And he went on to discover that there are many kinds of acceptance in AA
WE OFTEN HEAR the word “accept” around AA, and generally it is used with the word “admit”: “It was easy to admit I was powerless over alcohol, but it took me a long time to accept it.”
That kind of acceptance–which we finally, grudgingly have forced upon us, only to find that it is the keystone to our recovery–is just one of the kinds I have experienced in AA.
It began with acceptance of me by the group. I’ll never forget the motley collection of drunks that formed my first AA group. We were at a state hospital for the treatment of alcoholism, and we managed to squeeze in a short AA meeting during the noon hour, after lunch and before the first afternoon activity. While many of the other patients used the time for recreation or rest, some few of us gathered every noon in one of the small group-therapy rooms and tried to hold an AA meeting.
We were awfully short on knowledge of AA, but we were long on sincerity. I doubt that many of us had accepted the fact that alcoholism was the cause of our problems, but we did accept each other. I remember that as something special to me then: a feeling of brotherhood or common experience; a feeling of being accepted by the group for what I was, just as I accepted everyone else in the group for what he was. We didn’t need to know any more about each other than that we each wanted to do something about our drinking. I suppose it’s the same feeling that I’ve heard described more recently as loving everyone in AA without necessarily liking all of them.
In my drinking days, I once tried to tell a psychiatrist about a similar feeling of acceptance I had experienced; he seemed more than routinely interested in it and asked me to elaborate on my feelings.
The experience I had had was really quite commonplace. I sometimes ate lunch in a restaurant where a large, round table occupied a section of one room. Many of the men from nearby offices usually ate at this table. They would come in one by one and sit down; there would be much joking and laughing, of course, as if they were all members of a secret society with a set of private jokes. Although my office was right across the street from the restaurant, I was too much of a loner to join the group at the large table, so I usually sat by myself at a small table in the same room.
One day, however, someone I knew was sitting at the large table, saw me enter the restaurant, and motioned for me to join him. He introduced me around the table, and everyone greeted me cordially. My friend then asked some of the men to move their places closer together, so that there would be room for me, and they did so with much good-natured banter about how I’d have to get there earlier after this, because there were no reserved seats.
That was all there was to it. We ate lunch and talked about nothing very important; but I went back to my office with a warm glow that lasted for days. (Of course, the next time I went to the restaurant, no one looked up from the large table to invite me over, and I again went back to eating alone–but that’s another subject.)
I cannot say for sure why the psychiatrist seemed to attach so much importance to the incident. I suspect it was because of my obvious need for acceptance–the need that was met so quickly in those noontime AA meetings at the state hospital and so fully, later, in my own AA group.
All of us need to feel accepted, of course; we need to feel that we are a part of the family. And perhaps we drunks need it more than most people; we have been aliens in a strange land; for us, finding AA is like coming home.
That was the first kind of acceptance in my AA experience. Then there was a gradual but ever-strengthening acceptance of the reality of alcoholism. As I met more and more people who stated quite matter-of-factly that they were alcoholics, I began to realize that there were other people like me–that I wasn’t a freak or a moral leper or a weak-willed, spineless jellyfish. I was afflicted with the same thing (some called it a disease) that had afflicted a great many people before me. It was real, this thing; it was something that could account for the way I had been feeling. And it was something I could learn to live with–others had.
Part of this acceptance of alcoholism was the acceptance of myself as an alcoholic. I, too, had been forced to admit that I was powerless over alcohol. I, too, kept saying, “But why me?” I was rather relieved that there could be a plausible explanation for my insane behavior; but I couldn’t quite buy it for a long time. My deep-seated guilt gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I was getting off the hook too easily–that any minute the ax would fall. It all seemed too good to be true, and yet too terrible to believe. I just couldn’t accept it at first; but gradually this kind of acceptance, too, has become part of my AA experience.
It is difficult to explain the most important kind of acceptance I have found in AA–most important to me, that is, and probably most important to my sobriety and to my serenity. It is a part of the other kinds of acceptance, or, more accurately, they are a part of it. I am going to call it the acceptance of God’s will, for want of a simpler term. We encounter it first in the Third Step, where we make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.
Again, we make the decision to do it; but for many of us, it’s a long time before we actually do accept the will of God in our lives.
For me, it came one day when I was driving by myself on a 400-mile automobile trip. In an effort to relieve the boredom, I had decided to try to direct my thinking into constructive channels, instead of letting my mind wander as usual. I don’t remember exactly how I started thinking about God’s will just then, although I had thought about it quite a lot since I had come into AA. I didn’t really understand much about it, although I understood that we were to pray only for knowledge of it, and for the power to carry it out.
I began to wonder how we could possibly know what God’s will for us is–when all of a sudden a very simple idea came to me. (I’m sure a philosopher would call it simple-minded.) God’s will is for the good! He wants for us only that which is good.
I would have to be a writer of Bill W.’s talents to describe how this “spiritual awakening” affected me. All I can do is describe what happened then: I slowed down. It seemed perfectly clear that “good,” for me, did not include driving ninety miles an hour, any more than it included drinking alcohol.
I have since been fairly comfortable with my thoughts about God’s will, for it is usually possible for me to decide what is good for me and what is not. For instance, it is not good for me to hurt people, including myself. I am a child of God, and so is everyone else. I have a right to live and to be happy, and so does everyone else. God may have great plans for me, or He may not. Perhaps it’s that man with the long, stringy hair who will discover the cure for cancer, and not I. Or perhaps it’s that loud woman on the bus who will write the beautiful poem, and not I. Either of them could be the instruments of God’s will for good. And so can I.
These are some of the faces of acceptance I have seen in AA, and to me they are beautiful.