At five guests being aided now, and a sixth on his way, our sober living home is humming along at the moment! Two are in our basement tackling the neverending plumbing issue in lieu of program fees! And three are in the main house, with hopefully a fourth coming in a couple of days!
We’ve two rather young guests this time. One 24, the other 20. They don’t have a lot of AA meeting experience between them, not like us middle-aged alcoholics with decades of experience! In fact, the younger one had never been to an AA meeting at all!
Newcomers are always fun. It reminds you of how odd and amusing AA meetings can be, apart from their legitimate value at helping reign in your addictions!
AA meetings have both structure and variety. Structure in that they all open and close the same way, pretty much no matter where on Earth you are. Variety in that when it’s time for each to speak, you never know what you’re going to hear!
| But all are ALWAYS welcome! |
AA meetings can have different focuses, including when it’s discovered that it’s someone’s first time at a meeting. No matter what kind of meeting it was going to be, the presence of a newcomer turns it automatically into a newcomers meeting.
That’s when after the usual formalities, each person will be taking a turn addressing the newcomer, welcoming them, giving them words of encouragement, or a cautionary tale, or advice, or just speaking on whatever aids in their own sobriety.
The “whatever aids in their own sobriety” is where you get the most variety. Every meeting will give anyone the basics. The entire program, it’s instructions and reasons are given out at the beginning, right after the moment of silence (for all those who haven’t found AA yet) and the Serenity Prayer. And every meeting will close with the Lord’s Prayer, done in the Protestant style, and the closing mantra of “Keep coming back, it works if you work it SOBER!”
But after the prayer, after the instructions and such, after the announcements, after asking if anyone has an anniversary (like being one month or one year sober), that’s when it’s “open mike” as I think of it. The chairman will ask who wants to start, then when one volunteers to go first, it will go in a circle from that person till all have had a chance to speak. Mostly, this all fits into the hour just fine, no matter how many are there. Sometimes it runs late. Then you have to ponder whether to break away and possibly bobble someone’s sobriety, or stay and miss that episode of Westworld you were hoping to watch!
(I stay!)
(I stay!)
You all know how it starts. "Hi, I'm Dean and I'm an alcoholic!" (We don't do the last initial thing much any more) Then everyone says, "Hi, Dean!"
But what gets said behind those closed doors after that? Well, it really varies. Often times there is a brief reading from the Big Book (The Alcoholics Anonymous Bible) or from the 12 and 12 book. Then we’re each, in theory, going to speak on that topic. So you’re basically sharing what that topic means to you, or how it affected you, or how it inspires you or such.
But some will instead just share whatever they came to share anyway, whether it relates or not. Sometimes they’ll smoothly segue into what they have to share, other times it will be a clumsy transition, other times they’ll just start on their speech, with no attempt to pretend it relates.
In those cases, it will usually be about something alcohol related. It being entirely unrelated to anything is rare, but not unheard of. A woman can share about her troubled kid, or a guy can rant a bit about his uncaring ex, or etc. But it’s rare to be wholly unrelated to alcohol or drugs, and there’s an enormity of tolerance at such meetings.
When in most cases people are sharing about something alcohol or addiction related, it’s usually their personal stories of what drove them to the first AA meeting, or how they knew they hit rock bottom, or some anecdote from their past that illustrates the point of the reading.
Other times, it is AA related, but can be overly long. These folks probably don’t get listened to very often, and when they get to a meeting and have that captive audience, it’s all going to come out! This bothers people to various degrees, but I generally don’t mind. Clearly it is aiding them, and hey, whatever works, you know?
Yet it has been a bit of a joke before, and at a meeting once when we were discussing this one of the guys made us all laugh because with 2 minutes to go, and he being the last person to speak, he leaned back and said, “Well….it all started when I was seven….!” before grinning so we knew he was just kidding! And that’s a joke we all laughed at - for having all seen that happen for real before!
Because sure as anything, while rare, it does happen that sometimes, with two minutes to go, someone will just have to share their life story from that first snuck drink at seven to how dad was never there for them, and etc. etc.!
Other times you get odd brags about how bad someone was before they recovered. It’s when some guy or gal - usually pretty boring looking - wants to make a big deal of “sharing” how bad they were when they were still drinking or using. So you sit there listening to some guy who looks like an accountant relating this dubious tale of gang banging and hog riding and pipe hitting and rock breaking and as a part of your own personal growth, you pretend to be buying all this!
As funny as that can be, though (and heck, sometimes it’s even true!) it’s even funnier when the next person wants to try to top the last guy’s story, for whatever crazy reason! I’ve sat at meetings where the first bad boy bragger will speak of shoplifting, then next another will speak of a liquor store hold up, then next someone will talk about a bank job, till I want to jump up and say, “Let’s end this meeting quick, or the next guy is about to confess to serial killing!”
Women aren’t immune to this kind of thing. I’ve listened to the first woman speaking of cheating on her man, and by the time we get to the fourth woman speaking, she was turning tricks since the age of 15! Because male or female, there are some who just have to be the best at having been bad!
There are the boasting braggers, too. The ones who - especially when it’s a newcomers meeting - want to pontificate about how well AA has worked for them, how they read from the Big Book hourly, do everything their sponsor says, are working on the steps for the third time, and how only AA lets them have the house that’s bigger than yours, the car that’s faster than yours, and the girl who’s hotter than - oh, but you don’t even have a girl! That they inevitably end this kind of speech with “But I can’t take credit for any of this, it’s all the Big Guy Upstairs!” just makes this type of guy even more an invitation to felony assault than he already was!
Closely related to that is the guy who has a very specific plan of recovery that worked for him, and thus must be done by everyone else EXACTLY as he did! And if you don't do it his way, you aren't serious about recovery!
Then there are “the Lifers”. Most groups have at least one. If it’s a guy, he looks like he personally killed Hitler. If a gal, she looks like your mom’s grandmother. They are the ones who start off their shares the same way each time. “I last took a drink when Nixon resigned, and I thank God each day for my 42 years of sobriety!” Me, I think to myself, “Go home, you’re cured!”, but before you jump in to chastise me, yes, I know there is no cure!
Some come to meetings and see the ones I just described, but only see those ones. And they get instantly jaded and act all superior and condescending and know that they don’t really need this stupid stuff! But the cynics - and it’s easy to be one - forget the crucial fact that, “Oh, yeah, NONE of them are drinking or using any more!” Even if just for that day.
And really, the off topic story tellers, the life history givers, the “bad boy braggers”, the arrogant sermonizers, the “one size fits all” folk, the lifers, those are all just a VERY minor part of AA. A bit of spice to keep things lively. Some seasoning to let you know that this is real, this is life, and that alcoholics and addicts come in all varieties just like everyone else.
The main of AA is real and personal stories. Of the depths of despair and the heights of hope. And everything in between. I hear an awful lot from newbies, “This is boring, why do I have to go, it’s just a bunch of idiots going on and on!”
And yeah, I get that. There’s some truth in that. I’ve felt it myself. But honestly, it is like they say at AA - “you only get out of it what you put into it”. And if you listen with an open heart and mind, you will rarely attend a meeting in which you do not glean at least one nugget of wisdom, of inspiration or example. It’s there, and it will always be there, if only in the reading.
We tell newbies who are just out of detox or rehab, “do the ninety in ninety”. That’s where you hit a meeting a day for ninety days in a row. And yeah, at first, it’s really strange, as you are trying to adjust to this odd kind of meeting at once so standard and so different each time. You don’t know the words to the Serenity Prayer or when to hold hands, or when to stand, or what to say if you don’t want to talk, or a bunch of other stuff that only comes with time, with patience, and with you promising to “keep coming back”.
And yeah, you hear a lot of boring stories - boring especially if you’re listening with an ear that is still attached to the head of a person who hasn’t committed to sobriety yet. And you hear a lot of oddball things that seem to bear no relation to anything, especially if in your addiction you still believe you’re above it all.
But if you stay long enough, if you get your head more into an “in it to win it” mode, if you’re truly committing to it, you will start to hear some good and true things in all the sharings.
Yes, some will be silly. Or standard. But there is wisdom to be gleaned in almost any sharing, whether it is the same old same old, or something new that you never considered. And be it an affirmation or a revelation, it is always better than just about anything else you could be doing that evening! Certainly better than a drink, in which case you’d be babbling stuff pretty boring - or silly - to anyone sober!
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