In principle, the Steps in one's home fellowship cover all problems (defects in belief, thinking, and behaviour) and provide a solution: admission, surrender, inventory, confession, amends, God-reliance, and service.
Sometimes, people experience a problem for which another fellowship exists and assume firstly they must go to that other fellowship and secondly that they're missing out if they don't. Whilst the other fellowships were founded chiefly to grant access to the Twelve Steps to people who weren't alcoholics, they can also be used by members of AA etc. to accelerate problem-solving in other areas.
However, there can be a few problems with this:
- We don't have unlimited time: doubling up on fellowships takes time away from the first fellowship and from all of the other legitimate activities of life; the decision is not without a cost
- Sometimes joining another fellowship can seem an attractive alternative to actually using the existing programme to implement real change today
- Visiting or joining multiple fellowships and having multiple sponsors or guides can produce confusion because of differences in approach
- The approach can lead to 'problematising' oneself: seeing oneself as an ever-increasing basket of problems requiring endless elaborate and divergent systems to manage these problems
- The approach can also lead to compartmentalisation, with God falling through the cracks: rather than surrendering each moment to God, one remains in charge, applying each fellowship's sticking plasters to whichever part hurts: the fact of a single underlying problem, self-reliance, can be obscured
- Dispersing efforts across multiple programmes and not doing anything of them fully
- Spending so much time working on oneself with endless sets of steps and workbooks that one never gets round to actually letting go, sponsoring others (sponsoring = pressing the pilot eject button in the plummeting one-person jet of self), and losing oneself in service
The result, paradoxically, can be to fail to solve any problem adequately and to come to with many years of sobriety, befogged, distressed, confused, and still largely unresolved. I speak from experience here!
However, and it's a big 'however', there are legitimate reasons for engaging with more than one fellowship. A helpful approach is to tackle problems by escalating through the following stages, to ensure that one does get the help one needs without using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
The following is a general scheme that will apply to most situations. There are surely exceptions, and every situation is different and requires discussion with a sponsor. Your sponsor's advice always takes precedence.
Stage One: Grow where you're planted
Use all available tools in the current fellowship and programme to solve the problem. Until the first nine Steps are completed, and one is maxing out in Steps Ten, Eleven, and Twelve, one simply does not know whether the existing programme will work. It's a package deal, and only the package deal solves the problem. Half measure avail us nothing.
If, over time, that does not work, move to Stage Two.
Stage Two: Visit and read
Visit some meetings of the fellowship. Get some numbers. Read some literature. This can be enough for many people to halt the process, sensitise them to the nature of the character defects, and identify practical tools to solve the problem. This material can then be folded back into the original programme, to enrich it.
If, over time, that does not work, move to Stage Three.
Stage Three: Three-Step
Try taking the first three Steps in the fellowship in question with a good Big Book sponsor in that fellowship, so the approach is consistent. Many people find that this is sufficient to surrender that area in Steps Six and Seven and start to experience God-driven change.
If, over time, that does not work, move to Stage Four.
Stage Four: Sign up for the package deal
Welcome to your second fellowship. You've now doubled up, and are doubly and equally committed to both fellowships!
The one exception:
Sometimes, there is not just a problem in an area but an active addiction that is killing you, and killing you quick. I've known a lot of people who, unless they joined OA, SA, SAA, Al-Anon, etc, at the same time as joining AA or soon thereafter, could not have stayed sober in AA, because they required the full package deal in multiple fellowships to halt the addictive processes taking place.
Sometimes, people go on to remain fully fledged members of two, three, or four fellowships. Sometimes, they retract with their learnings to a single fellowship but continue to dip.
But, as with all important matters: advice, experience, or ideas can only get you some of the way. The real answer lies in self-honesty, discussion with friends and sponsors, and consultation of the Higher Power.