A guest speaker’s play in three acts, a daily reader sold out by Christmas, and the Three Cs: words Al-Anon’s families still use, and where they came from.
“Al-Anon today is the only readily available source of therapeutic help for the spouse…”
At lunch on the Thursday of Al-Anon’s World Service Conference in April 1968, the guest speaker wasn’t a member. Rev. Joseph L. Kellermann ran the Charlotte Council on Alcoholism, in North Carolina. Families, he told the delegates, needed to hear about Al-Anon much sooner.
It was Al-Anon’s eighth World Service Conference, the yearly meeting of delegates from across the United States and Canada: five days and nights of meetings in New York, on the theme of Responsibility. At the end of 1967 the office had counted 3,343 Al-Anon groups and 465 Alateen groups.
Then, as Al-Anon’s own history tells it, he compared alcoholism and what it does to a family to a play in three acts. That October, at a workshop of the Connecticut groups in Milford, he gave the talk a title: “A Merry-Go-Round Named Denial.”
In the first act the drinker is the star. He drinks his way into a crisis, and everyone else reacts to what he does. Watch it on television with the sound turned off, Kellermann said, and you would see what was really going on.
In the second act he does nothing at all, while three others clean up after him. The Enabler, often a friend or a relative, rescues him from each crisis. The Victim, his boss or someone else at work, covers for him on the job.
The third is the person he lives with, usually his wife or his mother. Kellermann called her the Provoker, and also the Adjuster, forever adjusting to the trouble the drinking makes. She is “the key person in the play.”
She holds the family together through every drinking episode, and feeds her hurt and bitterness back into the marriage. He expects his own failures to be forgiven, and expects her never to fail him.
“She must be at home when he arrives, if he arrives.”
In the third act he denies it all: that he has a problem, that anyone helped him, that he ever caused his family any trouble. Then he drinks again, and the play goes back to the first act without the curtain ever closing.
Only the second act can change, Kellermann said. It is the one act in which people other than the drinker can start a recovery, by learning to play their parts in an entirely new way.
Changing her part is hardest for the wife, the pamphlet says, because she will find herself standing alone. Friends, relatives and business associates treat her like an actor walking out of a play with no understudy to take her place.
Some wives, it says, find help from a counselor who knows about alcoholism, or in group meetings at a clinic. Others find it in Al-Anon.
In April 1969 the Conference approved the talk as Conference Approved Literature, with Kellermann’s permission. Al-Anon’s members write its literature, and a piece by an outsider was, its history says, “a rare example.” It became one of Al-Anon’s most popular pamphlets.
That year’s summary said the talk would be edited to reflect Al-Anon’s ideas more specifically. The pamphlet’s own preface, in later printings, says the text is reprinted as he presented it.
Between the talk and the vote, on the last day of September 1968, the office received the first copies of One Day at a Time in Al-Anon, the fellowship’s first daily reader. Volunteers packed the backlog of advance orders, and the first printing was sold out by the middle of December.
Lois W. and Alice B., who chaired the Literature Committee, both thought of the book as a gift from a Higher Power. In the copy she inscribed for Alice, Lois thanked “the transcriber, for we all know who the Author of this book is.” “How right she was!” Alice said.
Forty years later a member from Florida remembered what it had meant to him: “One Day at a Time in Al-Anon showed me that I was not alone.”
It’s April 1968, in New York. Al-Anon’s World Service Conference stops for lunch, and the guest speaker isn’t a member. He’s a clergyman who runs a council on alcoholism in North Carolina, the Reverend Joseph Kellermann. Families, he tells the delegates, need to hear about Al-Anon much sooner. Then he describes what alcoholism does to a family as a play in three acts.
Later that year he gives the talk a new name: a merry-go-round named denial. The next spring, the delegates vote to make it an Al-Anon pamphlet, one of the very few they didn’t write themselves.
In between, Al-Anon’s first daily reader comes off the press, and the first printing is gone by Christmas. Forty years later, one member remembered what it did for him. It showed him he was not alone.
In the record
Four pieces of Al-Anon’s language from these years, in the order they appeared, and who first put each one into words.
From Many Voices, One Journey, Al-Anon’s history of itself (2011), and the summaries of its 1968 and 1969 World Service Conferences. Quotations are short excerpts.
1968
A guest
At a luncheon during the Conference in April, Rev. Joseph L. Kellermann, of the Charlotte Council on Alcoholism, compares alcoholism and its effects on a family to a play.
October 5, at the Connecticut groups’ workshop in Milford: a title, “A Merry-Go-Round Named Denial.”
1968 Conference Summary; Many Voices, One Journey, chapter 5; the pamphlet’s preface
1968
A committee
Alice B. and six delegates on the Literature Committee spend more than two years reading and editing Al-Anon’s first daily reader. Every page ends with a quotation from outside literature, and each one means letters to its writer or publisher about copyright.
September 30: the first copies arrive. By the end of the year, 16,732 have gone out.
1969 Conference Summary; Many Voices, One Journey, chapter 5
1969
The Conference
The delegates approve Kellermann’s talk as Conference Approved Literature. Members write Al-Anon’s literature; a piece by someone outside it is a rare exception.
It becomes one of Al-Anon’s most popular pamphlets.
1969 Conference Summary; Many Voices, One Journey, chapter 5; the pamphlet’s preface
1972
An editor
Writing on Step One in Al-Anon’s monthly Forum, its editor, Margaret D., says many members have blamed themselves for the drinking. A saying helps: “I did not cause it. I cannot control it. I cannot cure it.”
1981: the Literature Committee takes up a suggestion to put the Three Cs in Conference Approved Literature.
Many Voices, One Journey, chapters 6 and 8
Whose words
Al-Anon writes nearly all its own literature, by committee and by vote. Its best-known pamphlet of those years began as a guest’s talk, and the Three Cs as something members were already saying.
For a closer look
Two editions of the play, what one member’s copy of the daily reader saw him through, and the slogans it added.
Any alcoholic, man or woman, could play the lead, the pamphlet says; it chose a man. The Enabler is occasionally a woman, and sometimes a clergyman, doctor, lawyer or social worker with little training in alcoholism, who handles the crisis the way a friend would and so keeps the merry-go-round turning.
Hazelden Publishing, part of the Minnesota treatment center, sells its own revised and expanded edition, with the same three roles and a section on drinking among teenagers and older people. Al-Anon’s 1969 summary also names Kellermann as the author of A Guide for the Family of the Alcoholic.
Each day’s page has a reading, a few lines headed “Today’s Reminder,” and a quotation to close. Finding the quotations, and clearing them with their writers and publishers, meant “a heavy load of correspondence” for the Literature Committee, Alice B. reported.
The member from Florida remembered more. Back then it was the only daily reader there was, and he read it hungrily. The he and she in its pages irritated him, but the pain they described had no gender, and its suggestions might work even for a man. It saw him through a divorce, a new marriage and three grandchildren, and after 37 years, he wrote, it still spoke to him.
The first edition had no index. One member still keeps, in the back of a well-worn copy, the index a friend wrote out on lined notebook paper. Today’s printing has one, and its copyright page lists the years 1968, 1972, 2000 and 2022.
Al-Anon’s first book, by then titled Living with an Alcoholic, already discussed slogans. One Day at a Time in Al-Anon added four: “Keep It Simple,” “Listen and Learn,” “One Day at a Time” and “Think.”
Al-Anon’s history says its slogans grew out of the way members talked, and spread as the fellowship did. (Legacy, in Keep Coming Back, tells where AA’s own slogans first turn up in print.)