12 Steps & 12 Traditions
This month’s Step and Tradition articles from the Digital Archive:
|  Amateurs Anonymous
Eighth Tradition - Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.
What dismays me about my early days in Alcoholics Anonymous is the extent of intellectual arrogance and grandiosity that I brought with me--defects that were quickly enlisted in what was to become an ongoing tournament: me vs. the Eighth Tradition.
The word "nonprofessional," in AA parlance, means that I ought to act in a way that neither affirms nor implies that I am something other than a recovering alkie in a Fellowship of recovering alkies. It means that if professional help is what I need, I should go where such help is available--outside AA. Seems clear enough. Yet before I was ninety days sober I had become legal advisor to a fellow newcomer who was then in the divorce court; I advised another AA to stop taking the medication that a qualified doctor had prescribed; and I counseled two AAs in a lover's quarrel.
I've learned enough since my entry into AA, in 1960, to stay out of those arenas, but there is still another that can take me by surprise. True, I no longer play doctor or therapist where medications or relationships are concerned, and I don't give legal advice, but I can still catch myself wondering whether the latest newcomer in my home group is really an alcoholic. On what basis would I question anyone's qualification? What else, except my expertise on AA and on alcoholism itself. Old habits die hard!
I try to be particularly careful when introducing newcomers to the Twelve Steps. It seems to me that one of the reasons the Steps were suggested in the first place was to avoid professionalizing them. In my zeal to encourage newcomers to get involved with the Steps I sometimes talk about them as if they were the be-all and end-all. Looking back at my own beginnings, I think that if anyone had told me, even by inference, that I had to get on with the Steps, I wouldn't have stopped long enough to remark, "What an order! I can't go through with it." I simply would've run like hell.
Sometimes I complain about the way officers conduct the business of my home group and set myself up as an expert on the AA group. Heaven help me, but there were times when I was so sure I knew everything there was to know about AA history that I would actually hook my thumbs in my vest like a nineteenth century politician when speaking from the podium.
Another area where I am made particularly aware of the Eighth Tradition is in speaking to non-AA groups. I have found myself on panels with experts in the field of alcoholism and have been introduced as an expert myself. I make it a point to remember something I was told by a member of our local intergroup public information committee: We need to maintain our amateur standing. There is a practical side to this as well. Being nonprofessional means I don't have to worry about giving a letter-perfect presentation every time.
Tradition Eight also suggests that our service centers may employ special workers. Some of the experience that helped formulate this Tradition was played out in the days of the Forty-first Street Clubhouse when members had a hard time distinguishing between Twelfth Step work and office employment. This was in the early 1940s. The controversy was still all very new but I can just imagine the air turning blue with resentment as they tried to understand that the secretary, for instance, was not being paid to stay sober or to do Twelfth Step work but to answer the phone, write letters, keep records of business transactions, and so forth.
Newcomers still ask, as I did, why we have paid AA workers (professionals). As it was pointed out to me, the staff at our local intergroup office, for example, is not paid to do Twelfth Step work. By opening up and helping to keep open the doors to institutions and correctional facilities, by collecting data on local groups and publishing updated meeting directories, along with many other fundamental activities, the intergroup staff is paving the way for Twelfth Step work. It makes my Twelfth Step work that much easier. And carrying the message of hope and recovery is the real "business" of AA. But why a paid staff? Why not volunteers? To attempt to conduct such an enterprise on a solely volunteer basis would be highly impractical. As for hiring AAs, who better to hire than people who know AA best!
Just for today, it is a good idea for me to stick close to simple basic AA as I encounter it in my home group and at others. Every single recovering alkie at every single meeting tells me, by word or deed, that nonprofessionalism in AA is one of the best ideas we ever had. (Incidentally, my friends are quick to remind me of it whenever I get too big for my AA britches!)
W. H.
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