Inside Alcoholics Anonymous: Tea and humour keep me going back

It is very reassuring to know that there is somewhere to go over the festive season if it all gets too much. File picture

There are two things you will nearly always find in an AA room – tea and a sense of humour. They kept me coming back in the early days when the last thing I wanted to say was my name followed by the words, “I am an alcoholic”.

There is something visceral about saying those words out loud, which is where the tea and the humour come in. Tea makes everything that little bit easier, while humour has a welcome habit of muscling in on even the darkest situations.

That’s a global phenomenon too, just as Alcoholics Anonymous is. I remember being struck by that on a holiday to Rome when I went to an English-speaking meeting and found it just like one at home. The only difference was everyone introduced themselves at the start. 

An American man at the end of my row began: “My name is Jack, and I am an alcoholic.”  Next along, a woman said: “My name is a Jill, I am an alcoholic."

There was a brief pause before the basement hall erupted into laughter as we remembered the old rhyme about Jack and Jill going up the hill to fetch a pail of water. “Jack fell down and broke his crown,” someone recited, and then we all came tumbling after – with our own introductions and later, an honest sharing of our experience, our strength and our hope.

That is the essence of what happens in an AA room. Members are asked to share what it was like when they were drinking, what happened to make them stop and what life is like now.

Because members are anonymous and the meetings take place behind closed doors, there’s an air of mystery about the whole thing. Some people think AA is a kind of a cult and I can see why. 

I thought that at first too, but then I realised that there are no leaders, no rules (only suggestions) and no money changes hands. You are asked for a contribution to pay for rental of the room and the all-important tea, but that’s it.

I have to say that I hated it in the early days. I hated the little slogans written on cards and put on the top table – ‘This Too Shall Pass’; ‘Easy Does It’ and the famous ‘One Day at a Time’. I didn’t have a better idea, though. I couldn’t stop drinking and I knew that people who went to AA could, and did.

They had something else too. Serenity. I saw it on some of the faces in the rooms and I wanted to know how they got their “washing-machine heads” to quiet down after they stopped drinking. That was a phrase I heard somebody use at a meeting and it struck a chord.

In fact, there was much that hit home. I had read lots of articles about hangovers and how to get rid of them, but none of them touched on the nameless fear, the remorse and the inability to look yourself in the mirror after a bad session.

God

They spoke about all of that in AA and, more importantly, how they got through it. They also spoke of God. When I first heard the word, I remember pushing my plastic chair back towards the bare-plaster wall of a community hall and thinking that this was a step too far.

As most people know, there are 12 steps in Alcoholics Anonymous. They are designed to act as a map to help you face your addiction, deal with the wreckage it has left in its wake, make amends and then go on to help others with similar problems.

The word ‘God’ appears in four of those steps and members, from the start, will tell you that it’s a spiritual programme. That can be very off-putting but, as I’ve found, AA is a very broad church. While step three suggests that “you turn your will and your life over to the care of God”, it adds the all-important rider that it can be a god, or higher power, of your own understanding.

For me, G.O.D. has come to stand for Group of Drunks, or the people who gather in church halls and empty schoolrooms at night with the single aim of trying to stay sober. That is a very powerful thing. When people, of all ages and from all walks of life, come together and express their united desire to stop drinking, something like grace enters the room.

I’m an Alcoholic: Inside Recovery

That is how it feels to me anyway and I’m not alone. It was so uplifting to see other people share their experience during the recent BBC2 documentary I’m an Alcoholic: Inside Recovery. For the first time, thanks to digital technology which altered people’s faces, the channel was able to show what happens inside an AA room while keeping the anonymity rule.

The programme was filmed to mark the 75th anniversary of AA in the UK. It began in Ireland a year earlier, in 1946, following the guidelines set by the first fellowship set up in the United States in the 1930s. 

Each meeting lasts an hour. It is opened by a secretary and then a chairperson speaks for about 15 minutes, telling their story, before opening the meeting to anyone who wants to share. Everybody is welcome. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.

Reassuring

But it’s not for everyone. It’s not easy either. If you are an alcoholic and you want to stop drinking, you’ll have to be prepared to look at yourself. I found that very difficult, but also very reassuring to hear others talk of the guilt, shame and remorse they had kept hidden for years.

It is also very reassuring to know that there is somewhere to go over the festive season if it all gets too much. Go online and you’ll find an AA meeting somewhere. If you feel the need to go along, rest assured that the door will be open and the lights will be on. You’re almost guaranteed to find tea and humour there too.