We speak and listen a lot. We go to events where people speak a lot. But what are they saying? Not necessarily a lot.
The culture of speaking in AA often appears to boil down to this:
- Say how nervous you are and how you didn't prepare, because God's about to speak through you
- Recount selected lurid facts and circumstances about one's childhood and drinking, but don't offer a cohesive narrative; don't make points or sense: leave the listener to join the dots
- Comically and scathingly present one's pre-newcomer and newcomer self as foolish, selfish, insincere, unreasonable, recalcitrant, and generally disagreeable
- Skip over the next 30 years and all substantive aspects of the AA programme other than being ordered about by a mean sponsor
- Relate some dramatic, tragic, pathetic, and sentimental stories about death and coincidence
- Say you're now at peace or something, but don't say how you got there
- OR say you're still mad, but you've now God or meetings or your sponsor, so that's OK
- Don't, whatever you do, share conclusions, observations, insights, or, heaven forbid, acquired or borrowed wisdom
- Cry, narrate the crying, and present this as a Jolly Good Sign Of Something
- Present God as the puller of all strings and arranger of all facts, absolving yourself of any responsibility
I am of course caricaturing a little (or even a lot), and there are many great speakers from whom I've learned a great deal, but it has taken a long time to pan that particular gold. The standard podium pitch is indeed very entertaining, at least for a while, and I suspect this is what a lot of speaker meetings, conventions, and conferences are really about: structuring and passing time; entertainment; shock value; a real-life Hallmark channel of rollercoaster emotions and vicarious living. After a while, it becomes dull.
Fireworks don't heat rooms. The fireworks of speakers do not bring about recovery. When you're freezing to death, fireworks are a welcome distraction until one starts to ask whether the ingenuity could be used for something more enduring.
The only real benefit of such speaking would be to (a) convince those who are in doubt that they are 'in the right place' (b) to give such people hope that there is a solution (c) to induce such people to take the Steps.
Now, these are laudable aims, but they are entry-level aims. They're the aims of a Twelfth-Step call or a newcomers' meeting; yet most speaker meetings and speaker events (conventions, conferences, etc.) are not populated chiefly or even noticeably by newcomers or other people who have not yet bought into the programme. In as far as there are newcomers, it is generally those who have already bought in who are showing up. The non-bought-in attendees tend to be at bog standard discussion meetings and newcomer meetings, typically late-afternoon / early-evening drive-time meetings at convenient locations.
In short, almost every podium talk is devised to convert non-AAs to joining AA and taking the Steps, yet the audience consists almost entirely of people who have already joined AA, who are already taking the Steps, who have already taken the Steps, or who have already decided they are not going (re-)take the Steps. It's very doubtful whether such talks achieve anything at all, and therefore whether such speaker meetings, conventions, and conferences achieve anything at all.
Between ten and fifteen years sober, I continued to attend a lot of meetings in AA and Al-Anon, but all of the usable material I could apply in my life to change my beliefs, thinking, and behaviour came not from meetings but from fellowship literature and recordings of speakers at retreat weekends whose purpose was to present the content of the programme. I continued going to meetings to find people to help. At the meetings themselves, there was little or no content.
Fortunately, around here at least, there is a lot more useful content in meetings. But here's what I do to try and make the most of time I am given to share:
- Discuss my drinking etc. only in order to illustrate aspects of Steps One
- Present with examples what attitudes and actions the programme offers
- Describe my experience of applying these
- Describe the results.
When I speak along the above lines, the sharing back often suggests that the listeners find this approach (a) very helpful and (b) very unusual (and sometimes unique).
It should ideally, therefore, stop being unusual and certainly stop being unique. The job is not done until this is what is expected and delivered so routinely its performance is not remarked upon.
Instead of talk about the fact of the programme working, let's talk about how it works.
There is room for drunkalogues and general cheer-leading, but these should be reserved for pitches at treatment centres and meetings where most people are new. Such drunkalogues should be structured around Step One, however; such cheer-leading should be integrated, nonetheless, into the sweep of the Steps and the context of fellowship and service. This way, both potential joiners, newcomers, and others only part-way to release can be equally and adequately served.