We Have Recovered

by Danny S.

Go ahead. Believe in the Disease Model. Believe in recoverING and never completing the solution. Even extoll your beliefs aloud. But please don’t call it AA. Even our American right to freedom of speech does not extend to shouting, “Fire” in a crowded theater when it could spell death to the innocent. People die when we misspeak. Especially in this life or death business of recovery from alcoholism. Use of the word recovered in the Big Book is probably just and incidental, linguistic gaffe. Pay no attention to it. It cannot be true. No one ever recovers from alcoholism. Right?…Yeah…right.

Did the co-authors actually mean it when they wrote that they had “recovered”? Or is what they wrote a mere literary flummox; an editing blunder and accidental byproduct of the poor writing abilities of a group of uneducated, hapless fools in a depressed Midwestern city, still reeling from their recent rehabilitation from the binds of self-will?

A lot of people desperately want to believe so. They will fight tooth and nail for the privilege of verbally revising the principles in the Big Book, “Alcoholics Anonymous” in order to hold on to the idea, a doctrine manufactured and imbued into the “professional” recovery field and “the rooms” of recovery by some invested folks whose livelihoods depend on YOU believing that alcoholics NEVER recover from alcoholism; that the use of the word Recovered in AA is some sort of semantic aberration – to be sloughed off and ignored.

Well let’s see. How many times did the supposedly illiterate Akronite newcomers commit this editorial oversight? 27 times. Check it out in your Big Book. WOW. That is some huge load of mistakenness. You’d think someone would had caught it – if not one of the “One Hundred” co-authors then at least one of the scores of clergy, priests, doctors, professionals, family and friends and committees who were asked to review the manuscript prior to its publication.

So did the co-authors of “Alcoholics Anonymous” ever convey the “recovering” concept? Yes,… once in The Family Afterward. That’s it. That’s all for recoverING. This is what you would call a ‘preponderance of evidence’. Wouldn’t you say? Do you kind of get the feeling that they might have thought they had recovered and that others could recover too?

Imagine pining one’s life on a single oddball usage of a single word like recovering, when the overwhelming preponderance points at something different?

Back in the 30′s “Recover” meant to get back the possession of; get or find again; to regain as in one’s health or property. – (The Winston Simplified Dictionary – 1938) We are convinced that a spiritual mode of living is a most powerful health restorative. (Big Book 133:2) A restorative is something having the power to restore or to bring back to a former condition, especially something used to bring back health or to restore to consciousness. This too, according to the same usage of the era.

FINAL SCORE: Recovered 27 vs. Recovering  1

It’s a landslide. Go with the real winners. Go with the co-founders. Go with the Recovered. And to those who do not respect the Big Book coauthors experience; nor the experience of many of us today who know that we have recovered …those who claim they will never recover from alcoholism – that their health with never be restored …believe them.

Return their lack of respect for our experience with unwavering respect for their experience, because with in-as-far-as their own recovery they are probably correct. They probably never will recover from alcoholism.

And maybe they don’t need to either.