Is the purpose of a meeting to ‘get current’?

Sometimes it is asserted that meetings that focus on the Twelve Steps, God, sponsorship, etc., are dull and are missing the point of Alcoholics Anonymous. The view is taken that the main purpose of sharing is to ‘get current’, in other words to explain to the assembled company of friends, strangers, and perfect acquaintances the experiences one has had in the past week, one’s feelings about these experiences, and one’s thoughts on all of this. I do believe that there is an inherent value in talking to other members of AA daily as part of one’s daily review process: what went badly, what went well, and what needs to be done differently. But the chief benefit from this lies not just in confession per se but in confessing to a person to whom we have given spiritual licence to respond with ideas, feedback, and often an adjustment of perspective. The sharing scenario in meetings prevents all of this, because of the lack of feedback and in fact the prohibition on the provision of feedback, which is referred to as ‘crosstalk’. Sometimes people say that meetings where people ‘get current’ all too much like group therapy. Sadly, the problem is that they are not enough like group therapy, because group therapy, at least in some of its forms, offers the opportunity to challenge. In AA there isn’t. Therefore, one of the drawbacks with ‘getting current’ is that one is simply reinforcing one’s current beliefs, thinking, perceptions, and interpretation, without any option for any of that to be challenged, questioned, or adjusted through dialogue. Secondly, if the meeting is taken up with everyone ‘getting current’, there is no space for the actual business of AA, which is the adequate presentation of the problem of alcoholism and the solution the AA offers. If this is not done in meetings, where, one might ask rhetorically, could this be achieved? Obviously, the message can be carried one-to-one, and successfully so, but when someone presents the problem and solution in a meeting of fifty people, there is the opportunity for up to fifty simultaneous message-carrying events. If the sharing consists in ‘getting current’, there is a low-level benefit of realising that other people are suffering as much as one oneself is, and this may certainly relieve feelings of guilt and separation, but this falls far short of doing something about the problem. Of course, a great way to carry the message is to use one’s recent experiences as worked examples to illustrate the programme, but in this case such sharing serves a higher purpose. This, hopefully, makes clear the difference between using sharing time for one’s own personal ends, and using one’s own life as the raw material for achieving a common goal.