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A.A.’s Auxiliary
Medicine
Column
For
25 years Ann Smith’s husband Ed gradually increased
his liquor intake until he was drinking up to two fifths
a day. “He was one of those alcoholics,” says
Ann, “who had to go to the end of the line.”
As Ed settled into the role of alcoholic, Ann played the
alcoholic’s wife: “I bathed myself in pity.
I nagged. I turned the children against him. I was extremely
self-righteous. I was convinced that Ed was doing this to
me deliberately.” Fired from his job, Ed threw a monumental
drunk one Christmas season, came to in January and called
Alcoholics Anonymous. Paradoxically, that was when Ann’s
troubles really began. Where she had formerly lost her husband
to the neighborhood bar, she now lost him to A.A.
As
Ed progressed through A.A.'s twelve self-improvement steps
(sample: "[We] admitted to God, to ourselves, and to
another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”)
and became an enthusiastic convert, Ann found her life was
losing what meaning it had held before. Playing nursemaid
to a drunk had been a full-time responsibility, the focus
of her existence, but Ed’s new purpose all but left
her out in the cold. Where once Ed had been out drinking
with his cronies, now he was sitting up nights with new
cronies, helping to keep them from drinking. “I was
suddenly jealous of Ed,” she says. “He had a
cause, and he was burning with it.” Soon she found
herself guiltily yearning for the bad old pre-AA days. Then
Ann was saved by joining Al-Anon, a kind of ladies’
auxiliary to A.A.
“Calm
as a Cow.” Al-Anon has nearly 1,000 national chapters
and 12,000 members. It exists
because of one hard fact: the average alcoholic, apart from
what he does to himself, cuts a devastating swath through
his surroundings. The nation’s 4,000,000 alcoholics
have in one way or another impaired the lives of an estimated
20 million ‘nonalcoholics, most of them relatives.
Al-Anon bars active alcoholics, but is open to almost anybody
who might have suffered from them--wives or husbands of
reformed, unreformed, or backsliding alcoholics; remote
relatives and friends of alcoholics; people whose lives
were indirectly upset by alcoholism, and who want the comforts
of group therapy.
Whereas
A.A. membership is roughly 5-to-1 male, Al-Anon finds its
membership running roughly lo-to-1 female. Better than half
the members join Al-Anon at an earlier stage than Ann Smith
did, i.e., while they still have active alcoholic mates
on their hands. One such recruit was Grace T., a schoolteacher
brought in by Ann. “I’ve never seen anyone so
close to flying apart,” says Ann. “She’d
had to quit teaching school; she was doing her children
-more harm than good. Well, now Grace has been going to
my group for two years. Her husband is still drinking, harder
than ever, and nobody knows it better than Grace. But I’ve
never seen such a change in a person. She’s as calm
as a cow. She’s told her three kids that their daddy
is a sick man and not responsible for what he does, and
that you love people no matter what they do--and she’s
sold them on it. And she’s sold herself. She runs
her household, she’s teaching again, and she’s
patient. Some day, she is sure, her husband will join AA.”
“He’ll
Come Around.” Al-Anon expects members
to rush out at any hour of the day or night to bolster wavering
members or shepherd its new ones. Al-Anon weekly meetings
are apt to be subdued, casual affairs largely devoted to
testimony about a family’s condition before and -after
A.A. and Al-Anon.
Although
Al-Anon’s influence occasional- ly leads an alcoholic
into A.A., this is incidental to its purpose. Many members
deliberately conceal from their alcoholic mates that they
belong to Al-Anon. They do so in the belief chairman. “Don’t
pour his bottle down the that their problem is unique and
should not be sink. Let him drink. One day he’ll come
confused with the alcoholic problem. “You’ve
around. But in the meantime you can be got to take your
eye off the alcoholic’s problem and put it on yourself,”
says one group chairman. “Don’t pour his bottle
down the sink. Let him drink. One day he’ll come around.
But in the meantime you can be helping yourself and others.”
(Source:
Time, December 17, 1956)
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