1939 Cleveland Plain Dealer
The Elrick B. Davis
Articles From The
Cleveland
Plain Dealer
October - November
1939
These articles appeared in the main Cleveland newspaper, the Plain Dealer, just five months after the first A.A.
group was formed in Cleveland. The articles resulted in hundreds of calls for
help from suffering alcoholics who reached out for the hope that the fledgling Alcoholics Anonymous
offered.
The thirteen reliable members of the Cleveland
group handled as many as 500 calls (ref 1) in the first month following the appearance of Davis' articles. The following year Cleveland could
boast 20 to 30 groups with hundreds of members (ref 2).
1. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, New York, A.A.
World Services, Inc., 1980, pp 206-207.
2. 'Pass It On', New York, A.A.
World Services, Inc., 1984, pp 224-225.
·
Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here
·
By ELRICK B. DAVIS
·
Much has been written about Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization doing major work in reclaiming the habitual
drinker. This is the first of a series describing the work the group is doing
in Cleveland.
·
Success
·
By now it is a rare Clevelander who does not know, or know of, at least
one man or woman of high talent whose drinking had become a public scandal, and
who suddenly has straightened out "over night," as the saying
goes-the liquor habit licked. Men who have lost $15,000 a year jobs have them back again. Drunks who have taken every "cure"
available to the most lavish purse, only to take them over again with equally
spectacular lack of success, suddenly have become total abstainers, apparently
without anything to account for their reform. Yet something must account for
the seeming miracle. Something does.
·
Alcoholics Anonymous has reached the town.
·
Fellowship
·
Every Thursday evening at the home of some ex-drunk in Cleveland, 40 or
50 former hopeless rummies meet for a social evening during which they buck
each other up. Nearly every Saturday evening they and their families have a
party — just as gay as any other party held that evening despite the fact that
there is nothing alcoholic to drink. From time to time they have a picnic,
where everyone has a roaring good time without the aid of even one bottle of
beer. Yet these are men and women who, until recently, had scarcely been sober
a day for years, and members of their families who all that time had been
emotionally distraught, social and economic victims of another's addition.
·
These ex-rummies, as they call themselves, suddenly salvaged from the
most socially noisome of fates, are the members of the Cleveland Fellowship of
an informal society called "Alcoholics Anonymous." Who they are
cannot be told, because the name means exactly what it says. But any incurable
alcoholic who really wants to be cured will find the members of the Cleveland
chapter eager to help.
·
The society maintains a "blind" address: The Alcoholic
Foundation, Box 657, Church Street Annex Postoffice, New York City. Inquiries
made there are forwarded to a Cleveland banker, who is head of the local
Fellowship, or to a former big league ball player who is recruiting officer of
the Akron Fellowship, which meets Wednesday evenings in a mansion loaned for
the purpose by a non-alcoholic supporter of the movement.
·
Cured
·
The basic point about Alcoholics Anonymous is that it is a fellowship of
"cured" alcoholics. And that both old-line medicine and modern
psychiatry had agreed on the one point that no alcoholic could be cured. Repeat
the astounding fact:
·
These are cured.
·
They have cured each other.
·
They have done it by adopting, with each other's aid, what they call
"a spiritual way of life."
·
"Incurable" alcoholism is not a moral vice. It is a disease. No dipsomaniac drinks because he
wants to. He drinks because he can't help drinking.
·
He will drink when he had rather die than take a drink. That is why so
many alcoholics die as suicides. He will get drunk on the way home from the
hospital or sanitarium that has just discharged him as "cured." He
will get drunk at the wake of a friend who died of drink. He will swear off for
a year, and suddenly find himself half-seas over, well into another
"bust." He will get drunk at the gates of an insane asylum where he
has just visited an old friend, hopeless victim of "wet brain."
·
Prayer
·
These are the alcoholics that "Alcoholics Anonymous" cures.
Cure is impossible until the victim is convinced that nothing that he or a
"cure" hospital can do, can help. He must know that his disease is
fatal. He must be convinced that he is hopelessly sick of body, and of mind —
and of soul. He must be eager to accept help from any source — even God.
·
Alcoholics Anonymous has a simple explanation for an alcoholic's
physical disease. It was provided them by the head of one of New York City's
oldest and most famous "cure" sanitariums. The alcoholic is allergic
to alcohol. One drink sets up a poisonous craving that only more of the poison
can assuage. That is why after the first drink the alcoholic cannot stop.
·
They have a psychiatric theory equally simple and convincing. Only an
alcoholic can understand another alcoholic's mental processes and state. And
they have an equally simple, if unorthodox, conception of God.
·
Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here
·
By ELRICK B. DAVIS
·
In a previous installment, Mr. Davis outlined the plan
of Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization of former drinkers who have found a solution
to liquor in association for mutual aid. This is the second of a series.
·
Religion
·
There is no blinking the fact that Alcoholics Anonymous, the amazing
society of ex-drunks who have cured each other of an incurable disease, is
religious. Its members have cured each other frankly with the help of God.
Every cured member of the Cleveland Fellowship of the society, like every cured
member of the other chapters now established in Akron, New York, and elsewhere
in the country, is cured with the admission that he submitted his plight wholeheartedly to a Power Greater than
Himself.
·
He has admitted his conviction that science cannot cure him, that he
cannot control his pathological craving for alcohol himself, and that he cannot
be cured by the prayers, threats, or pleas of his family, employers, or
friends. His cure is a religious experience. He had to have God's aid. He had
to submit to a spiritual housecleaning.
·
Alcoholics Anonymous is a completely informal society, wholly
latitudinarian in every respect but one. It prescribes a simple spiritual
discipline, which must be followed rigidly every day. The discipline is fully
explained in a book published by the society.
·
Discipline
·
That is what makes the notion of the cure hard for the usual alcoholic
to take, at first glance, no matter how complete his despair. He wants to join no cult. He has lost faith, if he ever had it, in the power of religion
to help him. But each of the cures accomplished by Alcoholics Anonymous is a
spiritual awakening. The ex-drunk has adopted what the society calls "a
spiritual way of life."
·
How, then, does Alcoholics Anonymous differ from the other great
religious movements which have changed social history in America? Wherein does
the yielding to God that saves a member of this society from his fatal disease,
differ from that which brought the Great Awakening that Jonathan Edwards
preached, or the New Light revival of a century ago, or the flowering of
Christian Science, or the campmeeting evangelism of the old Kentucky-Ohio frontier, or the Oxford Group
successes nowadays?
·
Every member of Alcoholics Anonymous may define God to suit himself. God
to him may be the Christian God defined by the Thomism of the Roman Catholic
Church. Or the stern Father of the Calvinist. Or the Great Manitou of the
American Indian. Or the Implicit Good assumed in the logical morality of
Confucius. Or Allah, or Buddha, or the Jehovah of the Jews. Or Christ the
Scientist. Or no more than the Kindly Spirit implicitly assumed in the
"atheism" of a Col. Robert Ingersoll.
·
Aid
·
If the alcoholic who comes to the fellowship for help believes in God,
in the specific way of any religion or sect, the job of cure is easier. But if
all that the pathological drunk can do is to say, with honesty, in his heart:
"Supreme Something, I am done for without more-than-human help," that
is enough for Alcoholics Anonymous to work on. The noble prayers, the great literatures,
and the time-proved disciplines of the established religions are a great help.
But as far as the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous is concerned, a
pathological drunk can call God "It" if he wants to, and is willing
to accept Its aid. If he'll do that, he can be cured.
·
Poll of "incurable" alcoholics who now, cured, are members of
the Cleveland Fellowship of the society, shows that this has made literally
life-saving religious experience possible to men and women who, otherwise,
could not have accepted spiritual help. Poll shows also that collectively their
religious experience has covered every variety known to religious psychology.
Some have had an experience as blindingly bright as that which struck down Saul
on the road to Damascus. Some are not even yet intellectually convinced except
to the degree that they see that living their lives on a spiritual basis has
cured them of a fatal disease. Drunk for years because they couldn't help it,
now it never occurs to them to want a drink. Whatever accounts for that, they
are willing to call "God."
·
Some find more help in formal religion than do others. A good many of
the Akron chapter find help in the practices of the Oxford Group. The Cleveland
chapter includes a number of Catholics and several Jews, and at least one man
to whom "God" is "Nature." Some practice family devotions.
Some simply cogitate about "It" in the silence of their minds. But
that the Great Healer cured them with only the help of their fellow ex-drunks,
they all admit.
·
·
Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here
·
By ELRICK B. DAVIS
·
In two previous articles, Mr. Davis told of Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization of former drinkers, banded to overcome their
craving for liquor and to help others to forego the habit. This is the third of
a series.
·
Help
·
The ex-drunks cured of their medically incurable alcoholism by
membership in Alcoholic Anonymous, know that the way
to keep themselves from backsliding is to find another pathological alcoholic
to help. Or to start a new man toward cure. That is the way that the Akron
chapter of the society, and from that, the Cleveland fellowship was begun.
·
One of the earliest of the cured rummies had talked a New York
securities house into taking a chance that he was really through with liquor.
He was commissioned to do a stock promotion chore in Akron. If he should
succeed, his economic troubles also would be cured. Years of alcoholism had
left him bankrupt as well as a physical and social wreck before Alcoholics
Anonymous had saved him.
·
His Akron project failed. Here he was on a Saturday afternoon in a
strange hotel in a town where he did not know a soul, business hopes blasted, and with
scarcely money enough to get him back to New York with a report that would
leave him without the last job he knew of for him in the world. If ever
disappointment deserved drowning, that seemed the time. A bunch of happy folk
were being gay at the bar.
·
At the other end of the lobby the Akron church directory was framed in
glass. He looked up the name of a clergyman. The cleric told him of a woman who
was worried about a physician who was a nightly solitary drunk. The doctor had
been trying to break himself of alcoholism for twenty years. He had tried all
of the dodges: Never anything but light wines or beer; never a drink alone; never
a drink before his work was done; a certain few number of drinks and then stop;
never drink in a strange place; never drink in a familiar place; never mix the
drinks; always mix the drinks; never drink before eating; drink only while
eating; drink and then eat heavily to stop the craving — and all of the rest.
·
Every alcoholic knows all of the dodges. Every alcoholic has tried them
all. That is why an uncured alcoholic thinks someone must have been following
him around to learn his private self-invented devices, when a member of
Alcoholics Anonymous talks to him. Time comes when any alcoholic has tried them
all, and found that none of them work.
·
Support
·
The doctor had just taken his first evening drink when the rubber
baron's wife telephoned to ask him to come to her house to meet a friend from
New York. He dared not, his wife would not, offend her by refusing. He agreed
to go on his wife's promise that they would leave after 15 minutes. His evening
jitters were pretty bad.
·
He met the New Yorker at 5 o'clock. They talked until 11:15. After that
he stayed "dry" for three weeks. Then he went to a convention in
Atlantic City. That was a bender. The cured New Yorker was at his bedside when
he came to. That was June 10, 1935. The doctor hasn't had a drink since. Every
Akron and Cleveland cure by Alcoholics Anonymous is a result.
·
The point the society illustrates by that bit of history is that only an
alcoholic can talk turkey to an alcoholic. The doctor knew all of the
"medicine" of his disease. He knew all of the psychiatry. One of his
patients had "taken the cure" 72 times. Now he is cured, by
fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous. Orthodox science left the physician licked.
He also knew all of the excuses, as well as the dodges, and the deep and fatal
shame that makes a true alcoholic sure at last that he can't win. Alcoholic
death or the bughouse will get him in time.
·
The cured member of Alcoholics Anonymous likes to catch a prospective
member when he is at the bottom of the depths. When he wakes up of a morning
with his first clear thought regret that he is not dead before he hears where
he has been and what he has done. When he whispers to himself: "Am I
crazy?" and the only answer he can think of is: "Yes." Even when
the bright-eyed green snakes are crawling up his arms.
·
Then the pathological drinker is willing to talk. Even eager to talk to
someone who really understands, from experience, what he means when he says:
"I can't understand myself."
·
Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here
·
By ELRICK B. DAVIS
·
In three previous articles, Mr. Davis has told of Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization of former drinkers banded to break the liquor
habit and to save others from over drinking. This is the fourth of a series.
·
Understanding
·
What gets the pathological drinker who finally has reached such state
that he is willing tolisten to a cured rummy member of Alcoholics Anonymous, is that the retrieved
alcoholic not only understands what only another alcoholic can understand, but
a great deal that the unreformed drunk thinks no one else could know because he
has never told anyone, and his difficulties or escapades must be private to his
own history.
·
Fact is the history of all alcoholics is the same; some have been
addicts longer than others, and some have painted brighter red patches around
the town — that is all. What they have heard in the "cure" hospitals they
have frequented, or from the psychoanalysts they have consulted, or the
physicians who have tapered them off one bender or another at home, has
convinced them that alcoholism is a disease. But they are sure (a) that their
version of the disease differs from everyone else's and (b) that in them it
hasn't reached the incurable stage anyway.
·
Head of the "cure" told them: "If you ever take another
drink, you'll be back." Psychoanalyst said "Psychologically, you have
never been weaned. Your subconscious is still trying to get even with your
mother for some forgotten slight." Family or hotelphysician said "If you don't quite
drinking, you'll die."
·
Reproof
·
Lawyers, ministers, business
partners and employers, parents and wives, also are professionally dedicated to
listening to confidences and accepting confessions without undue complaint. But
the clergyman may say: "Your drinking is a sin." And partner or
employer: "You'll have to quit this monkey business or get out." And
wife or parent: "This drinking is breaking my heart." And everyone:
"Why don't you exercise some will power and straighten up and be a
man."
·
"But," the alcoholic whispers in his heart. "No one but I
can know that I must drink to kill suffering too great to stand."
·
He presents his excuses to the retrieved alcoholic who has come to talk.
Can't sleep without liquor. Worry. Business troubles. Debt. Alimentary pains.
Overwork. Nerves too high strung. Grief. Disappointment. Deep dark phobic
fears. Fatigue. Family difficulties. Loneliness.
·
The catalog has got no farther than that when the member of Alcoholics
Anonymous begins rattling off an additional list.
·
"Hogwash," he says. "Don't try those alibis on me. I have
used them all myself."
·
Understanding
·
And then he tells his own alcoholic history, certainly as bad, perhaps
far worse than the uncured rummy's. They match experiences. Before he knows it
the prospect for cure has told his new friend things he had never admitted even
to himself. A rough and ready psychiatry, that, but it works, as the cured
members of the Cleveland Chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous all are restored to
society to testify. And that is the reason for the fellowship's weekly
gatherings. They are testimonial meetings. The members meet to find new victims
to cure, and to buck each other up. For years their social and emotional life
has all been elbow-bending. Now they provide each other a richer society to
replace the old. Hence, the fellowship's family parties and picnics.
·
Never for a moment do they forget that a practicing alcoholic is a very
sick person. Never for a moment can they forget that even medical men who know
the nature of the disease are apt to feel that failure to recover is a proof of
moral perversity in the patient. If a man is dying of cancer, no one says:
"Why doesn't he exercise some will power and kill that cancer off."
If he is coughing his lungs out with tuberculosis, no one says: "Buck up
and quit coughing; be a man." They may say to the first: "Submit to
surgery before it is too late;" to the second: "Take a cure before
you are dead."
·
Religion
·
Retrieved alcoholics talk in that fashion to their uncured fellows. They
say: "You are a very sick man. Physically sick — you have an allergy to
alcohol. We can put you in a hospital that will sweat that poison out. Mentally
sick. We know how to cure that. And spiritually sick.
·
"To cure your spiritual illness you will have to admit God. Name
your own God, or define Him to suit yourself. But if you are really willing to
'do anything' to get well, and if it is really true — and we know it is — that
you drink when you don't want to and that you don't know why you get drunk,
you'll have to quit lying to yourself and adopt a spiritual way of life. Are
you ready to accept help?"
·
And the miracle is that, for alcoholics brought to agreement by pure
desperation, so simple a scheme works.
·
Cleveland alone has 50 alcoholics, all former notorious drunks, now
members of Alcoholics Anonymous to prove it. None is a fanatic prohibitionist.
None has a quarrel with liquor legitimately used by people physically,
nervously, and spiritually equipped to use it. They simply know that alcoholics
can't drink and live, and that their "incurable" disease has been
conquered.
·
·
Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here
·
By ELRICK B. DAVIS
·
In previous installments, Mr. Davis has told of Alcoholics Anonymous, an informal society of drinking men who have joined together
to beat the liquor habit This is the last of five articles.
·
No Graft
·
It is hard for the skeptical to believe that no one yet has found a way
to muscle into Alcoholics Anonymous, the informal society of ex-drunks that
exists only to cure each other, and make a money-making scheme of it. Or that
someone will not. The complete informality of the society seems to be what has
saved it from that. Members pay no dues. The society has no paid staff. Parties
are "Dutch." Meetings are held at the homes of members who have
houses large enough for such gatherings, or in homes of persons who may not be
alcoholics but are sympathetic with the movement.
·
Usually a drunk needs hospitalization at the time that he is caught to
cure. He is required to pay for that himself. Doubtless he hasn't the money.
But probably his family has. Or his employer will advance the money to save
him, against his future pay. Or cured members of the society will help him
arrange credit, if he has a glimmer of credit left. Or old friends will help.
·
At the moment members of the Cleveland Fellowship of Alcoholics
Anonymous are searching the slum lodging houses to find a man, once eminent in
the city's professional life. A medical friend of his better days called them
in to find him. This friend will pay the hospital bill necessary to return this
victim of an "incurable" craving for drink to physical health, if the
society will take him on.
·
The society has published a book, called "Alcoholics
Anonymous," which it sells at $3.50. It may be ordered from an anonymous
address, Works Publishing Co., Box 657, Church Street Annex Postoffice, New
York City; or bought from the Cleveland Fellowship of the society. There is no
money profit for anyone in that book.
·
It recites the history of the society and lays down its principles in
its first half. Last half is case histories of representative cures out of the
first hundred alcoholics cured by membership in the society. It was written and
compiled by the New York member who brought the society to Ohio. He raised the
money on his personal credit to have the book published. He would like to
see those creditors repaid. It is a 400-page book, for which any regular
publisher would charge the same price. Copies bought from local Fellowships net
the local chapters a dollar each.
·
The Rev. Dr. Dilworth Lupton, pastor of the First Unitarian Church of
Cleveland, found in a religious journal an enthusiastic review of the book by the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, and sent it to the
president of the local Fellowship. It has been similarly noted in some medical
journals.
·
The Foundation
·
To handle the money that comes in for the book, and occasional gifts
from persons interested in helping ex-drunks to cure other
"incurable" drunks, the Alcoholics Foundation has been established,
with a board of seven directors.
·
Three of these are members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Four are not
alcoholics, but New Yorkers of standing interested in humane movements. Two of
them happen also to be associated with the Rockefeller Foundation, but that
does not associate the two foundations in any way.
·
First problem of the Cleveland Fellowship was to find a hospital willing
to take a drunk in and give him the medical attention first necessary to any
cure. Two reasons made that hard. Hospitals do not like to have alcoholics as
patients; they are nuisances. And the society requires that as soon as a drunk
has been medicated into such shape that he can see visitors, members of the
society must be permitted to see him at any time. That has been arranged. The
local society would like to have a kitty of $100 to post with the hospital as
evidence of good faith. But if it gets it, it will only be from voluntary
contributions of members.
·
Meantime the members, having financed their own cures, spend enormous
amounts of time and not a little money in helping new members. Psychiatrists
say that if an alcoholic is to be cured, he needs a hobby. His old hobby had
been only alcohol. Hobby of Alcoholics Anonymous is curing each other.
Telephone calls, postage and stationery, gasoline bills, mount up for each
individual. And hospitality to new members. A rule of the society is that each
member's latch string is always out to any other member who needs talk or
quiet, which may include a bed or a meal, at any time.
·
A NOTED DIVINE REVIEWS "ALCOHOLICS
ANONYMOUS"
·
By ELRICK B. DAVIS
·
In a recent series, Mr. Davis told of Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization of former drinkers banded together to beat
the liquor habit. This is the first of two final articles on the subject.
·
The Book
·
When 100 members of Alcoholics Anonymous, the extraordinary fellowship
of men and women who have cured themselves of "incurable" alcoholism
by curing each other and adopting a "spiritual way of life," had
established their cures to the satisfaction of their physicians, families,
employers and psychotherapists, they published a book.
·
It is a 400-page volume of which half is a history of the movement and a
description of its methods, and the other half a collection of 30 case
histories designed to show what a wide variety of persons the fellowship has
cured. It is called "Alcoholics Anonymous," and may be bought for
$3.50 from the Works Publishing Co., Box 657, Church Street Annex Postoffice,
New York.
·
The name of the publisher is that adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous for
its only publishing venture. The address is "blind" because the name
"Alcoholics Anonymous" means exactly what it says. The price of the
book is "cost," 50 cents a volume less than one of the country's
soundest old-line book publishers would have charged if the fellowship had accepted that house's offer to
publish the book and pay the society 40 cents a copy royalty on sales.
·
Among the first reviews of the book to see print was that written by the
Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick for the Religious Digest. That review so attracted at least one well-known Cleveland minister that he obtained
a copy of the book, got in touch with the Cleveland chapter of the society, and
plans to preach a sermon about the movement.
·
Dr. Fosdick is himself the author of seventeen books. His review of
"Alcoholics Anonymous" follows:
·
"This extraordinary book deserves the careful attention of anyone
interested in the problem of alcoholism. Whether as victims, friends of
victims, physicians, clergymen, psychiatrists or social workers there are many
such, and this book will give them, as no other treatise known to this reviewer
will, an inside view of the problem which the alcoholic faces. Gothic cathedral windows are not the sole things which can be truly seen only from within.
Alcoholism is another. All outside views are clouded and unsure. Only one who
has been a alcoholic and has escaped the thraldom can interpret the experience.
·
Truth
·
"This book represents the pooled experience of 100 men and women
who have been victims of alcoholism-and who have won their freedom and recovered
their sanity and self-control. their stories are detailed and circumstantial,
packed with human interest. In America today the disease of alcoholism is
increasing. Liquor has been an easy escape from depression. As an English
officer in India, reproved for his excessive drinking, lifted his glass and
said, "This is the swiftest road out of India," so many Americans
have been using hard liquor as a means of flight from their troubles until to
their dismay they discover that, free to begin, they are not free to stop. One
hundred men and women, in this volume, report their experience of enslavement
and then of liberation.
·
"The book is not in the least sensational. It is notable for its
sanity, restraint and freedom from over-emphasis and fanaticism.
·
"The group sponsoring this book began with two or three
ex-alcoholics, who discovered one another through kindred experience. From this
a movement started; ex-alcoholics working for alcoholics, without fanfare or
advertisement, and the movement has spread from one city to another.
·
"The core of their whole procedure is religious. They are convinced
that for the helpless alcoholic there is only one way out-the expulsion of his
obsession by a Power Greater Than Himself. Let it be said at once that there is
nothing partisan or sectarian about this religious experience. Agnostics and
atheists, along with Catholics, Jews and Protestants, tell their story of
discovering the Power Greater Than themselves. 'Who are you to say that there
is no God,' one atheist in the group heard a voice say when, hospitalized for
alcoholism, he faced the utter hopelessness of his condition. Nowhere is the
tolerance and open-mindedness of the book more evident than in its treatment of
this central matter on which the cure of all these men and women has depended.
They are not partisans of any particular form of organized religion, although
they strongly recommend that some religious fellowship be found by their
participants. By religion they mean an experience which they personally know
and which has saved them from their slavery, when psychiatry and medicine had
failed. They agree that each man must have his own way of conceiving God, but of
God Himself they are utterly sure, and their stories of victory in consequence
are a notable addition to William James' 'Varieties of Religious
Experience.'"
·
A PHYSICIAN LOOKS
UPON ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
By ELRICK B. DAVIS
Dr. Silkworth
The first appraisal in a scientific
journal of Alcoholics Anonymous, former drunkards who cure themselves by curing each other
with the help of religious experience, was published in the July issue of the
journal Lancet. It was "A New Approach to Psychotherapy [in] Chronic
Alcoholism.: by W. D. Silkworth, M.D. physician in charge, Chas B. Town's
Hospital, New York City. A drunkard during a moment of [deep] depression had
the spontaneous "religious experience" which started his cure. This
was the seed from which came Alcoholics Anonymous. Dr. silkworth was at first
skeptical. He is no longer. Excerpts from his paper follow:
"The beginning and subsequent
development of a new approach to the problem of permanent recovery for the
chronic alcoholic has already produced remarkable results and promises much for
the future. This statement is based upon four years of closeobservation. the principal answer is: Each
ex-alcoholic has had and is able to maintain, a vital spiritual or 'religious'
experience, accompanied by marked changes of personality. There is a radical
change in outlook, attitude and habits of thought. In nearly all cases, these
are evident within a few months, often less.
"The conscious search of these
ex-alcoholics for the right answer has enabled them to find an approach
effectual in something more than half of all cases. This is truly remarkable
when it is remembered that most of them were undoubtedly beyond the reach of
other remedial measures.
Religion
"Considering the presence of the
religious factor, one might expect to find unhealthy emotionalism and
prejudice. On the contrary, there is an instant readiness to discard old
methods for new which produce better results. It was early found that usually
the weakest approach to an alcoholic is directly through his family or friends,
especially if the patient is drinking heavily. Ex-alcoholics frequently insist
a physician take the patient in hand, placing him in a hospital when possible.
If proper hospitalization and medical care is not carried out, this patient
faces the danger of delirium tremens, 'wet brain' or other complications. After
a few days' stay, the physician brings up the question of permanent sobriety.
If the patient is interested, he tactfully introduces a member of the group. By
this time the prospect has self-control, can think straight, and the approach
can be made casually. More than half the fellowship have been so treated. The
group is unanimous in its belief that hospitalization is desirable, even
imperative, in most cases...
"An effort is made for frank
discussion with the patient, leading to self-understanding. He must make the
necessary readjustment to his environment. Co-operation and confidence must be
secured. The objectives are to bring about extraversion and provide someone to
whom he can transfer his dilemma. This group is now attaining this because of
the following reasons:
Reasons
1.
Because of their alcoholic experiences and successful recoveries they
secure a high degree of confidence from their prospects.
2.
Because of this initial confidence, identical experiences, and the fact
that the discussion is pitched on moral and religious grounds, the patient
tells his story and makes his self-appraisal with extreme thoroughness and
honesty. He stops living alone and finds himself within reach of a fellowship
with whom he can discuss his problems as they arise.
3.
Because of the ex-alcoholic brotherhood, the patient too, is able to
save other alcoholics from destruction. At one and the same time, the patient
acquires an ideal, a hobby, a strenuous avocation, and a social life which he
enjoys among other ex-alcoholics and their families. These factors make
powerfully for his extraversion.
4.
Because of objects aplenty in whom he can vest his confidence, the
patient can turn to the individuals to whom he first gave his confidence, the
ex-alcoholic group as a whole, or to the Deity.
posted by Patrick at
2:29 AM
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