Get Away From Me With Your Anonymity...

 

A friend of mine is in “recovery”.

Pardon me, strike that.  I mean Recovery.  Disregard the dubious air quotes.

She’s in recovery for the volatile life she’d lived in her childhood and adolescence, contending with two addicted parents, one alcoholic, the other obese and dangerously food-addicted.  It all went down and ended about thirty years ago, and she’s made it along just fine ever since, but in the past decade, she’s made it to her long-needed path of Recovery.

It’s great to in fact live within an enlightened culture that will define this process as such.  I can actually recall a time when there was no such thing as Recovery for the emotional odyssey bore by people young and old, having to live with substance addicts, rage addicts and general $%*s, and the ensuing life process was known as “living with the s--- life dealt you”.  But of course, that was a very different time.  America was deep in recession, there were no smoke-free zones, and Real People was a smash-hit NBC prime-time hour.

Even back then, there did historically exist what they called “Family Groups”, where those painfully affected and without recourse would turn in the effort to find solace and reasoning, when it came to dealing with irrational and mad behavior in the confines of one’s home.  But in those days, such fellowship meetings were rare and hard to find, and attendance bore a stigma too great.

Say what you will about our emotionally frail society, but advancement has prevailed in the process.  The Twelve-Step Meeting has caught on like a cherished, time-honored board game that almost anyone can play.  And if it’s not thoroughly in line with the design of the game, the players can always set a few modifications as needed.  Game on.

Recovery, as it would come to be known in these United States began early in the twentieth century, at least officially as history has it.  We’ve all heard, read and seen on TV the depiction of the immortal Bill Wilson and his founding partner Dr. Bob Smith, in the historic creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, to find some positive and more effective resource for the incurable drunk than simply incarceration and eternal lockup in some insane asylum until death, for the convenience of the neighborhood. Lo and behold, it worked.

It worked because the drunk finally had some possible route to functional and legal existence once more, freedom in almost every sense of the word against their addiction.  But only if they remained in attendance, and Lived By The Program.

That’s the Twelve Steps.  Admitting that the wrong of your life begins with you, and how you have to work on yourself before you can re-build your life.  An alcoholic moving to the Coast to get away from all the damage New York has done to her life will only find her consistently drunk with no subways to throw up and pass out in.

In other words, it works for those in immediate, desperate need, and those who try it and indignantly don’t think so will very well reach their proper  relationship with it in time, if their fate lets them.

There’s an old joke about an AA convention of several hundred men checking into a grand hotel lobby.  A spectator asks the desk clerk, “Hey do you think that program really works…?”.  The clerk’s honest response: “Man, I hope so..!:

And in fact, those sorts of conventions and advancements wouldn’t be possible in the realm of group addiction recovery if it didn’t.  But it’s all about the devout adherence of the participant, whose life hangs in the balance. 

Not long after the AA movement took off though, a neighboring fellowship saw formation, when meeting founder Bill W was forming get-togethers in living rooms for alcoholic men, and all the wives were relegated to the kitchen with Bill’s wife Lois.  There was nothing to do but talk about what ended them up together in that kitchen, and Al-Anon was born.

Some fifty or sixty years later, an umbrella organization known as Intergroup would be established, with the responsibility of commissioning regulation group recovery meetings across the U.S., with main offices in central areas.  With all the pamphlets, books, public-service TV and radio ads, Sunday morning television dramatizations and the like, the road was paved for a New World of Recovery.  Those bearing significant aspects of harsh affliction in their lives due to close encounters or perhaps a twenty-four hour-per-day life with and alcoholic or drug addict would ultimately have meeting groups of their own, with matching individuals who can share their story and strength, and hence bring vision and strength to those convinced their lives have no choice but to end.  Advancements like the more complex Narcotics Anonymous and Narc-Anon would come out of this movement.  Then, the discovery and founding of other fellowships like Overeaters Anonymous, Overspenders Anonymous, Underearners Anonymous, and by now no doubt there are fellowships for the struggle with internet and social media addiction.  Some of them are even conducted online.  Advancement is everywhere.

That goes for the contenders of life with these addicts as well.  In the last fifty years, we’ve seen no less than a cottage industry farmed out from the challenge of life’s struggle in dealing not just with alcohol or substance addicts, but the behaviorally distorted of all sorts.  Your family or long-gone elders included, and how that life, whether you know it or not, adversely affected you. 

In the labyrinth of bookstore aisles forming a Masada of self-help expert publications, it might be just too daunting to try and be your own D-I-Y therapist.  But most often, although you won’t really know where best to begin, you’ll know when.  And even in the less-than-arguably correct place, the use of those Twelve life-saving Steps will work for you.

I didn’t make it to my first Al-Anon meeting until maybe a decade after my frequently drunk mom’s passing.  It might not have happened if it weren’t suggested in a therapy pre-screening one day.  “You mean I’d be eligible to attend one of those…?” was my response.  The director said, “Oh, of course….lots of affected people do, no matter when..”.  Therapy fizzled out quick, but the meetings were the winning discovery.

Soon, I’d learn of groups like “Families Anonymous”, for those trapped in dysfunctional behavior environments, and “Adult Children Of Alcoholics”, sorting out their lives’ derailments in view of how their drunk-parented lives misguided them.

What an oasis.  I can pretty much assess that I’d stayed away from this adventure in the interest of initially not wanting to fall victim to my prior life’s train wrecks, or even walking around branding myself a Wreck Survivor.  Certainly not when there are many other, more legitimately heroic survivors worthy of respect and honor in our world.

But when I sat down in my life’s first -Anon meeting, it felt like Elvin Jones playing with John Coltrane for the first time.  A perfect fit.  Listening to these people sharing their stories and their inner emotional struggles was like Carvel in the arid desert.  Much as I was prepared to speak my own, well-articulated diatribe, I almost never had to.

I sure could have used these fellowships when I was seven, eight, ten, eleven, up front with the alcoholic driving my life’s rig.  I was a pretty advanced thinking talker back then, and likely could have held my own with these articulate grownups.  Fact is though, it’s a no-children environment, and even branch fellowships like Ala-teen don’t always make for effective group meetings.  In her lengthy recovery hiatus, my mom recommended I attend an Ala-teen meeting in town.  At fourteen, I thought why not..?  I geared up prepared to offer a lot of intellectual reflection upon my childhood repressions, but showed up to a room of rowdy kids resembling a school lunchroom before whistled silent.  No dice.

But ineffective as that formation was, I’d get my just desserts a couple decades later, within my Al-Anon involvement. 

One thing I’d learn in the several-year attendance was that indeed the fellowship was open not just to the immediate struggler with the active raging, destructive drunk in their lives, leaving them to drive around town afraid to go home after the meeting.  The gathering is also wide open to those whose qualifying demon has long gone from their wounded lives, those who can offer the wide, intellectual insight they couldn’t begin to observe or absorb when they themselves were roaming the streets at night in 1987.  They get to go home to dinner and a movie.

It renders the immediacy and efficiency of these meetings just slightly questionable at times, if entirely well-meant.  Trouble is, meaning well doesn’t always serve well.  Sometimes, a picture of kittens and a “You Are Special” mug just won’t cover it.

That’s kind of the misguided effect of the extended -Anon phenomenon.  It’s an empowering and pain-relieving environment, certainly a safe space for the hour you’re there, and indeed a place to make contacts and friends to be at your immediate aid if things get dangerous, inside or out.

But there is in fact a ‘Use Only As Directed” aspect to these holistic, self-insightful wellness approaches.  Meeting groups are called upon to be self-managing, or autonomous.  The Intergroup people can’t audit each and every one.  Meeting groups are “on their honor”.  Despite every adhered measure though, welcoming means openness to those sometimes too verbose, too intellectual, or sometimes too emotionally locked up to serve and be served best.

At the same time, some of these folks are the most likely to have a good time and become long-time cast members.  Who’s gonna turn them away…?  Meeting groups need volunteers and keepers.  Too many of us are just too encumbered, and we’re grateful.

For those lonely and socially disjointed after years of reclusion after the intimate alcoholic’s departure, these -Anon get-togethers can be your new life..!  And you’re ready to share, educate and lecture like never before, bearing the PhD of your life’s experience.  The Class Will Come To Order.

For six solid years, once a week or more, I found catharsis in sharing my kaleidoscopic autobiography in five minutes or less in rooms of up to thirty folks among whom I could only hope were gaining something from my insights.  When my act was done, another stepped up to the pageant stage and unloaded.  It sure felt good to do so, regardless of who in that room was rendered bored, annoyed or kind of miffed over the fact that tonight’s meeting, presumably given to the share of immediate struggle is a lecture series on the Aristotelian philosophies of post-alcoholic-cohabitation survival, by some fairly smug pseudo-intellectuals leading carefree lives.

I recognized this before long, and though conscious of it, when a room full of intimidated people were offered the chance to speak and couldn’t bear to volunteer, here I was, prepared to keynote the room to oblivion, in Sunrise Semester fashion.

To some careful extent, you do in fact have to be somewhat full of yourself to share and offer sermonistic guidance to those in like struggle.  But it won’t work all the time.  At an AA gathering of long-time recovered alcoholics addressed by itinerant founder and lecturer Bill W., sure enough a fellow recoveree approached him and called him out for becoming a “dry drunk”.  Something to do with his holier-than-thou demeanor and detached nature in what was a founded interest-gone-industrially-bad.  In recovery, BW evidently was forced to assume a certain posture that eroded an integral sincerity, or visceral element of compassion.  It probably also couldn’t have been helped.

And that’s part of the puzzle of recovery.  While a room full of those in need of healing are pitted against half a room of those in need of speaking it out, the net result may not be too many changed lives.  But you will see an evening of much needed respite.  Recovery meetings are clearly a matter of The Medium Is The Message. 

The origins of the suffix -Anon and the label “Anonymous” are long derived from the understanding that civilians not bearing any substance addiction, nor dealing with addicts in their lives, are simply not equipped to understand, and hence likely to judge the character of one bearing such delicate vulnerability.  It’s best kept “amongst the tribe”.

There’s other reasons too, as I’d come to figure out.  Sharing your life’s spoken odyssey, in a format much the way Homer probably did under the spotlights in Greek improv clubs in the B.C. 600s, in the intimate company of a partner or willing-eared friend is not always a welcome showcase.  Despite their kindness, they have their unspoken baggage too, except they’re just a little too polite or reserved to unbutton their sleeves the same way.   That’s where self-published books, YouTube videos and podcasts take over.  The determination to get your story heard will.  That’s if you have anything to say about it.

And once it makes it to the take-it-or-leave-it shelf, you’ve arrived knowing that the world is a better place for the message you’ve brandished out there.  Let the Anonymous reign forth and conquer.

And stay that way.

 

Noah F.