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Daily Reflections · December 6

When the Chips Are Down

AA’s first book told drinkers to quit playing God, and not to put dependence on people ahead of God; in 1953 Bill W. set the two side by side, and later owned both.

Today’s reading

The reading for December 6 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 116, in the essay on Step Twelve: three sentences, from Bill W.’s pages on emotional security.

This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.

Read it at aa.org

Themes and asks

  1. Running it, or leaning on it

    Just before the passage, Bill W.’s essay names two ways alcoholics went after emotional security: trying to run the lives of the people around them, or demanding, the way a child does, to be looked after. Both drove people off.

    • Whose life are you trying to run right now, even for their own good?
    • Whom are you leaning on harder than one person can bear?

  2. The healthy kind

    The passage names one kind of dependence it calls healthy, and it isn’t on people. Its last sentence ties that back to both of the habits just before it.

    • Besides a drink, what have you leaned on that gave way when you needed it most?
    • What would depending on God look like today, in one thing you’d actually do?

  3. Not only in a crisis

    The member who wrote the reflection doesn’t stop at the emergencies; the reflection goes on to the good days and the everyday.

    • Do you turn to God mostly when things go wrong? What would it be like to bring the rest of your day to God, too?
    • Whom do you count on to keep you going, and what happens to you when they can’t?

  4. Whom you reach for

    Right after the passage, the essay says drinking had been lonely even with family and friends all around, and that in AA they begin to get along with people who know what it was like. Read beside today’s title, that suggests a test: whom you reach for when things go wrong.

    • The last time the chips were down, whom did you call, and whom didn’t you?
    • Who in AA would you call today if the bottom fell out? Do they know it?

Behind the words

Both halves

Today’s passage comes from Bill W.’s essay on Step Twelve in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, from its long stretch on practicing the principles in all our affairs (December 3 shows where that falls). Earlier in the same stretch, the essay pictures life handing a sober member “a great big lump”: a promotion missed, a job lost, trouble at home or in love, a son made a casualty of war. Can AA’s members meet such things as well as people who never drank often manage, it asks? Then it turns to what Bill calls emotional security.

Today’s title isn’t in the essay, but Bill reached for nearly the same words. As AA Comes of Age printed his talk on unity at AA’s convention in St. Louis in 1955, he told members that AA needed no human authority, because it had two others: God, and John Barleycorn, the old nickname for drink, who threatened to kill anyone who didn’t do God’s will. “So, when all the chips are down, we conform to God’s will or perish.”

Both halves of the trouble the essay goes on to describe had been in AA’s first book, in 1939, chapters apart. “How It Works” likened anyone living on self-will to an actor who “wants to run the whole show,” and drew the lesson: “we had to quit playing God. It didn’t work.” “Working with Others,” on the newcomer who says he can’t stay sober until his material needs are seen to, warned that members don’t stop drinking “so long as we place dependence upon other people ahead of dependence on God.” And Fitz M., a minister’s son from Maryland, told in “Our Southern Friend” how, once sober, he took drinkers in to live with him: “I begin to play God. I feel that I can fix them all.” He fixed none of them, he wrote.

In the Twelve and Twelve, Bill set the two side by side, as two faces of one demand: for emotional security on our own terms. Alcoholics had either tried to dominate the people around them, he wrote, or had insisted, “like infants ourselves,” that those people look after them, and either way people pulled back. Leaning too hard on people fails, he added, because “all people are fallible.” Today’s passage names a dependence that answers both.

Bill later owned both. In the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, in January 1958 (November 6 tells more), he wrote, “My basic flaw had always been dependence,” almost absolute, on people or circumstances, and that he had to cut those faulty dependencies loose, even on AA. In January 1962, in “This Matter of Fear,” he looked back on the first phase of his AA life as one of “a great deal of pride and power-driving,” followed by years when “any number of us commenced playing God all over again.” The foundation he named against fear was faith, in a Creator “all power, justice, and love.”

More on how Bill wrote the Twelve and Twelve: Wit’s End, in Suggestions Only. On the depression he wrote it through: The quarter mile, in Number One Man.

Two ways in, one way out

The stretch of Bill W.’s essay on Step Twelve around today’s passage, in order, in this page’s words. The two old ways come first, side by side. The quotations are the essay’s.

  1. One old way

    Running their lives

    Content while people let us manage them like children; hurt, and blaming them, once they balked or left.

  2. The other

    Being looked after

    Insisting that people look after us, which often drove off the very ones we loved. We were trying to turn everyone into “protective parents.”

  3. Growing

    Give and take

    Partnership with the people around us, giving without asking to be repaid. People were drawn to us, and when they let us down it hurt less.

  4. Today’s passage

    Leaning on God

    The essay’s next step. Read its three sentences at aa.org.

  5. What it brought

    Steadier footing

    For many of us, the essay says, a steadiness that held through other people’s failings and through trouble we hadn’t caused.

  6. Why it mattered

    Not alone

    Drinking had been lonely, even with family around. In AA, the essay says, “we don’t have to be alone any more.”

Threads

Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.

Sources
  • Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essay on Step Twelve (the reading cites page 116).
  • Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001. “How It Works,” “Working with Others” and “Our Southern Friend.”
  • Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Unity: The Second Legacy,” Bill’s talk at St. Louis, 1955.
  • The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety,” January 1958, and “This Matter of Fear,” January 1962.
  • Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 9 (Fitz M. of Maryland, a minister’s son).
  • Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. December 6 · aa.org

Something wrong here? A date, a name, a quotation? Let me know

Daily Reflections is AA’s book of readings for every day of the year, each written by a member about a favorite passage from AA’s literature. A Daily Reprieve gives each day questions to sit with and the story behind its words.

Printed from One Drunk to Another, an independent AA history · onedrunktoanother.org/today/december-6/