I wonder now whether that story really was funny, intentionally or unintentionally. Anyhow, I lost it and never thought of it again—consciously—through the next two and a half years of fierce alcoholic drinking. During that time, I took a geographical cure, seriously believing that if I moved to New York from Fort Worth, my drinking would somehow get straightened out. It was a severe and scary setback to find myself drinking even worse around Times Square than I ever had back in the old corrals of Cowtown.
One morning, sweatily trying to decide which shoelace to tackle first, desperately trying to remember what horrors I had perpetrated the night (or nights) before, I found myself crying and saying, “I’ve got to get out of this hell, some way.” Then I suddenly remembered that old Forth Worth newspaper clipping about Alcoholics Anonymous.
Two general ideas from that gossip column had apparently lodged themselves in the collection of throbbing cavities I called my head. One was that AA had something to do with people known to be very heavy drinkers. The other impression was that AA didn’t ask for more than your first name, so they could never tell anyone that you had joined their club.
That promise of privacy, that pledge—implied in the name Alcoholics Anonymous—to keep my shameful record absolutely confidential made it possible for me to show up at the local AA office a few days later. The Traditions were still unwritten, but the spirit of trustworthiness and anonymity which pervaded our Fellowship enabled me to sneak through the door on a clear, cold January day of 1945 and find at long last not only that I was at home, that I was wanted, but that no one would tell on me.
Already, I was the beneficiary of both halves of Tradition Eleven. Fort Worth members had cooperated with that Texas columnist back in 1942, so he could carry the message of AA in his newspaper. They had given him information about AA—not boastful promotion material. By that action, they had acknowledged that AA itself could not be anonymous; it could not be a secret society if it wanted to carry the message. And in their message that problem drinkers could recover, they also conveyed the AA promise of privacy, or confidentiality.
Because their behavior saved my life, I have ever since been glad to see our public information committees helping to get more and more publicity for AA in newspapers, on television, in magazines, books, and movies. It may not always be the kind of publicity I like; but when I am tempted to criticize, I just remember that all it has to do is to plant the twin seeds of (1) hope for the problem drinker and (2) anonymity—the conviction that he can trust us never to betray him. I’m sure such publicity has saved many other lives, and I hope we get cleverer and cleverer at figuring out ways to keep AA constantly being mentioned in the public media.
Once I had joined AA, I found there was something I could do, personally and privately, to help spread the message. Rather soon after starting to sober up, I told my friends and family about this wonderful new thing I had learned: that alcoholism is a disease, not a moral failing. It wasn’t my fault that I had been such a bad drunkard for so long; it was the disease’s fault. But I quickly added that now I was going to be all right, it wouldn’t happen again, because I had joined this marvelous organization called Alcoholics Anonymous.
I also told my doctor and employers, when it seemed appropriate for them to know. My friends in AA did, too. Whenever we told of our own membership, we knew that it might help chip away at the cruel stigma which still kills too many alcoholics. Sometimes, of course, the message was carried to other alcoholics, indirectly, through these doctors and employers.
Since we also told of our AA membership when we made amends, when we spoke at open meetings, and when we did Twelfth Step work, the notion of keeping our membership secret, or being furtive about it, just never occurred to most of us, I guess. After all, why should we be ashamed of recovering from a disease?
We did not tell any outsiders the names of other members, of course. That promise of confidentiality in our name was precious to me, and still is; I certainly would not break it.
But I have always loved to gossip, and it wasn’t easy to keep from telling last names and other identifying facts about members to other AAs. I have learned my lesson on that one, I hope, the hard way—through embarrassment. It happened to me twice. Having told one member about another member, I learned that the two were old acquaintances and each wanted particularly to keep the other from knowing he was in AA! Clearly, I had violated confidences. It was unforgivable, and I am still ashamed when I think of it.
Now I consider my knowledge of people in AA to be very much like the privileged information confided to a doctor, lawyer, or priest. I have absolutely no right whatever to disclose anything about a member to anyone else, in AA or out, without that member’s explicit permission. Respecting this privileged information is not a matter of professional ethics, specifically sanctioned by law, but I think the AA promise of confidentiality is a sacred one, and I must do my part to keep it.
Within the Fellowship, I prefer to speak of another member—and be spoken of—only by the first name. I like this practice simply because it is extra insurance against letting slip things told me privately, and because it is an effective symbol, making the point—particularly to outsiders and newcomers—that we mean it when we say we’re anonymous, we’re trustworthy, we don’t tell.
Few of us in AA, I guess, have much occasion to worry about that part of the Tradition cautioning against the use of our names or faces in mass communications media. Not long after sobering up, I discovered that neither Winchell, Life, the New York Times, nor anyone else was standing outside the meeting doors every night to announce to a breathless world that I was just leaving an AA meeting, sober. As far as I know, the network anchormen and their TV cameras have let practically all the rest of us alone too. By and large, the record is remarkably good on that part of Tradition Eleven. Even if as many as seventy-five “anonymity breaks” accidentally occur in, say, one year, that’s only about .00015 percent of our membership.
One particular set of AA members does run into that problem, however, and I especially admire the way they handle it. I refer to the many good AAs who work professionally in the field of alcoholism and are always being interviewed by newspapers and on television and radio. They just say they are “recovered alcoholics,’’ without saying that they are AA members. It seems to me that this device is honest, adheres perfectly to the Tradition, and at the same time may carry a message of hope. Certainly, the old stigma fades when good-looking, smart-sounding, respectable folks like that are not ashamed to say in public that they are recovered alcoholics, and when they say it as casually as they would state any other fact about themselves.
In my opinion, anonymity in the mass media is still very important, to all AA members and to all potential members. It signals to sick alcoholics: Come on in—we won’t tell. And it guards us against the temptation to start bragging about ourselves…but I’m ahead of myself again. That’s Tradition Twelve.
And I still have a long way to go in getting Number Eleven under my belt. Doesn’t “attraction rather than promotion” have a personal meaning for me? Yes, I am supposed to make AA life look so attractive that drunks will want the kind of sobriety they see in me more than they want to go on drinking. Rather than promote AA with the hard sell or with bribes (a cup of coffee, a flop , a job, or other favors), it’s up to me to make AA seem very attractive.
The members I met in 1945 did just that for me. I don’t find it so easy.
B.L., New York, N. Y.
Sponsor Your Doctor
by John L. Norris, MD
January 1976
All of us interested in alcoholism and the problems of alcohol have been puzzled, frustrated, and at times angered by the lack of understanding or even of interest on the part of the helping professions, especially medicine. A few pioneers in medicine—Silkworth, Tiebout, Kennedy, Gehrmann, Seixas, Block, Gitlow, among others in the United States—have understood