All changes made over the years in the Big Book (A.A. members’ fond nickname for this volume) have had the same purpose: to represent the current membership of Alcoholics Anonymous more accurately, and thereby to reach more alcoholics. If you have a drinking problem, we hope that you may pause in reading one of the forty-two personal stories and think: “Yes, that happened to me”; or, more important, “Yes, I’ve felt like that”; or, most important, “Yes, I believe this program can work for me too.”
- The purpose of the stories is to reach people who are not yet 'sold' on AA: either those outside AA who have yet to attend meetings or join or those inside AA who have yet to conclude they belong or engage actively in the programme
- The way we reach people is by telling our stories
- The people we're aiming at are people with a drinking problem
- Groups I have attended say, in their script, that anyone with a drinking problem is welcome to attend
- That's because we're trying to help people attending the meeting decide whether or not they belong
- They do that by listening to our stories, the way readers read the stories, and seeing if they identify
- Forty-two stories is a lot: it can take a lot of exposure to AA stories before a person identifies
- Maybe a person needs to hear 42 pitches at meetings before they identify ('Pause in reading **one** ...')
- Maybe 42 meetings in 42 days might be a good new slogan
- The identification works from the outside in: what happened to me through to what I felt
- The inference is then drawn: if this worked for you, this will work for me
- This forms the basis of Step Two: if you can recover, so can I, because the problem you had is the problem I've got