking out the AA program. I didn’t want to face the ridicule at the time, and I wasn’t sure it was going to work for me. If it didn’t work, I wouldn’t have put up with them mocking me. You might say that I was protecting my anonymity at the time and didn’t even know it. 

After thirty days, I didn’t care who knew about it because I believed I found the answer, and I had. Soon, I was one of those guys who wanted to shout it from the rooftops and try to sober up everyone around me, and you know how that turned out. As I dragged each of my five brothers to AA meetings, it seemed they each learned just enough to be able to rationalize exactly why they were not alcoholics, and they ridiculed me anyway. Since then, one brother, a nephew, and a niece have committed suicide. 

That was among the experiences that gave me hard earned lessons to respect the principle of anonymity. Of the rest of my immediate family of ten siblings, only one sister saw something in me that she liked. She got sober in the program and hasn’t had a drink in over forty-eight years. 

We are exposed to the discussions in AA meetings as newer members complain about someone breaking their anonymity; or ones wanting to shout it from the rooftops, like my former self. Such will always be the case in AA as that is one of the symptoms of alcoholism. We are failed idealists who need attention. But as we get more experience, we learn the true value of the spirit of anonymity. We can always come up with some noble reason for tooting our own horn. We can dress it up in the altruistic motive of sacrificing one’s own anonymity to save someone’s life, which sometimes, in the long run, destroys the chance of being a good example. Often the result is just the opposite, which  I have personally witnessed. Tradition Twelve talks of Anonymity as” The spiritual foundation of all our Tradition ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.”

There is a difference between the” Spirit of the law”, and the” Letter of the law.” We who have been diligent with the program have been highly influenced by the Spirit of what the founders learned and introduced us to in the form of the 12 steps and the 12 traditions.  They all come in the form of unselfishness of the spirit. I have yet to find one prayer or principle in the two books we use as reference guides, that are of a material nature or of selfish motives. This tells me the things I do, as the result of practicing the principles of the program, should be done unselfishly and without fanfare. So long as I needed the attention I was always seeking when I was looking for the photo opp., I was still only following the letter of the law, so to speak. When I came to understand the Spirit of Anonymity, I was able to rein in my EGO and my selfish motives. I try to be a good role model and do so quietly. It seems to work better that way.   

By Dede H.

Courage calls me to be better than I am
To channel moral and mental strength
To face my fears, to persevere and withstand
I must face my ordeals going to any length
I am so glad I have you all to hold my hand
Courage may you be my Higher Power today
Carrying me through trials and tribulations
I see them on the horizon coming my way
I need not call upon ghosts and apparitions
Mighty Courage you are here to save the day
I carry you in my pocket and in my head
Round my neck in the emblem on my necklace
Courage, I think of you to avoid the purloin
I’ve achieved Courage with a smile on my face
Ask and I’ll show you my sobriety coin!

By Christine. R

“Now about sex.” This single sentence from page 68 of our Big Book pulls the covers for a world of room to talk all we want about sex.  The sex discussion continues on 69, proving “there are no mistakes in God’s world.” “We all have sex problems.” Underlined and highlighted several times over in my book.  

Sex is one third of our Fourth Step. Yet, bring up sex as a topic and you’d think we AA’s were a bunch of monks and nuns – never had an intimate relationship anywhere, anytime. Nope!  Nope!  Nope!  If the topic is resentment, all hands rise. If the topic is sex, it’s crickets. Mum’s the word.

In our 12 x 12, p.56 the reference is to secrets so shameful, “we hope they will go to the grave with us.” Such were the topics of men and sex for me. 

While whining and complaining about this man or that, my good sponsor would “bring me up sharply” to say, “They might have been jerks, but you chose them. Your picker is broken. You need a new picker. Why not let God choose for you next time?”  

“Are you out of your mind? Why in the world would I do that?” was my internal dialogue.  Page 70 continues with: “Pray for the right ideal, for guidance, for sanity and for strength to do the right thing.” Turns out God can be a part of our sex conduct. Whoa!  

Indeed, I was picking Mr. Dick instead of Mr. Right. Not looking into the long haul of any relationship, if Bob was busy, there was always Steve. If Steve wasn’t available, there was always Joe. Rather like going from drink to drink, I went from man to man. Men were drinks with legs. Eventually, I had to reveal to my home group I was addicted to men, things got so out of hand, so to speak. Alcoholism is like whack-a-mole. If it’s not drinking, it’s spending. If it’s not spending, it’s eating. If it’s not eating, it’s sexing. One way or another, we seek escape. 

I didn’t know how to be faithful. With no self-control, I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it to arrive by yesterday.  

Some of our oral traditions are not written down; they are not memorialized. One of those traditions is to keep away from relationships for the first year of sobriety. Another crock, I thought. Yet, after taking a year off, I learned more about men by not dating than I did by dating them.

The carrot my sponsor put forth was to attend women’s meetings. Learn how to be a woman among women. Learn how to be in relation with women, not in competition. What clinched it was my sponsor saying, “Once you learn to be a friend with women, you can learn to be a friend to men.” Oh boy! Let’s go to the meetings. Sure enough. Not only did I learn to be a friend to women, I learned to be a friend to men. I’d never had male friends before. Through our Program, I learned to be myself, not what someone else wanted or who I thought I should be. 

No longer a steak dinner for sex. A doormat no more, I moved from the floor under one’s feet to a wall hanging to be appreciated and enjoyed.  

Through esteem-able acts, came self-esteem. 

One of the best suggestions is “if sex is very troublesome, we throw ourselves the harder into helping others.” When lonely, lustful or the thought of texting that ex-boyfriend seems like a good idea, a call to a newcomer saves the day. The privilege of listening to someone else. They call them “Exes” for a reason. Because it’s over and time to move on.  Letting go and moving on – sometimes the hardest thing in recovery.  “It quiets the imperious urge when to yield would mean heartache.” The heartache is for other people as well as ourselves when we pursue this “imperious urge.”

After taking a year out and pulling down the blinds on relationships with men, I began dating a guy in our Program. Supportive to have someone who speaks our language of the heart, who doesn’t let me get away with things and who champions me when times are tough. We’ve been together for 18 years and recently married.  

The woman who never could stay faithful, found faith. The woman who never knew lasting love, found love at last. While it took time and time takes time, it was worth every minute to find Mr. Right, Now.

I Did Not Fit In

By Rick R.

When I look back on my experience, after going through my pre drinking years, my drinking years, and my sober years, in the AA program, it is not hard to see what a troubled individual I had become. In my days from birth to the day I entered grammar school, I was unaware of the dysfunction in my immediate environment. With the absence of supervision, discipline, and role models, I did anything I wanted to do, and my behavior became dishonest, selfish, and shameful, as I later learned. On my first day of parochial school the world came apart for me when I looked around the classroom and realized I did not fit in. All the other kids were having fun and enjoying the experience and I was terrified knowing I could never live up to what was expected of me at that time. As a result, I developed fears and inhibitions those other kids did not seem to have. I learned right from wrong in church but was much too insecure to do what was right. I learned to cut corners, to lie, and cheat, since I had no confidence I could ever keep up with my peers. I began to overcompensate and to act out to make up for my short falls, but it never worked for me. Fist fighting became a regular event. 

This all went on till I turned thirteen and found the answer to all my problems. I had access to alcohol. I did not recognize it at first, but it immediately removed all those fears and inhibitions. For the first time in my life I felt normal and I was as good as anyone and better than most, so I thought. I continued to drink to feel good but when I awoke in the morning, I was more terrified than before. All I had to do was  take that first drink and everything was right with the world again. I continued this pattern until I was twenty-eight years old when I woke up one morning to face The Hideous Four Horsemen, Terror, Bewilderment, Frustration Despair (Big Book pg. 151) and I had a moment of clarity. 

I knew that I had to do something about my drinking, or I would die a horrible death at the hands of others or by my own hand. I called AA, struggled to find the location of the meeting place, arrived there two hours later, and was greeted by three members who were compassionate and understanding. As they listened, my sense of isolation slowly went away, as did the desire to drink. I have never wanted a drink from that moment: October 15,  1969 to the present. I have never had to struggle with the AA program and have embraced it to the best of my understanding. I came to understand the things that I did as a child and as a practicing alcoholic were the ingredients of the disease of Alcoholism. The die was cast at the age of six. All the ingredients were there long before I ever took a drink and all I had to do was add the alcohol. 

Once I removed the alcohol, all the ingredients were still there and that is what the program helped me to set right. I was not responsible for becoming an Alcoholic. I am, however, accountable for my behavior while I was drinking. If I am willing to make restitution and clean up the wreckage of the past, I can free myself from all the guilt and shame and walk away with my dignity and self respect. Today my life is better than it ever could have been, had I never become an Alcoholic in the first place.

Of that, I am convinced.

By John W.

Long before I became a Grateful Alcoholic – no, I never thought I would describe myself in that way – in another dimension of life I had heard the gift of courage described as fortitude. I had an intellectual sense of what “fox-hole courage” was intended to mean, but having never been in the military, much less in battle, I had no literal reality in which to frame the term. When I began losing, with increased intensity and consequences, my battle with the disease of alcoholism, my fruitless, solitary struggle, my Bottom, led me to the AA program and there I experienced the miracle which allowed me to achieve a daily reprieve from my disease. In that awakening, with the help of others, I worked the 12 Steps, sought to live the 12 Traditions and even learned of the 12 Concepts.

But as I trudged and strove to practice these principles in all of my affairs, I had to ask myself: what on earth did that really mean? Dearest Maggie, a darling octogenarian with over half of that time sober, occasionally would drive my home group to tears of laughter, when sharing about how she thought at first that compliance with this suggestion meant she needed to increase her liaisons with different members of the male gender. But when the laughter subsided, she would put the joke aside and burn into your consciousness, as only she could, what it had been like when she drank, how she had come to AA, and what her life was like now because of AA. She would put flesh on the bones of the skeleton of the Principles, but never a name to them.

Although he had pointed to no particular location in the literature, as if only by virtue of the oral tradition of AA, my sponsor had conveyed to me the Principles: Honesty, Hope, Faith, Courage, Integrity, Willingness, Humility, Brotherly Love, Justice, Perseverance, Spirituality and Service. As I had then worked the Steps and continued to do so in the many days that have followed, each Principle had become so easily recognizable in each Step, yet their collection in one place was as elusive as a finger of fog ‘neath the bridge on a blossoming October morning in the city. They were like a good friend who timely arrives with help when trouble is afoot, always there to shed light on the problem at hand or to guide to the next right thing when doubt or fear permeates the senses.

So it is no surprise to me now, as I Zoom from one virtual meeting to the next in these shuttered times, in a March that had come in like one lion and was exiting into April as a pride of them, with not a lamb to be seen, that the Principle of courage is on the nearing horizon.

Born from a Faith which embodies the awareness, to paraphrase FDR that “The only thing to Fear is Fear itself,” fortitude needs now to be summoned to carry this alcoholic through these troubled times. This too is the Principle of courage: the knowledge and belief that no difficulty need be so great as to preclude the ability to confront it with Integrity. I was hearing the Principle of courage expressed by those sharing their experience, strength and hope in my Zoom rooms and I needed to hear it. Whether I attended a Zoom in my home town to strike back at the feeling of loneliness that the shelter-in-place mandates had fostered or tuned-in elsewhere just for a change of pace, the response in the end was always the same – have courage, you are not alone in this battle. 

I saw in my Zooms how vital and necessary it was to have been searching and fearless when I had taken that inventory. That tool in my spiritual kit, that fourth principle, courage, was now being put to use in ways I had never confronted, contemplated, or not a mere few weeks before even imagined possible. Courage, the Principle of step four, honed so many days passed in the inventory’s making, was today confronting the fears of the pandemic, and this was in real time for me Practicing These Principles in All My Affairs. 

This was me in real time practicing the principles in all my affairs to build “the arch through which we passed to freedom” (Big Book, p. 62).