Things Change

We change all that we touch. When we are trying to create a better world, that is a good thing; when we are trying to duplicate what was successful in the past, it is not so good. The Steps are messages and messages change in four ways.

First, the message changes in the retelling. Remember the old childhood game of “whispers”? It’s a game in which one person whispers a message to another, which is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from the one offered by the first. An example of this is “Life must be lived as play” (a common paraphrase of a quote from Plato) ended up as “He bites snails”.

Second, the message changes in our memory. Experiments conducted at Stanford and other universities show that our understanding and recall of even simple stories is severely diminished over time. The experiments showed that even though intelligent, motivated college students had committed simple stories to memory, their retelling became more and more distorted over the ensuing months and years.

Third, meanings of the words themselves change. Sometimes that change is subtle: in the 1930’s, a “suggestion” was a “proposal”, a “declaration of a plan”. Nowadays, “suggest” means more like to “imply as a possibility”. Sometimes the change is dramatic: in the 1930’s, “brainstorm” was a feverish sickness of the brain. Today, it means something entirely different.

Finally, the message itself may not be properly understood. An example of this is why they created Appendix II ­ Spiritual Experience, in the Big Book. In 1941, when producing the 2nd printing, the authors changed one word in the Steps – from “spiritual experience” to “spiritual awakening” in Step 12. They were so concerned about the implications of making even such a minor change that they felt it necessary to write a two­page essay explaining their reasons for the change.

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The terms “spiritual experience” and “spiritual awakening” are used many times in this book which, upon careful reading, [emphasis added] shows that the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery from alcoholism has manifested itself among us in many different forms.

Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the impression [emphasis added] that these personality changes, or religious experiences, must be in the nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals. Happily for everyone, this conclusion is erroneous. [emphasis added].

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So what they are saying is that they felt they had to change the word because people were coming to erroneous conclusions reached by mistaken impressions from careless reading.

The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous were not meant to be interpreted or changed in any way. They were meant to be a straightforward, careful delineation of a simple program that worked for the first 100 members of Alcoholics Anonymous. The Steps were experiential, not theoretical.

The original members were not quite sure WHY they worked; they just knew from experience that they DID work. Thus, it was important that they explain PRECISELY what they did. To that end, they contemplated, discussed and argued over the exact wording until they had something they could all agree upon. What they hammered out was the 200 words that describe the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. EXACTLY two hundred words. I don’t think that was happenstance. I think that, over the years, we have accepted the opinions of too many so­called “experts” (both in and out of the Fellowship) and have lost our grasp of what the original members really meant.