The First Tradition Check List: Practice These Principles Tradition One: Our common welfare should come first ; personal recovery depends on A.A. Unity. 1. Am I in my group a healing, mending, integrating person, or am I divisive? What about gossip and taking other members’ inventories? 2. Am Ia peacemaker? Or do I, with pious preludes such as “just for the sake of discussion,” plunge into arguments? 3. Am I gentle with those who rub me the wrong way, or am I abrasive? 4. Do I make competitive A.A. remarks, such as comparing one group with another or contrasting A.A. in one place with A.A. in another? 5. Do I put down some A.A. activities as if I was superior for not participating in this or that aspect of A.A.? 6. Am I informed about A.A. as a whole? Do I support, in every way I can A.A. as a whole or just the parts I understand and approve of? 7. Am I as considerate of A.A. members as I want them to be of me? 8. Do I spout platitudes about love while indulging in and secretly justifying behaviour that bristles with hostility? 9. Do I go to enough A.A. meetings or ready enough A.A. literature to really keep in touch? 10. Do I share with A.A. all of me, the bad and the good, accepting as well as giving the help of the fellowship? © “The AA Grapevine, Inc.” (November 1969)

Alcohol and I fought. Alcohol won.

It sounds so simple, but it took 30 years of my life to play out.

At first it was just a flirt. After a few drinks I could relax and enjoy myself, and situations involving other people (i.e. most of life) were easier and more fun with alcohol. This phase of our relationship only lasted briefly. Soon I figured out that with alcohol I could do and say things I couldn’t otherwise do or say. That’s when our relationship deepened and I started to depend on the ‘courage’ it gave me. It was at this point that the denial started. All the family drunks that had preceded me were forgotten. What I was doing was nothing like that and I wasn’t hurting anybody else. Besides, I could stop if I wanted to. I just didn’t want to!

Why should I? Everybody else drank and used whatever drug was trendy at the time. We could afford it, we had fun, and we got up and went to work in the morning. Where was the harm? Where indeed! I knew I drank differently than other people. I knew and at the same time I didn’t – because denial had become my second best friend. And denial became stronger and stronger as I became sicker and weaker.

Time passed and I started to lose things: Friends, the ability to drive, my relationship with my husband, my self respect, memory, concentration, etc etc And when I finally thought I’d had enough, I decided to fight back. What weapons did I have? Anti-depressants, doctors, special diets, analysts. I didn’t know that I had NO chance of winning. Nobody told me!

So I fought for 10 more years and when, inevitably, I had to admit defeat I knew that I was powerless over alcohol. And that my life was unmanageable.

Thank God for Step 1. It’s strong enough to gather up the defeated people that land in the rooms of AA once the fight is over and there’s no place else to go. And it’s simple enough for us to hold on to, even in that ruined state, until we’re ready to take the next Step, and then the next one.

The Traditions are the means by which we organise ourselves as a Fellowship and without them we would have no mechanism for resolving disputes within groups or service bodies.

I sometimes say they are not a set of theoretical constructs but are based on 11 years of group experience and indeed other experience, such as that of the Washingtonians Movement which was founded by six self-declared drunks in Baltimore in 1840, with the aim of sobering up drunks. After 3 years they claimed that 100,000 ‘drunkards’ had signed the pledge to remain abstinent. They were involved in the temperance movement at the time. Some people joined the movement because they believed in its aims and wanted to support it. Others with political ambitions joined to further their own aims. They eventually became more involved with the temperance movement and then the slavery issue and lost sight of their original aim. In 1848 the whole movement collapsed. A salutary lesson for AA!!

With the growth of AA in the 1940s and the vast amount of enquiries that were being received from AA Groups as well as people in the medical profession, members of the clergy, employers, etc., it was clear to Bill W. that we needed some set of principles which “could offer tested solutions to all our problems of living and working together and of relating our society to the world outside” (AA Comes of Age p203). Bill felt that the time had arrived when a set of principles could be written, covering matters pertaining to unity, group conscience, membership, group autonomy, non- affiliation/endorsement, self-support, professionalism, avoiding controversy, anonymity in all its aspects.

When Bill completed writing the Traditions he had them published in the ‘Long Form’ in the AA Grapevine 6 May 1946.

It took a good many years for the Traditions to be recognised as being as important to the Fellowship’s survival as the Twelve Steps are

to each individual member’s life.

I would suggest that Traditions 1 and 12 encapsulate what is written in-between them, putting the Fellowship first in all our AA involvement. Tradition one brings the Traditions a lot closer to individual recovery than is sometimes appreciated in the Fellowship. I am mindful of this in my service involvement and therefore don’t just have an altruistic motive in mind when looking to uphold the Traditions but a personal one as well.

The guiding principle for me is putting the whole of AA before any of its constituent parts.

When I think about personal anonymity at the public level, I can see how it is there to protect the individual member as well as the Fellowship.

A lot of non-AAs have contributed in supporting the Fellowship over the years and I always think about John D. Rockefeller and his associates’ advice not to professionalise AA and not to look to accumulate any great wealth as this may get in the way of carrying out our primary purpose. I believe the principle of corporate poverty was adopted following this advice.

The Traditions were adopted by the Fellowship at the first International Convention in Cleveland in July 1950, with over 3,000 in attendance.

Although he was terminally ill at the time, Dr. Bob gave a short talk at the Convention. He mentioned the simplicity of our programme and said “Lets not louse it all up with Freudian complexes and things that are interesting to the scientific mind, but have very little to do with our actual AA work”. He said the Twelve Steps can be simmered down to two words ‘love’ and ‘service’.

He died in November of the same year.