Working the Steps in a Group...

Originally published in the AA Grapevine                                                                                                                                                            "I BELONG TO an AA group

that meets on Tuesday evenings
at eight o'clock.
The members are primarily from
Chicago's western suburbs; several
are from other areas.
We meet in members' homes and
discuss a Step each week.
We begin with Step One,
go right through to Twelve,
and then start at the First Step again.

If a new person comes to the group
and it's his first meeting and we're on
Step Seven, for example,

we don't go back to Step One.

If the Twelfth Step call has been made properly, we figure, the First Step
has been explained to the new person before he comes to the meeting.
Otherwise, there might be so many meetings on Step One that the entire
group would fail to move along as it needs to. Every member in the group
helps the newcomer feel welcome and spends some time talking with him
or her after the meeting. Everybody in the group is working the Steps.
If a new person comes into the group and attends regularly, he starts working
them, too. He doesn't know any differently. He very quickly figures out
that "How It Works" means that this is how it works. Doesn't it get repetitious
with the same people talking about the same Steps month after month and
year after year? Well, it probably would if we worked each Step only once.
However, every member in the group is working and reworking all the Steps.
As a result, we speak from fresh experiences each time we go through them.
We don't talk about the Fourth Steps we wrote years ago. We discuss
inventories written recently and Fifth Steps we took not long ago.
The same holds true for every Step. This creates an atmosphere that stimulates
 each of us to continue work in the program. The group is far more than a place
to go and ventilate our feelings merely to find symptom relief. In our experience,
conditions such as depression, anxiety, fear, boredom, hostility, and apathy are
just symptoms, and they will disappear through persistent work with all the Steps.
The answer, then, is not to concern ourselves with the symptoms, but to work
and rework the Steps so that they may remove the causes. Then the depression,
fear, boredom, or other symptom will disappear, too. We've seen this happen
consistently. Some members who join our group suffer from this condition.
They have had substantial amounts of sobriety and have tried various therapies
and brands of counseling, because they felt they "needed something more than
just AA." In every instance, it turns out that they have not done enough continuing
 work with the Steps. Without fail, when these men and women begin to work and
rework every one of the Steps, their symptoms gradually vanish. Very possibly,
the Twelve Steps may be the most commonly overlooked and underrated long-term
therapy there is for the alcoholic. Therapies of all kinds appear and promise magnificent
benefits for the client. Gradually, each sinks into richly deserved obscurity, only to be
replaced by something new. Unfortunately. AAs often get siphoned into such an
"expanded approach," because they're hurting and don't understand that their hurt
is the inevitable result of insufficient work with the AA program. Our home group
 has found that this program works effectively at any stage of sobriety for any AA
who is willing to keep using it. It generates a vitality for change that is translated
into increasing health and freedom. The February 1975 issue of Psychology Today
included twelve classified advertisements for Primal Therapy, under the heading
of "Growth Centers." A few years ago, all of those listings would have been for
Transactional Analysis. Five years from now, it will be something else. All of
these fads flourish for a while and then fade into oblivion. It seems to me that
AA members often wind up in these various therapies because of inadequate
sponsorship. Sponsorship in our group is strong. We try to be honest and open,
and we don't waste each other's time pretending to be counselors or therapists.
We simply try to share our actual experience in working the AA program.
  Such experience--generally recent--has shown us again and again that outward
 problems in our lives are produced by conditions within ourselves. Persistent
use of the Steps removes the inward conditions that cause the problems. As we
experience changes in ourselves, we live our way into a new understanding,
and we gradually stop creating difficulties in our lives. We find answers and
solutions that we could never see before, and they all come from the program.
It's so simple that it's sometimes tough to believe! In the past several years,
three other groups have branched off from our Tuesday-night group. These,
too, are Step groups. A number of AAs with eight, ten, and more years of
sobriety have joined our group because they heard about it from other members,
who described the help found in our meetings and work with the Steps. It is a
working group. We get our directions from the Big Book and the "Twelve and
Twelve." They are used as springboards for continuing work, not simply for talk
about what we did with a Step years ago. This continued action in the program is
the key to the healing vitality the group provides for each of us. The meeting
begins with a quiet time, and then someone reads "How It Works." The host or
hostess generally leads off with some remarks from personal experience about the
Step under discussion and then asks for comments from each person present.
Each talks about AA and the Step under discussion, rather than offering erudite
philosophy or amateur psychology. No one talks about peer-group pressure,
treatment modalities, attitudinal ambivalences, multidisciplinary approaches,
or therapeutic milieus. Each member tries to honestly share his experience with
that particular Step: what he has done with it, what he is doing with it, and what
it has done and is doing for him. Usually, we have between twelve and fifteen
at a meeting; sometimes, as many as twenty. The meetings begin at eight o'clock
and generally end by nine. We've found that if we try to avoid talking beyond
our experiences, we can thoroughly discuss a Step in a surprisingly brief time.
Members in our group range in sobriety from a few months to many years.
All of us go to the meetings because we need what the group gives us: a regular r
eminder of where our help lies, along with steady encouragement to keep doing
the work.

There's a quiet enthusiasm in our members. We know what's made the changes in
our lives, and we're equipped to talk about it from the standpoint of fresh, growing
experience. And that's the message. Regardless of where we are in sobriety, you
 and I have a specific method of dealing with what happens to us each day--by simply
 renewing our work in the program. Unless I do this kind of continuing work, I'll never
know what the AA message really is or how to help another person experience it.
One basic measurement of my progress in AA starts with what I'm doing in my home
group. Our group helps me remember the transforming power of the program, summed
up on page 562 in the Big Book: "I get everything I need in Alcoholics Anonymous-
-everything I need I get--and when I get what I need I invariably find that It was just
what I wanted all the time."

  Paul M.                              Riverside, Illinois