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                         What a Healthy AA Group looks Like

A healthy, thriving, productive, supportive AA group is a beautiful thing. It is made up of an eclectic mix of people having long-middle-and-new lengths of sobriety who stand ready to welcome and help the brand-newcomer by sharing their collective experience in staying sober.

Members of a healthy AA group sponsor and have sponsors; participate in service work for their group and AA as a whole; offer educational programs about AA for themselves and for the public; know the 12 steps and 12 traditions of AA; share when asked to share, chair when asked to chair; and hang out with one another socially outside of meetings.

They also step aside without resentment when it's time for younger members to more fully participate in service positions inside the group. 

Google says there are currently more than 123,000 AA groups around the world, that AA literature has been translated into more than 100 languages, and there are more than two million people in AA recovery today. 

AA depends on each and every one of those members to do his or her fair share, because the work inside AA groups is 100 percent voluntary. 

Newcomers, of course, have to find their feet and are allowed to sit on the sidelines soaking up recovery for a bit, but once they are over their initial fears and confusion they're encouraged to do their share and to participate in 12-step work. Once they do so they become a vital part of AA.

(Note: I wasn't "encouraged" by my all-male first AA group. I was told to do a variety of service jobs in ways that left no escape hatch.) 

Being an active sober member of an active healthy AA group is exhilarating. We can't wait to get to our meetings where we participate fully. In our supportive group's atmosphere we learn by doing how to live a life of "right actions," and from them we soon start to feel good about ourselves.

As Seamus, my dear Irish friend in recovery, once told me: "Learning and teaching are players in the same game. If either one stops, everything becomes heavy and ceases to be fun. Learning is the reward for respecting life and teaching is the fruit of experiencing life."

Healthy AA groups offer a mixture of meeting programs, from personal sharing from one speaker; to topic meetings where steps, traditions, gratitude, service, sponsorship, and other related AA topics are opened for group discussion; "study meetings," where AA's literature is read and hashed over; and general discussion meetings about what's going on in each of our lives and how we're applying our program of recovery to our life situations.

Healthy AA groups offer special workshops, too, to further educate its members - and even the public - about what AA has to offer. Members invite people in the legal, teaching and medical professions to attend their "open" meetings (open to all, not just alcoholics) to learn what AA is all about and what it has to offer.

    (Note: I'd personally like to see a lot more of this done.)

A healthy group doesn't skip over the basics. The AA Preamble, How it Works, the 12 Traditions and very often The Big Book Promises are read aloud at every meeting. A favorite prayer brings  the meeting to a close.

While AA members do network among themselves and often employ one another's legal, artistic, building, plumbing, or other skills outside of meetings, we don't focus on such activities inside 

our meetings. We are not an employment agency. 

Nor are we treatment centers, social service practitioners, religious institutions, or medical advisors.

We are one-time drunks who have escaped the ravages of alcoholism who meet to share our knowledge of AA recovery with one another and to help newcomers find sobriety. 

We - each of us - have all the qualifications necessary to share our own story of suffering and escape from our disease in a manner newcomers can identify with. 

Protecting AA's primary purpose is an enormous responsibility and a healthy AA group recognizes that fact. Its members know there are millions of suffering alcoholics in need of what AA has to offer. Carrying that message to the still-suffering alcoholic remains its priority. 

Are there unhealthy AA groups?

Sure. Fortunately they are fairly uncommon. But even though they usually don't last long, they can do plenty of damage while still in operation. 

These are those groups made up of one, or sometimes a small clique, of "bleeding deacons," old-timers who offer "my way or the highway" advice to newcomers, then talk (and talk, and talk) at length when it's their turn to share, and discount (or don't even know) AA's written traditions. 

My best advice, once you're sure a group is unhealthy for you, is to go find yourself a healthy one - even if that means having to start a group yourself.

Because, as is said in the "Big, Big Book" .... "Where two or three are banded together, I will be there in the midst of them." 

And when our Higher Power has a healthy AA group of people banded together with the single purpose of helping others and themselves, miracles can - and do - happen. 

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