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From the books ... Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book) and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (12 & 12)
Click the page number or the book cover icon
to view that page in the literature.1.
2.
3.
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5.
6.
Several of our crowd, men of thirty or less, had been drinking only a
few years, but they found themselves as helpless as those who had been
drinking twenty years.
7.
Potential female alcoholics often turn into the real thing and are gone beyond recall in a few years.
8.
I also had the notion that I
might find a customer for a
car at this place, which was familiar for I had been going
to it for years.
9.
10.
11.
We do not like the thought
that the contents of a book
or the work of another alcoholic has accomplished in a few weeks that for which we struggled for years.
12.
13.
This had little effect
however for I kept on drinking and used a great deal more hard liquor than in former years.
14.
I conducted myself so creditably that I was able to
secure a much coveted internship in a western city, where I spent two years.
15.
16.
17.
And it can go on for years.
18.
19.
20.
(*) The fellowship of Al-Anon Family Groups was formed about thirteen years after this chapter was written. Though it is entirely separate from Alcoholics Anonymous, it
uses the general principles of the A.A. program as a guide for husbands, wives, relatives, friends and others close to alcoholics. The foregoing pages (though addressed only to wives) indicate the problems such people may face. Alateen, for teen-aged children of alcoholics, is a part of Al-Anon.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
Many years ago one of the leading contributors to
this book came under our care in this hospital and while here he acquired some ideas which he put into practical application
at once.
26.
We believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy; that the phenomenon of craving is
limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker.
27.
28.
Three years ago, when my head doctor, Silkworth, began to tell me of the idea of helping drunks by spirituality, I
thought it was crackpot
stuff, but I've changed my
mind.
29.
In the next years alcoholics flocked to A.A. by tens of thousands, largely as the
result of excellent and
continuous publicity
freely given by magazines and newspapers
throughout the world.
30.
31.
An exceptional man, he remained bone dry for twenty-five years and retired at the age of fifty-five, after a successful and happy business career.
32.
I pointed out that I had had
nothing to drink whatever for three years, and this in the face of difficulties that would have made nine out
of ten men drink their heads off.
33.
Today's life is measured against that of other years and, when it falls short, the family may be unhappy.
34.
35.
After a few such experiences, often years before the onset of extreme difficulties, he
would return to us convinced.
36.
By going back in our own drinking histories, we could show that
years before we realized it we were out of control, that our drinking
even then was no mere habit, that it was indeed the beginning of a fatal progression.
37.
As we look back, we feel we had gone on drinking many years beyond the point where we could quit on our
will power.
38.
The dammed-up emotions of years break out of their confinement, and miraculously vanish as soon as they are exposed.
39.
I gave the matter much time and study for the next two and a half years, but I still got tight every night nevertheless.
40.
Several of our crowd, men of thirty or less, had been drinking only a
few years, but they found themselves as helpless as those who had been
drinking twenty years.
41.
42.
This resolution I kept steadfastly for the next forty years, except when circumstances made it seem unwise to absent myself.
43.
I say this after many years' experience as Medical Director of one of the oldest hospitals in the country treating alcoholic and drug addiction.
44.
45.
46.
Sixteen years have elapsed between our first printing of this book and the presentation
in 1955 of our second edition.
47.
48.
49.
50.
But he is yet a long way from making good to the wife or parents whom for years he has so
shockingly treated.
51.
We know that while the alcoholic keeps away from drink, as he may do for
months or years, he reacts much like other men.
52.
Dad may feel that for years his drinking has placed him on the wrong side of every argument, but that now he has become a superior person with God on his side.
53.
54.
During these years, I drank as much as my purse permitted, still without paying too great a penalty, although I was beginning to have morning
"jitters" at times.
55.
During the subsequent fifteen years I had sense enough never to go to the hospital if I had been drinking, and very seldom did I receive patients.
56.
The next three years I spent in Boston, Chicago, and Montreal in the employ of a
large manufacturing concern, selling railway supplies, gas engines of all sorts, and many other items of heavy hardware.
57.
58.
59.
After high school came four years in one of the best colleges in the country
where drinking seemed to
be a major extra-curricular activity.
60.
But the head of the house has
spent years in pulling down the structures of business,
romance, friendship, health -- these things are now ruined or damaged.
61.
62.
All changes made over the years in the Big Book (A.A.
members' fond nickname for this volume)
have had the same purpose: to
represent the current membership of Alcoholics Anonymous more accurately, and thereby to reach more alcoholics.
63.
Only thirty years later the conquest of the air was almost an old story and airplane travel was in full swing.
64.
Years later, this tough Irish customer liked to say, "My sponsor sold me one idea, and that was sobriety.
65.
The first edition appeared in April 1939, and in the following sixteen years, more than 300,000 copies went into circulation.
66.
67.
Unlike most of our crowd, I
did not get over my craving for liquor much during the first two and one-half years of abstinence.
68.
Seven percent of the A.A.'s surveyed are less than 30 years of age -- among them, many in their teens.
69.
To a surprising extent,
A.A. has offset the damage to family life brought about by years of alcoholism.
70.
Bill W., who along with Dr. Bob S. founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, wrote the book to share 18 years of collective experience within the Fellowship on how A.A. members recover, and how our
society functions.
71.
After the husband joins A.A., the wife may become discontented, even highly resentful that Alcoholics Anonymous has
done the very thing that all her years of devotion had failed to do.
72.
73.
We feel, after many years of experience, that we have found nothing which has contributed more to the rehabilitation of these men than the altruistic movement now growing up among them.
74.
But this was a man who had experienced many years of frightful drinking, who had had most all the drunkard's experiences
known to man, but who had been
cured by the very means I had been trying to employ, that is to say the spiritual approach.
75.
As we shall see, he now means a great deal to his community, and the major liabilities of thirty
years of hard drinking have been repaired
in four.
76.
77.
78.
A doctor said to us, "Years of living with an alcoholic is almost sure to make any wife or child neurotic.
79.
What often takes place in a few months could seldom have been
accomplished by years of
self-discipline.
80.
After three years of this, I wound up in the local hospital where they attempted to help me, but I
would get my friends to smuggle me a quart, or I would
steal the alcohol about the
building, so that I got rapidly worse.
81.
After three years of trial and error in selecting the most
workable tenets upon which the Society could be
based, and after a large amount of failure in getting alcoholics to recover, three successful groups emerged -- the first at Akron, the second at New York, and the third at Cleveland.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
Mercifully, no one could guess that I was to have
no real employment for five years, or hardly draw a sober breath.
87.
My whole life seemed to be centered around doing what I wanted to do, without regard for the rights, wishes, or privileges of anyone else; a state of mind which became more and more predominant as the
years passed.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
In recent years some members and friends of A.A. have asked if it would be wise to update the language, idioms, and historical references
in the book to present a more contemporary image for the Fellowship.
94.
Sometimes the man we are calling upon admits his own fault, so feuds of years' standing melt away in an hour.
95.
96.
97.
When the Washingtonians became temperance crusaders, within a very few years they had completely lost their effectiveness
in helping alcoholics.
98.
99.
On through the years this conduct continues, accompanied by his continual promises to be
careful or to keep off the streets altogether.
100.
Though old buildings will eventually be replaced by
finer ones, the new structures will take years to complete.
101.
For thousands of years we
have been demanding more
than our share of security,
prestige, and romance.
102.
103.
We had failed to see that though adult in years we were still behaving childishly, trying to turn everybody -- friends, wives, husbands, even the world itself -- into protective
parents.
104.
105.
106.
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