No condemnation, no reprimand, no argument. The love of the father for his child

 “No condemnation, no reprimand, no argument. The love of the father for his child.”

What The Ten Stages did for me was to implode all of my conviction about myself. I was not only wrong about the nature of my drinking—I was wrong about the nature of myself. I had thought I was a victim of my depravity, but it turned out that my depravity was the gift that had forced me to come home. the stages explained this to me better than anyone: my child within wasn’t angry. Worse than that: my child within didn’t even understand anger.

I had thought that I was a desperado, coming in from the fields, begging for a handout. It turned out that I was a prince, and my father saw me from a long way off.

The 12 Steps are the heart of Alcoholics Anonymous—but which12 Steps?

The two principal versions of the 12 Steps are markedly different in history and in spirit. One was written by a young, optimistic Bill Wilson on the pink cloud of early sobriety; the other was written by Wilson 15 years later when he was disillusioned and suffering from crippling depression. He wrote the first version in a borrowed office with a pretty secretary transcribing; he wrote the second in a cinderblock shack built to escape visitors, with a judgmental editor so disgusted with Wilson’s shenanigans that he broke away from AA a few years later. Needless to say, the two versions—one published in Alcoholics Anonymous (aka the Big Book) in 1939; the other in 1953’s Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions—paint very different pictures of the problem of alcoholism and its AA solution.
In the spring of 1938, AA was a fledgling organization, little more than a brainstorm in the minds of two native Vermonters who had managed to stop drinking: Wilson, a salesman in Brooklyn, New York, and Dr. Bob Smith, a proctologist in Akron, Ohio. It was Bill’s idea to write a book for people who couldn’t get to AA meetings. He began work in the Newark, New Jersey, offices of Honor Dealers, owned by an early AA member named Hank Parkhurst, drafting and dictating to Parkhurst’s secretary Ruth Hock. Quickly Wilson realized that he needed a structure for the book.
One night at home in Brooklyn, taking as a model the six tenets of the Oxford Group, a Christian evangelical group of which both Wilson and Smith had been members, he began writing. “I relaxed and asked for guidance,” he recalled later. “With a speed that was astonishing…I completed the first draft.” When he numbered the steps he had written, there were twelve.
As each chapter was finished, it was circulated in New York and Akron for editing by veteran newsmen who had gotten sober in AA. Some pages of the original manuscript are almost illegible because of the many edits, most of which make the text more inclusive and less Christian. For instance, Bill Wilson’s first draft of the seventh step read: “Humbly, on our knees, asked God to forgive our shortcomings.” The phrase “on our knees” was deleted, even as the phrase “as we understood him” was added to the word “God” in the third step.

Some mornings, Tom Powers later told me, Bill would just put his head down on his desk and weep while Powers and Love tapped out the new steps on Bill’s typewriter.
It was more than a decade—and a World War—later, when AA was becoming so popular that Bill Wilson avoided meetings, before he thought that it was time for some system of governing and by-laws for the organization. By then he had read thousands of letters written by groups all over the world, many with the same questions and a few with the same solutions. To bring all the knowledge together he planned a new book of "twelve traditions"—these are the by-laws—and an expansion of the 12 Steps. The steps in the Big Book are often brief and run together; Bill wanted to amplify each step and give it its due.
Dr. Bob had died in 1950, and Bill and Lois Wilson were living in the shingled house called Stepping Stones in Bedford Hills, New York. To edit the new book, Bill tapped AA friend Tom Powers, who had worked in advertising and lived nearby in Chappaqua, and magazine editor Betty Love. The three met in the morning in Wit’s End, the cinderblock office Bill had built on a ridge above his house. Soon after they began the work, Bill was felled with the third disabling depression of his life, which he called a “period of blackness.” Some mornings, Tom Powers later told me, Bill would just put his head down on his desk and weep while Powers and Love tapped out the new steps on Bill’s typewriter.
I interviewed Tom Powers before he died at his All Addicts Anonymous (AAA) East Ridge retreat, in Callicoon, New York, where he had established his own sober community after angrily leaving AA in 1958. Powers said that he could no longer tolerate Bill Wilson’s philandering; he also had reason to think Bill was a thief. While Powers’ judgmental voice is evident in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Bill’s mood had also become much darker. After 15 years’ leading AA, he was tired; he felt an enormous burden of responsibility and expectation. In fact, he introduced a resolution that passed in 1955 to turn AA over to its members.
“It may appear that AA consists mainly of racking dilemmas and trouble-shooting,” he wrote near the end of the book. “We have been talking about problems because we are problem people.” When another writer—Jack Alexander—complimented Bill on his work, Bill answered, “Besides my natural tendency to procrastinate, I’ve had a dreadful hex about further writing. Figure I had been so beat up by the events of these last years that I could never bring off anything more that would be worthwhile.”
The darkness in which the new steps were composed is reflected in the harshness of their tone. In step four in Alcoholics Anonymous, for instance, readers are gently led to the idea that they may have some part in their own misfortunes. There is no judgment. But in step four in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, readers are told that they are “tyrannized” by their desires, which has resulted in emotional “deformities.” Readers are scolded for imposing their instincts on others and giving in to uncontrollable desires for prestige with a resulting “perverse soul-sickness.” The Big Book promises that God is waiting: “when we drew near him he disclosed himself to us!” The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions often describes a God who can seem unjust or heavy-handed.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, another New Englander, famously wrote. AA literature is magnificently inconsistent, often contradicting itself or dramatically changing its point of view, as it did about the steps from 1938 to 1953. This was part of Bill Wilson’s ability to make AA welcoming to almost anyone who needed help. It’s hard to pick a fight with someone who is on your side.

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The proper attitude that goes with the healthy choice is not willfulness—which is the root of so much of our problems and unhappiness—but willingness.

Willingness to live by principles.
Willingness to do what is right for ourselves.
Willingness to respect the nature of our spirits and our bodies—and of the world we live in—and to act accordingly.
Willingness to get in touch with our Higher Power, to understand what it requires of us for well-being, and to way (in essence, if not in literal form): “Not my will, but Thine.”

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The AA or Al-Anon program itself can be your Higher Power in a way that is perfectly in keeping with the spirit and letter of the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions.

 It also allows 12-Steppers to avoid the contradiction, seldom noticed, in using God or some other spiritual personality as one’s Higher Power.
Clearly, the 12^th Tradition tells us to always place “principles over personalities.” Note that it doesn’t just say earthly or moral personalities, but personalities in general. If one is to apply this Tradition in a consistent and unbiased manner, it seems to urge that we turn our lives over to the guidance of the power in principles, rather than turning it over to any personalities. It does not say “except for an external Supreme Being or one’s own personal Savior,” or whatever. It says “principles over personalities,” period.
Now, an atheist or agnostic can wholeheartedly embrace the 12^th Tradition and turn his life over to the Higher Power that resides in the principles of the 12-Step program. The reason is that the principles of the 12-Step programs are based on the facts of reality and human nature, on the factual requirements of human spiritual and emotional health—rather than on anyone’s say-so, supernatural or otherwise.
It might be thought that those facts themselves, or Reality itself, can be one’s Higher Power. And in truth, they do operate, to one’s advantage or disadvantage, depending on whether one acts in accordance with them or against them. But as a point of reference for a 12-Step recovery program, it is not the facts themselves that serve as one’s Higher Power, but the facts as acknowledged or recognizedin the form of principles. To have a “conscious contact” with the facts of reality as one’s Higher Power—and not merely being constrained by those facts—one must deal with them in the form of principles.
Agnostics and atheists can do everything that their program brothers and sisters do—things like staying in touch with their Higher Power, “letting go and letting God,” being willing to have their Higher Power remove their character defects, etc.—but they do it in relation to the Higher Power in the principles of the program, a fully natural Higher Power, rather than a Higher Power residing in some other dimension.
Before going any further, I want to make one thing very clear to my religious friends: I am not arguing that Christians, Jews, etc. should abandon their faith in God. Their faith is none of my business. But the integrity and effectiveness of 12-Step programs is my business—and it should be the concern of everyone who wants to make sure that religion never becomes one of the Three Obstacles to Progress in Al-Anon, as one of our pieces of program literature refers to it.
The issue is: is it proper to set up a personality—albeit, a supernatural one—as one’s Higher Power in a 12-Step program? Is it proper to turn one’s life over to someone else, even if that Someone is All-Knowing, All-Powerful, and All-Good?
I believe that there is much danger in setting up God as one’s Higher Power as there is in allowing one’s sponsor or some other 12-Step program friend to serve in that way. The human weakness this plays into is the natural tendency for people who are emotionally and spiritually unhealthy to turn over responsibility for their lives to someone else. This is a very harmful policy. It encourages passivity, the attitude that you don’t have to do anything; someone else (in this case, your Higher Power) will take care of it for you.
In response to this, Christians and others in the Program point out that when you turn your life over to your Higher Power, you still have to provide the energy, the “footwork,” as it were. This is true, but they don’t follow it to its logical conclusion: what they really mean is that you are turning your life over to the guidance of “God’s will”—i.e., becoming willing to act according to (God’s) principles as expressed in the 12 Steps, 12 Traditions, etc.
So, here we are once again, back to the need to live according to principles, rather than self-will, hedonism, etc. Back to: “Principles over personalities.”
Can Christians and others accept the need to leave God at the doorstep, so to speak? Can they let go of the religious elements which now compromise the effectiveness of 12-Step programs? (Giving up the reciting of the Lord’s Prayer at the close of 12-Step meetings would be a good start.)
Even if they can’t go this far, surely they can agree with agnostics and atheists that the principles of the 12-Step recovery programs are a Higher Power than their own self-will. If promoting such a mutual understanding is all I am able to accomplish with this essay, I will have been very successful indeed. Let’s talk.
Example 5: Another Higher Power for 12-Steppers
Some people say the “God-of-your-understanding” can be the collective conscience of the recovery group, the group-as-a-relationship. The premise here is that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” that a principle of “synergy” operates that produces more healing and growth for everyone than they could have had apart form the group.
It is a common temptation for some group members, when seeing a group going “off course” in some way, to want to take over the group and try to make it better. But the group doesn’t need us to focus on it and try to cure its shortcomings or control it in some way, any more than any of its members need us to do this. You are not anyone else’s or anything else’s Higher Power. The only one you need to control and fix—the only one you really can control and fix—is yourself.
It’s true that a group conscience is a more complex Higher Power than any of the other examples presented so far. It depends upon the interaction of a number of individual people’s awareness, rather than the simple operation of one’s own internal awareness. Also, the general grasp of the 12-Step principles may be better or worse than your own individual grasp of them. Nevertheless, the overall pattern of relating to the group as one’s Higher Power is the same as in the other examples.
If you do what’s right for you, the group-as-a-relationship will carry you to where you need to be. If, of course, the group doesn’t have enough healthy parts—i.e., enough people who are actively fixing themselves or keeping themselves healthy—that fact will eventually become apparent to you. But in such a case, rather than trying to take over and fix the ailing group, acting as its Higher Power, so to speak, you are far better off simply to find another, healthier group.

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We were then encouraged to believe that “a Power greater than ourselves” could restore us to sanity.

We were then encouraged to believe that “a Power greater than ourselves” could restore us to sanity. That reliance on our selves or egos and our hedonistic or wilful impulses—rather than higher principles—was the main source of the emotional turmoil and chaos in our lives. That focusing on trying to change someone else’s character or behaviour—rather than doing what is right for ourselves—was the cause of our continuing feelings of misery and helplessness.

We were further invited to “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God” as we understood Him—to admit “to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”—to be “entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character”—to “humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings”—and to seek “through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God” as we understood Him, “praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. (Except for the phrase “persons, places and things,” the above quotes are all from the Twelve Steps of AA.)

For these purposes, many people find that the traditional Judeo-Christian God works perfectly well as a Higher Power. Indeed, some of them (especially newcomers) are more than a little nervous or upset to hear the term “Higher Power.” Why not simply call God “God”!

In time, however, most of them come to accept the fact that the 12-Step programs, while not religious per se, are very spiritual—and that in order to offer spiritual and emotional recovery for the greatest number, these programs should scrupulously avoid reference to any specific religious point of view. (These points are made in the 12 Traditions and Three Obstacles to Progress. It’s interesting to note that, if taken consistently, they would seem to rule out the common practice of closing 12-Step meetings with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.) The relative few, usually Fundamentalists, who cannot get comfortable with the unaffiliated nature of such programs, are free to gravitate toward Christian recovery programs.

What about those who have trouble relating to an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, All-Good Creator of the Universe? How are they to relate to a Higher Power?

Most of these people begin the process with something more easily grasped or believed in, such as their own conscience—or the “Group Conscience” (i.e., the collective spirit of the assembled recovery group)—or the 12-Step program itself (including the 12 Steps, 12 Traditions, slogans, Do’s and Don’ts, Serenity Prayer, etc.—or some power in Nature greater than themselves (such as the ocean)—or even a radiator or some other concrete object they can focus on in order to “transcend” or get outside of their own selves and wills. (This last technique is similar to what pregnant women train themselves to do in a La Maze childbirth class, which helps them to detach from or dissociate from the pains of labor and delivery.)

In all cases, your Higher Power is supposed to be the focus of your prayer and your requests for serenity, courage and wisdom. And in all cases, you are encouraged to think of your Higher Power as higher than your self-will, and desires, a source of wisdom and guidance superior to your own thinking and judging.

Even though it seems reasonable that you could consult your own conscience on a temporary basis—if you weren’t in too chaotic an emotional state at the time—you are usually encouraged to get in the habit of being in touch with a Higher Power outside of yourself. Even your recovery group or your personal sponsor is generally considered to be more reliable than your own inner sense of right and wrong, or your own reasoning powers, particularly in times of stress. (Presumably, your conscience and your intellect are too closely tied in to the ego or self-will and are tainted by its influence—and too easily influenced by strong emotions to remain objective.)