It was hard to hear the voice on the telephone over the rain pelting outside my window. “Is that you, Joan? You don’t sound like yourself. Is something wrong?”
It was “Joan,” six weeks sober, checking in with her sponsor on the coldest, wettest night of the year, in a voice I hardly recognized.
“I just got home from the office,” Joan croaked, “and I think I’m sick. My throat’s sore and I can’t seem to get warm.”
“Thank goodness you’re in out of the rain! Do you feel up to a can of soup?. . .Good. If you eat some hot food and go right to bed–“
“I can’t,” Joan wailed. “I have to go to a meeting tonight. If I don’t go to a meeting every night I might not get my ninety meetings in ninety days.”
I opened my mouth, prepared to utter an outraged yell, closed it, breathed a fast prayer for patience, and tried again.
“Joan, dear, it’s a bitter night, and pouring rain. You have at best a cold sore throat and at worst the flu. Do you really think that you’re certain to start drinking again if you don’t risk pneumonia to get to a meeting tonight?”
“Of course not! Drinking is the last thing I want to do. But they told me I had to make my ninety meetings. . .”
“The Big Book doesn’t tell you that. I’m your sponsor, sober around ten thousand days now, and I don’t tell you that. Actually, Joan, going to a lot of meetings while you’re new to AA is an old idea, and a good one. If you treat it as a suggestion, not a command, and if you use common sense when applying it.”
Joan, to the relief of us both, decided to use some sense and stay home in bed. I, too, stayed home and reflected on the tendency we alcoholics have to create rigid rules for a program that has always worked better without them. We’ve done it since AA started, as writings about the early days show. At one point AA groups became concerned with devising complicated membership codes. They prepared elaborate written rules about eligibility for membership, degrees of membership, and expulsion from membership, and sent copies to what was then called “headquarters.” We stopped taking this seriously when it was discovered that, if all these rules were enforced, absolutely no one could get into AA.
“Ninety meetings in ninety days” is one more example of illogical but all too human reasoning: If something is good for some people under some circumstances, it has to be good for all people under all circumstances.
Another one I have been running into lately is “We should never manipulate people.” It came up most recently when “Grace” and I were having coffee with “Amanda.” I like to spend time with Amanda, who has been sober in AA nearly thirty-five years, hoping some of her love and kindness understanding will rub off on me.
Grace shared with us her woes about a family member, with whom she had a running fight going. Well, not all the time. Only when they were together and only when they discussed any of their several areas of disagreement, which was about all they ever discussed. She didn’t like her relative’s attitude. He reacted with angry resentment to her justified criticism and complaints.
“It seems to me that you are trying to force another person to change, Grace,” I offered, “and we all know that doesn’t work. Why don’t you try changing your own approach, and see if it doesn’t produce a more favorable reaction? Instead of criticizing for what you don’t like, praise him for the things he does that you do like. You can find things to praise if you look for them.”
Grace was horrified. “That would be trying to manipulate him. We’re not supposed to manipulate people!”
I looked at gentle, loving Amanda for support, and did a double-take. She opened her mouth, as if prepared to utter an outraged yell, closed it, twitched her lips rapidly, drew a deep breath, and tried again.
“Grace, dear, did you ever think that people respond in one way or another to everything we say to them? If we speak angrily and critically they respond negatively. When we speak lovingly and approvingly, they respond positively. In that sense we are, all of us, manipulating other people all the time. We just don’t realize we are doing it. What you seem to object to is doing it deliberately, in a planned campaign to improve things. But that is exactly what AA does, and why it succeeds in helping alcoholics stop drinking, when nothing else works. The sick alcoholics come to us, hurt and resentful from angry criticism about their drinking, and AA gives them love, encouragement, and understanding–on purpose. And the results are terrific.
“The principle that we shouldn’t try to take over and control other people’s lives is basically sound. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t control and direct our own actions into ways which are beneficial rather than destructive. You apparently believe that using cruel, unkind words that are certain to produce an angry reaction is alright, but using warm, loving words that at least have a chance of encouraging harmony and cooperation is manipulative and wrong. Does that make good sense?”
“I never thought of it that way,” Grace admitted. “I guess I never really thought about it at all. They said we shouldn’t manipulate people, and that was as far as I got.”
It strikes me that “they,” whoever “they” are, must keep awfully busy. Taking every suggestion that is good in theory, if used with discretion and common sense, and turning it into a universal rule to be forced on everyone regardless of circumstances, can’t be easy. I wonder how “they” find time to work their own AA programs.
I wish “they” would relax a little and concede that so much rigidity is often ill-advised, sometimes even dangerous. It can be a threat to health, like Joan’s, to domestic tranquility, like Grace’s, to an even disposition, like mine.
👏👍