What Are We Telling The Newcomer?

When we tell them they are the most important person in the room? Do we think these people don’t recognize our humanity? What do they see?

Consider one simple thought – they don’t see time, time sober. They begin to hear that but did you understand it in the beginning? Most of these folks sitting in their first few meetings (at least in our area) don’t even understand that we practice abstaining from drinking alcohol much less recognize what we’re about. What they see is a room full of unknown faces with unknown quantity/quality. That’s all.

So we tell them they’re the most important person in the room? Important relative to what? In what manner are they important? How do they understand their importance? Heck, they probably came in believing they were better than us anyway. After all, aren’t we the dregs of the earth and now they’re sitting with us? How does it feel to have the lowest of low tell you your the most important of the lowest of low?

They hear “Steps,” “Sponsor,” “One Day at a Time,” “Don’t Drink and Go To Meetings,” etc. Steps? At your first meeting did you know what the Steps were? Did you care? At your first meeting did you know what a sponsor was? Did you care? At your first meeting did “One Day at a Time” make any sense to you? Did you care? At your first few meetings, when you heard “Don’t drink and go to meetings,” did you wonder how the hell you were not going to drink?

Were you really in a frame of mind that being told you were the most important person in the room made a difference to you? Or were you more PO’d that you might be about to lose the one thing that was always there for you when you wanted your pain to go away?

Did you understand your desperation sitting in your first meeting? Did you have any clue that you had a disease that is permanent, progressive and fatal not to mention the most patient bast*** on the planet? Or were you shaking from withdrawals? Were you wondering how the hell am I going to quit drinking? What are these people talking about? How much do you really remember from that first meeting? That you were told you were the most important person in the room?

And then, months later we tell you that unless you develop humility you won’t stay sober. Geeesh.

Bill W. had some clue about this before the Traditions were even written. In January of 1946 he said;

“In a spiritual sense, anonymity amounts to the renunciation of personal prestige as an instrument of national policy.”

Yes, I realize he brought “national policy” into it and I don’t understand that. I think it is more important that he knew that what was truly important in a society based on anonymity was the renunciation of personal prestige. Perhaps that is why, when they eventually got around to the Traditions they spoke of avoiding allowing prestige to divert us from our primary purpose…

“Nearly everyone of us had wished to do great good, perform great deeds, and embody great ideals. We are all perfectionists who, failing perfection, have gone to the other extreme and settled for the bottle and the blackout.”

Here’s my “NO” vote for prestige and applause. It wasn’t right for Bill Wilson, isn’t right for me and ought not be right for newcomers.