Listen, Share and Pray

Today’s two sentences open a paragraph on page 100 of the Big Book, in “Working with Others,” the chapter on Step Twelve, right after December 16’s lines, which close the chapter’s advice about a newcomer whose family has left him. Here his family is still around him. The rest of the paragraph tells the helper what to say to them instead: that the man has been seriously ill, that his faults won’t vanish overnight, and that when they run short of patience they should remember “the blessed fact of his sobriety.” The next paragraph has the helper let the family hear how the troubles in his own home were put right, if they were. In the loan copy, the draft sent out for comment a few months before the book was printed, that story beat any amount of “preaching or criticism”; the book printed in April 1939 dropped the preaching.

At St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Sister Ignatia, the nun who from 1939 helped Dr. Bob S. find beds for alcoholics and from 1944 ran their ward, made a point of trying to bring each patient’s family back together. As she told it in the 1950s, she sent for the wife on the day before her husband was to leave, and often heard that the wife was finished with him. Sister Ignatia talked with her alone and asked her to give the program one more chance. When the wife allowed that perhaps he didn’t want to see her either, Sister Ignatia said she would find out: “It’s up to both of you. I’m not getting into any domestic troubles.” Then she found the husband, who said he was ashamed to talk to her, brought him in, and once the two of them were talking, said she had to go and answer the phone, or some such, and left them.

She kept it up at Rosary Hall, the alcoholic ward she opened at St. Vincent Charity Hospital in Cleveland at the end of 1952, and in January 1955, at her urging, the city’s first Al-Anon family group began to meet. One of its first members, Margaret H., a nurse on the ward, remembered Lois W. warning them at an early meeting that AA members in the area might not see the point of a family group. Sister Ignatia came to its Friday-night meetings. At first, Edna C. told her biographer, Mary C. Darrah, she stuck up for the men, and Darrah writes that the wives felt she blamed them for the drinking. Then one night, as Edna remembered it, a wife lost her temper: “Well, Sister, you didn’t have to live with him.” The remark shook her, Darrah writes, and while she was still learning she turned to Lois for advice on working with the wives. Once she had sat with them a while, Edna said, she came to see their side too.

The families’ own fellowship came to a rule of its own. Before there was an Al-Anon, the wives’ groups had no such rule. One wife whose husband found AA in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1943 sometimes went along on his calls, to talk with the drinker’s wife and keep her out of the way while her husband talked to the man, and Al-Anon’s history notes that groups like hers handed newcomers plenty of advice. Near the end of her memoir, Lois wrote that it was Al-Anon’s policy for members to give “no personal or marital advice,” and to offer instead their own stories, and what working the program had been like for them.

More on her talk with the wife, and the ward at St. Thomas: The man you married, in Your Size in Pajamas. On Rosary Hall and Cleveland’s first family group: Eternity is now, in Your Size in Pajamas. On the family groups before Al-Anon: Before the name, in A Family Disease.