“our lives had become unmanageable.” (ODAT, 11 February)
That implies that they had been manageable but that their
condition changed.
To have the capability to manage one’s life is to have
agency.
If one exercises that agency, and exercises it badly, one
has indeed been managing one’s life: but the management is poor.
The second half of the Step does not say that we had managed
our lives ineffectively.
The original AA Step One presents unmanageability as the
corollary of powerlessness. For the alcoholic, the alcoholism is compelling
them to drink, and the course of the day is thus driven by alcoholism. They are
literally not in charge. They literally have no agency. They literally cannot
manage their lives. Powerlessness is the condition that explains the
unmanageability. Unmanageability has nothing to do with the quality of the
results. If this were the intention, it would have said, ‘Our affairs were
disordered’ or ‘Our circumstances were poor’ or ‘Our lives were damaged
financially and emotionally’. There are a thousand ways of describing actual negative
states of affairs. The ‘unmanageability’ does not do this: it describes the
quality of not being subject to management.
As an Al-Anon, if there is an active alcoholic in my life,
there are features of my life that I simply do not have the agency to manage.
It is like making a cake and having a trickster constantly adding or removing
ingredients, with me powerless to stop to them.
The alcoholic is powerless over their drinking, so they
cannot manage their life.
I am powerless over their drinking, too, so my life is
unavoidably impacted, and there’s not a thing I can do about it.
But that’s not all:
As an Al-Anon, I am driven by impulses to obsess, to attempt
to fix, change, control, and regulate, and, without God’s help, there’s not a
thing I can do about that, either.
The impulses in the untreated Al-Anon are as powerful as the
impulses in the untreated alcoholic.
And therein lies my own Al-Anon unmanageability.