How Bill’s writing in the “Twelve and Twelve” helped him through a challenging time in his sobriety
Seemingly out of nowhere, in my seventh year of sobriety in AA, I sank into a deep depression. The false promise of a drink was never far from my mind. I retreated from meetings. I stopped answering my phone. Days turned into weeks and months. I finally sought professional help. I didn’t know if I could stay sober without some relief.
One day, I’m not sure what precisely triggered it, I remembered a speaker that I had heard at a Step meeting during my first year. The speaker recounted our cofounder Bill W.’s experience with depression in sobriety, noting that this was also the period when he wrote the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.
The process of writing each day, while quite difficult, even painful for Bill, proved therapeutic. The memory of this share prompted me to dig out my “Twelve and Twelve,” curious to see what I might find. From the first page, I could hear Bill’s familiar voice, although I detected a new melancholy. He wrote: “If temperamentally we are on the depressive side, we are apt to be swamped with guilt and self-loathing…we may sink to such a point of despair that nothing but oblivion looks possible as a solution.” Wow. This is how I felt. Bill must have felt this way too.
In my reading of the “Twelve and Twelve” during this time, I found a more patient Bill than I did in the Big Book. Perhaps he was tempered by years of experience in the Fellowship and his own struggles. For example, in the Tenth Step chapter, Bill offers six different ways to go about the practice of inventory, rather than insisting on one. In the Eleventh Step, he acknowledges that we may be “seized with a rebellion so sickening” that it becomes impossible to pray (it had for me). Instead of shaking his head, Bill encourages us “not to think too ill of ourselves” and to resume our practice when we can.
I welcomed Bill’s gentleness, a gentleness that I could not yet give myself. Line after line also pulled up my own memories: the HR person where I worked who broke her anonymity to help me; the oldtimer with clouds of silver hair who listened patiently to my fears about writing a Fourth Step, then invited me to trust her experience and do it anyway, reassuring me that everything would be alright; dinner with my sponsor at a Chinese restaurant before my Fifth Step where I was so nervous I kept eating food off of his plate; a moment of clarity about myself during a Ninth Step amend with a former employer who showed me why I struggled so to get along with people; holding hands and reciting the Serenity Prayer with gravely ill patients in the AIDS ward of a local hospital, some of whom I knew from AA meetings.
Reading the “Twelve and Twelve” reminded me that I had started on a path and that I was still on that path, although clearly drifting from it. I was still a member of AA if I wanted to be, still a member of a Fellowship that had helped me so much. It was at this point that I picked up the phone and called an old friend in the program, unsure that he would remember me (of course, he did), and asked if he would meet me for coffee.
Before writing this account of my seventh and eighth years, I reread the “Twelve and Twelve” cover to cover, in two sittings (one for the Steps, the other for the Traditions). It’s remarkable how many of AA’s most valued insights about getting and staying sober and living a meaningful, happy life are contained in its pages: fear is the chief activator of our defects…willingness is the key…the spiritual axiom…restraint of tongue and pen…emotional hangover…pain is the touchstone…the beginning of the end of isolation…the pause…emotional sobriety…and joy of living is the theme of the Twelfth Step. In my early years in AA, I could sure spot a “bleeding deacon” that Bill warns us about in Tradition Two. Now in my fourth decade, I’m conscious of not becoming one.
That time Bill spent writing about our Steps and Traditions had apparently helped lead him out of his depression. Rereading the “Twelve and Twelve” in my seventh year helped lead me out of mine. And like Bill, I stayed sober. This is what the “Twelve and Twelve” represents to me—hope.