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I was not ready to get sober in 2014, and shortly after my divorce was final in 2016, I started drinking for another eighteen months. My sobriety date is February 16, 2018, and I only mention that to qualify myself as an active, recovered member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Before my relapse, I had started sponsor shopping. There was nothing wrong with my original sponsor. We had a lot more in common, in fact, but I was not okay. I had not worked the steps, and I was not practicing these principles in all my affairs. So to me, what it really seemed like I needed was some new friends and maybe a new girlfriend. The easiest route to both was the 8 p.m. meeting at my home group. My home group at the time had three to four meetings a day. Each meeting time largely functioned as its own group vs. being a small part of a larger whole. And like most groups with multiple meetings, each meeting time slot had its own personality. And the 8 p.m.—well, that personality was attractive, especially if you were under 40 and single.

Just like Bill wrote about while pacing the lobby at the Mayflower Hotel, the crowd inside was inviting and looked fun.

Recovered vs. Recovering

A “personality change sufficient to bring about recovery.” This is a summation of the promise in Step 12, “having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps.” So, why do people continue going to AA after the obsession to drink has been removed for them? This brings up the age-old debate that is being held in meeting rooms all over the world: Are you recovered or are you recovering? The Big Book uses the word recovered multiple times, starting in the foreword to the first edition. However, there is a glaring contradiction to this that many drunks, myself included, have built a stronghold on: “We are not cured of alcoholism. What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.”

This is the hill we die on. And I suppose it’s not a bad place to land after all, since recovered does not mean cured. So it’s not a contradiction, but it’s worth examining.

Cured vs. Recovered (The Insulin Analogy)

Early on in AA, and in modern addiction treatment, alcoholism wasn’t viewed as a temporary illness like a cold that you cured with antibiotics and moved on from. It was treated more like Type 1 diabetes. A diabetic can achieve total symptom remission. They can live a completely normal, full life—they are, for all practical purposes, recovered from the daily suffering of the disease. But they are not cured, because if they stop taking insulin, the underlying condition instantly resurfaces.

In AA, the 12 Steps and the “personality change” act as the insulin. The moment someone assumes they are permanently cured and stops doing the work, they forget where they came from, the old thinking patterns return, and this is always followed by a drink.

Meetings are seen as maintenance, not medicine. This is the dogma, and anything contradictory to this is treated as blasphemy.

The original intent, however, was for the newcomer to graduate from patient to helper.

When Bill Wilson and the early members wrote the Big Book, they didn’t envision meetings as a lifetime support group where people sat in a circle complaining about how hard it is to stay sober. The original intent of Step 12 was clear: You go to meetings to find the next guy to help him get sober.

“In addition to these casual get-togethers, it became customary to set apart one night a week for a meeting to be attended by anyone or everyone interested in a spiritual way of life. Aside from fellowship and sociability, the prime object was to provide a time and place where new people might bring their problems.” — A Vision for You (pages 158–159)

This is the only place in the Big Book (which, according to its own text, is the Program of Alcoholics Anonymous) where meetings are discussed. So how did we get here? To a place where meetings need to be held and attended every night? To a place where you need a lifelong dependence on a sponsor vs. needing to help someone else get sober?

In the early days, once you had your spiritual awakening or personality change because of the steps, you didn’t keep attending meetings just for your own treatment. You went to work in the hospital wards and sat with the alcoholic who was still dying. You went as a practitioner, not a patient. This entire process, from your first meeting until you were expected to carry the message, was usually completed in one to two days. This stands in stark contrast to today, when some sponsors suggest you attend meetings for 12 months before you even begin to work the steps. Why would we hold the cure hostage for a year in some cases, when it’s explicitly laid out in the book repeatedly?

In “The Doctor’s Opinion,” on pages xxvi–xxvii, Dr. Silkworth wrote:

“On the other hand—and strange as this may seem to those who do not understand—once a psychic change has occurred, the very same person who seemed doomed, who had so many problems he despaired of ever solving them, suddenly finds himself easily able to control his desire for alcohol, the only effort necessary being that required to follow a few simple rules.”

Yet if you sit down with a highlighter and try to find a clean, bulleted list of actual rules written by Bill Wilson, you won’t find one. The book’s core instructions are wrapped inside narrative stories and sprawling prose. However, it’s not that hard to decipher what those rules are. Most people agree on what it comes down to.

So, why was this never written as a simple list? Well, to be fair, Dr. Bob simplified it even further in his personal story when he said:

• Trust God
• Clean House
• Help Others

However, Dr. Bob’s story is not in the first 164 pages and, therefore, is not considered to be part of the canon in AA theology.

The Advent of Treatment Center

Most will agree that these rules migrated into AA from treatment centers and the court system. The bigger issue is that they stayed because no one had the authority to say they couldn’t. The traditions that are meant to safeguard AA from the alcoholic have also ensured that the ego is truly the only thing in charge at a local level.

The Minnesota Model is the real hinge point. Hazelden, being the most famously cited case, took AA’s Twelve Steps and institutionalized them. Until then, the steps had been an entirely unstructured fellowship of one alcoholic helping another alcoholic for its first fifteen years. Then came professional staff that included nurses, clergy, social workers, and psychologists—along with daily schedules, lectures, and mandatory group participation. By 1989, an estimated 90% of treatment facilities were running on this model. So an entire generation of alcoholics learned “the program” not from another drunk with a coffee pot, but from an institution with rules and consequences for noncompliance.

The court system in the DUI-crackdown era that expanded through the ‘80s war-on-drugs years layered its own coercion on top of this growing treatment model. Judges began mandating meeting attendance and requiring slips to be signed as proof.

Group secretaries signed slips, but neither the group nor its members were “bound” by that signature. It does not constitute AA’s endorsement, but that’s a legal disclaimer, not a lived reality. In the room, a slip-signer and a genuine newcomer are indistinguishable, and the culture adapts to the presence of people who don’t want to be there. Closed meetings become the only gatekeeper around “who’s a real member.”

The Twelve Traditions were written specifically to prevent AA from becoming an institution with power—to ensure that AA would not become a hospital or treatment center with rules to follow, and more importantly, that money would not be the driving factor in recovery. Bill W. wrote these in the mid-’40s largely out of fear that AA would calcify into a bureaucracy, or worse, a cult of personality around him and Dr. Bob—money, property, and prestige were the named enemies.

But that design has a blind spot: it only guards against centralized ego. It has no mechanism at all against local ego. If a home group decides newcomers can’t speak for 90 days, or bans cross-talk, or refuses certain members, or a chairperson turns “trusted servant” into a fiefdom, there is nobody in AA with the authority to override that. Group conscience is the only corrective action a group has. The saying in AA is that AA is self-flushing, and the group conscience is seen as the will of God. The group conscience, however, is just whoever shows up and has the energy to keep showing up. That’s not democracy in practice; it’s incumbency shrouded in the divine. The very feature meant to protect AA from a single alcoholic’s ego at the top guarantees that ego at the bottom is essentially unaccountable.

So the treatment-center and court-system rules didn’t just leak in—they leaked in and then had nowhere to be flushed out. The traditions were engineered to resist top-down correction, not bottom-up drift. Every other reform movement has some appeals mechanism; AA structurally cannot. There is a right to appeal in the Twelve Concepts; however, this is more of an area-level protection mechanism and does not apply at a group level. It ensures the voice of the minority is heard, but the concepts are almost never talked about at a group or individual member level.

Autonomy

The idea of complete and total autonomy at the group level, provided that autonomy does not affect AA as a whole, is perhaps one of the greatest and most perplexing concepts to someone who is new.

We’re all used to living in a world where “someone” is in charge. We may have mixed feelings about that person and their rules, but we expect they are in place. We assume that a Starbucks is a Starbucks, and whatever I’m being told at store (A) most likely holds true at all stores. It’s an unwritten, usually unspoken assumption that most people make. When you’re new in AA, you think the same thing as well. Honestly, many people who have been around for many years still think this. But travel a little, even in your local area, and you’ll quickly see this is not true at all.

These subtle differences are procedural and inconsequential more often than not, such as variations in the readings at the start or end of the meeting. The meeting times and formats, the materials read, or the ones that are not allowed to be read vary. After a meeting or two at the new location, the initial shock wears off, and you realize that everyone is basically saying the same thing you hear at your home group. Most areas I’ve lived in, most groups I’ve visited or have made my home group in fact, and most speakers I’ve heard all say the same thing.

But not the 8 p.m. at my home group.

One of the first things that I noticed was not only the insistence that you did not attend other groups or time slots, but the badgering and even belittling that a person received when they did. There was also something that would have gone unspoken in a different group—this group had a leader. Two, in this case. Everyone knew it, and they told you about it after looking over their shoulders to see who was around first. The people in charge here ruled with a smile and an iron fist.

John Lennon wrote, “There’s room at the top, they are telling you still, but first you must learn how to smile as you kill.” This would run through my mind at every meeting. The power structure felt more like a corporate boardroom, or more like a high school cafeteria pretending it was a corporate boardroom.

When someone new walked in the door, they would greet them. While this is normal and polite, it was rehearsed and directed—assigned. If it was a guy (and statistically, it usually was), there would be a nod—something that would go unnoticed by 99% of the room—toward a man sitting in the corner, who would find one of his sponsees and assign them to go “imprint” on the newcomer and make them feel welcome. He never wanted to do this himself. “He had too many people to work with, and they were all so very sick.” While it’s true that he did sponsor a lot of guys, usually 10 or more at a time, he also had them all on a very strict call-time schedule. When you met him, you had set time to call him each day, and you got roughly 15 to 30 minutes, so he was on the phone all day when he wasn’t at a meeting.

If you were at the 8 p.m. meeting and a newcomer showed up, you would get edged out of the conversation with them if you did not belong to that sponsorship chain. This is not something they advertise, but something I’m very familiar with. I was part of this sponsorship chain for 6 years, and he taught me everything.

So this was the plan: When someone new arrived, you wanted to make an impression and make it quickly. The goal was to keep everyone in the same sponsor chain that attended that time slot. Initially, that was stated as “we want to save as many lives as we can and we need to ensure they are hearing the message as outlined in the book.” Generally speaking, during a meeting at least, this was the overarching message that was put out there—the first 164 pages. Later, however, it would be stated, “Our sponsees will do exactly what we tell them, they will talk how we tell them, talk to whom we tell them, and vote at the group conscience business meetings the way we tell them; this is our group, and we get what we want.”

The Spirit of Rotation

AA’s Second Tradition states: “Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.” Rotation is the practical tool that enforces this tradition. Without rotation, well-meaning members can easily develop a sense of ownership over a meeting or service position. Rotation keeps ego in check by ensuring no individual becomes indispensable or takes on the role of a “boss.”

Constant, persistent action is often cited as the key to practicing AA as a way of life. When this philosophy is applied on a personal level, remarkable things can and do occur for the individual. This is true of regular diet and exercise, or saving money. Repetition strengthens and confirms, and then faith comes naturally. That’s my favorite way to say it. When this principle is applied at a leadership level in AA, however, it risks becoming incumbency.

This is true if you are the group chairperson, the secretary, or even an individual meeting chairperson. If, for example, you or someone from your sponsorship chain is the only person in that group allowed to chair a specific meeting or workshop so the message stays “constant,” you’ve moved from the role of trusted servant to the exclusive interpreter of the book. You’ve become a megalomaniac who’s building a disciple base.