I’m going to say quite a bit here in more draft form, because I’m very, very familiar with these issues and perhaps you can take something from this.
I appreciate your doing this, but don’t you feel uncomfortable violating the Tradition that “We must always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films?” As a radical feminist well-versed in feminist epistemology and critical theory, I’m someone who went to my first meeting in 1988, I have been disturbed since then at the increase of people violating this tradition–particularly celebrities. Perhaps you do so because Members no longer follow this? I’ve wondered what the Internet would do to this, given how it flattens anonymity. Perhaps this is my answer
During the late 80s and 90s I had many issues w/ the implicit sexism of the Big Book and the 13th stepping I encountered in most meetings (I was a young blonde woman) but was told by various leaders that I needed to “focus on my sobriety” and how trivial my issues were–that these were my issues that I needed to address, rather than the ongoing sexism and harassment I faced. I also questioned the racial self-segregation I saw between NA and AA–and particularly Al-Anon–which seemed to be dominated by older white women and by its particular nature of buttoned up, discursive self-analysis. You might already know that NA runs like an old-school Black church, with lots of call and response, which is why most white drug addicts go to AA and Black alcoholics go to NA. The very literacy-based, CBT-type self-reflection in Al-Anon in particular seemed not to be consistent with the “secondary orality-based” nature of low-income Black culture in this country (see Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word,” or MIT Labs work on the hx of communication technologies.)
Up until 2012, I would often read substitute gender inclusive language if chosen to read the Steps out loud, and I literally quit all of it for good after an Al-Anon self-appointed female busybody called me out for it during a meeting. Through the years, though, esp in AA, a few young female newcomers appreciated it. I even wrote an original intro to our long-time women’s group that I developed, which I’ve seen years later pop up in online fora on the west coast 20 years later. I had scholarly manuscripts in the 1990s about various 12 step/cultural issues ready to go (anonymously) and then dropped it. More on that later….
But see, the challenges posed by radical feminist understanding were much greater than just substituting language. They had to do with, in particular, the recognition of the permeation of sexual violence and assault within “alcoholic families.” Many of the issues faced by abused women, in particular in Al-Anon, weren’t just of “changing attitudes” but of developing feminist self-awareness that they didn’t owe their male partner obedience and that the pervasive blame they experienced from institutions–which was very real until recently–wasn’t their fault. The 12 steps were a literally a backdoor way for feminist strength to come through, though never explicitly called as such in meetings.
I was simultaneously working w/ battered women through a feminist volunteer organization and saw the permeation of male dominance throughout society and institutions at the time—how women were blamed for their own victimization. I’d experienced this first hand by vicious sexist magistrates blaming me or my clients for our own abuse, even in a famous college town. And of course I’d experienced it growing up–“what police will help you, you s**t!” said my drunken violent father. But I noticed as a well-versed Dworkin-MacKinnon feminist that radical feminist rage that emanated from the staff at the battered women’s center sometimes exculpated women from ANY personal responsibility and blamed all men, which I found even then to another version of sexism (though understandable) and spiritually dishonest, and lazy. But then I’d go to a 12 step meeting and see formerly battered women internalizing that locus of control and suggesting that they just weren’t “working a program” when they were with that guy and blaming themselves for always “chosing bad men,” when I knew the stats were so high that they’d likely find another man who seemed non-abusive but would turn out to abuse them all over again.
I observed then that 12 steps, like non-dualism in general, encapsulate the challenge facing activists of faith–the radical freedom of liberation theology (per Friere et al)–and also, how the internalization of the locus of control seems to functionally empower people, though can also cause us to self-blame and thereby hinder larger social change. I noticed how it often came down to choosing your battles–choosing peace and letting go of what you couldn’t control, which then paradoxically made you much more successful in addressing those small parts of injustice and slowly improving the world. Balancing those issues was fascinating to me, but I rarely found anyone–except a few years later in academia and in the early Internet group Moderation Management–who explicitly articulated this tension about internalization vs externalization of locus of control.
I actually noticed as an aspiring scholar, at the time in the late 80s, that the romance literature for which some women had fan fiction meetings (pre-internet) followed a psychological dynamic of restoring disrupted locus of control. Unfortunately I was in a grad program full of limited, logical positivist, midwit people (the kind who now call themselves DEI experts)….While I actually had an original manuscript ready to go w/ that analysis, and a female professor encouarging me, the leading prof in the grad program was a misogynistic gay male who singled me out so much for public torment and deliberate low grading (because I was a fluffy blonde feminist, a twofer for an old school woman-hating gay man) that I gave up, afraid of more abuse like I’d grown up with. Even another lesbian faculty member in that same program constantly hammered me too–they didn’t understand feminist epistemology and assumed because I was pretty that I must be stupid instead of more aware than they were. And in their arrogance neither they nor the bullying students (who’d simply heard I was a radical feminist–they never even talked to me) couldn’t grasp how critical theory called out journalistic bullsh*t at all.
Ironically, that grad program has been in the national news over the past few years, w/ faculty who now claim they’re experts on sexism and racism and understand critical theory, making a big deal about how one of their new DEI hires was treated. I still have the original papers I submitted to them w/ their nasty comments– I’ve often wondered about photographing and posting all over social media and detailing their sexist abuse, which would today have won me a lawsuit.
Re the Program, I’ve wanted to go back to 12 step meetings–even today, as a matter of fact, because I’ve started daily drinking again to deal w/ a serious chronic illness–and wondered if woke-ism had infiltrated it. It’s infuriating ironic that 30 years ago I was the only person I knew within a 300 mile radius openly speaking about the sexual harassment I faced or, w/ members outside of meetings, the unintentional sexist erasure of women, but was dismissed as “babe” who was “crazy and oversensitive.” Now, I’m immediately, smugly dismissed as a middle aged white woman who’s blind to my white privilege. Yet, on the other hand, the Program helped me “become peace you wish to see” and accomplish a great deal over the ensuing two decades on behalf of disadvantaged minority aspiring scholars. And it taught me gratitude, balance, so much, despite its limitations.
What I’ve appreciated about the Traditions was how incremental they required change to be, though that drove me nuts at the time as a feminist. I was a daily meeting attendee “newcomer” in the late 80s in the height of the “Satanic panic” and several new, spoiled, childless, teddybear-clutching women suddenly “recovered memories of Satanic ritual abuse” –one was so sensitive that we couldn’t even have a candlelight meeting because the “light triggered her traumatic memories.” I’m glad that AA and Al-Anon explicitly exclude the discussion of therapy, self-help, or other literature in the context of meetings, precisely because they haven’t until now at least wanted the latest self-help craze to overtake the literature of the program and the main focus.
The essence of the Program is developing an active relationship with a Power Greater than Yourself (and to knee-jerk athiests, it’s well-known among members that this could be the Universe or a Doorknob–it’s up to each member. It entails working the steps through observing and interacting with others doing the same. This enables us to take responsibility for changing our ATTITUDES about life and thereby not blaming or trying to control people, places, and things we can’t control. We thus thereby rely less on addicting substances that falsely, immediately change those attitudes–we instead work on facing the Present, one day at a time, head on. In fact, the 12 steps and meeting culture, 90 years ago, already expressed principles Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, as well as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and contemporary non-dualist literature, well before the self-help industry and psychology establishment “discovered” and monetized these principles. That makes sense, given that Carl Jung & William James were very involved in its inception and had been influenced by Eastern non-dualist principles. Per Ernst Kurtz (a wonderful Harvard-based religious historian of the program), AA quite originally, powerfully syncretized elements of evangelicalism, Calvinist notions of hard work, and Eastern non-dualist principles. This helped Americans at the height of the depression and has slowly seeped into the culture ever since. By providing a “disease metaphor,” however problematic to us now, he enabled many people, post-Prohibition, to learn a new language of managing the pain in their lives and slowly moving toward greater emotional intelligence in their personal lives.
I’m very disappointed if the WSO caved into this institutional DEI crap–and egoically irritated, I guess, because my entire life I’ve called out issues 20-30 years before they happened and I’m so sick of seeing others get credit for suddenly discovering something for which I was harassed at the time (and for which I’m too terrified to publish, particularly today). My prediction now is that the inevitable mass understanding w/in 5-10 years about how humans need to integrate a recognition of their incessant ego needs into whatever world view they have, will result in some slow radical cultural improvement (probably rendered even more humble if current scientific UAP disocveries pan out and scientism is more properly understood as the fundamentalist evil it is). Yet, once again grifters and cowards will take even that and monetize it or use it as an ideological system w/ which to compete with and control other humans.
I feared in the early 90s that AA would be imposed on the culture as a whole like DEI now is–I’m amazed that it hasn’t. AA HAS been wrongly imposed w/ court-ordered treatment, as Stanton P and others recognized early on. At MM, we used to discuss how such the movement could have been forced on the culture writ large and then ruined as a result. Generally, the structure itself has been kept out of public adoption.
That’s why I’d ultimately ask the author–are you sure you want us to hash out AA in a public forum? It’s one thing to write about it as an example of a larger cultural problem, but should we ADJUDICATE AA IN A GROUP CONSCIENCE MEETING VIA A PUBLIC, NON-CONFERENCE APPROVED FORUM? Funny that as a radical feminist I’m one to follow their old-boy rules, but those rules actually protected the Program from the various self-help movements that have come since. I had no idea that they’d weighed in on the culture wars–I’d feared it but thought of all groups they would have held out.
Here’s what I suspect, though. Despite any new rules, there will ALWAYS be AA and NA meetings where contrarian people, especially older men, call out the DEI bullsh*t. I know those guys too well. DEI is inherently–like the tensions I described 30 years before–about EXTERNALIZING LOCUS OF CONTROL, and therefore it INHERENTLY VIOLATES THE CORE PRINCIPLES OF THE PROGRAM, HOWEVER SEXIST, RACIST, LOGICAL POSITIVIST, CLASSIST, or GENERALLY SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED ITS INCEPTION. I’d write about it, but like in the 90s when I wouldn’t publish some six articles about the Program due to adherence to Traditions and my own fears, I’m afraid to have that discussion now. Old habits die hard, I guess.
