Intro: Current OHMA student Lily Doron tries to understand how Alcoholics Anonymous, and 12-Step programs in general, train participants to reframe their life narratives in ways that promote healing, foster connection, and, hopefully, keep people sober. She brings these questions from OHMA’s workshop with Emma Courtland to an interview with her father, an alcoholic who is currently 12 years sober.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
This is the Serenity Prayer, said at least once, usually twice, during each Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting. According to my father, who has been in AA for 12 years, these words are central to recovery.
Since it is impossible to change one’s past, this mantra says one must be wise enough to accept it. The past, no matter how difficult or painful, is a part of one’s life. But to move beyond it, one must live in the present. According to AA teaching, accepting one’s past requires forgiveness – of others and of oneself – and an aim towards making amends and “doing the next right thing” for the future.
The Serenity Prayer, to my father, “almost says the past is irrelevant.” Yet storytelling – and sharing personal experiences – plays a prominent role in AA and the 12-Step process, from recruitment to typical daily meetings to Speaker Meetings. In many respects, storytelling is AA’s central tool for building community and stopping active addictions.
I wanted to explore this seeming contradiction. How can the past be irrelevant if it is so present in every meeting? Through a case study of my father’s journey in AA, I hoped to better understand how 12-Step programs (AA, Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, etc.) influence the way participants frame and discern meaning from the events of their life story.
Emma Courtland’s talk, Finding Fathers: A Cautionary Tale for Oral Historians, spurred my curiosity in this theme. Through her thesis project, Emma sought to understand how people who grew up without fathers use their imagination in the construction of their life-story narratives. At the end of her talk, she mentioned that all four of her narrators had participated in support groups or 12-Step programs, and wondered how such formal storytelling training might have impacted the flexibility and imagination of their oral histories. She didn’t say how this training happens or detail the impacts it has, as these questions were outside the scope of her project, but I wanted to continue this exploration where Emma left off.
So I called my dad, who was willing to share his personal narrative and talk about the prevalence of storytelling in AA. To start, we both re-listened to a life-story interview I conducted with him three years ago, in November 2016. We then analyzed how it fit in with AA’s storytelling framework, even if he was not conscious of it at the time.
In AA meetings and 12-Step practice participants continuously discern meaning from the storytelling process. Through this process, they deliberately reframe their past. In typical meetings, participants will read a story from AA’s ‘bible,’ The Big Book. Like the Bible, The Big Book teaches through storytelling. After a story is read at a meeting, individuals will have four to five minutes to tell a story from their own life that relates to the reading.
For example, my dad told me about a story in The Big Book called “Stars Don’t Fall.” In it, a wealthy woman writes, “My alcoholic problem began long before I drank… I was out of step with my life, with my family, with people in general…” In my dad’s 2016 interview, he, too, makes this feeling of difference central to his story. In that interview, my dad said he was different in that “[he] was the only boy” in his family of sisters, and he was artistic, intellectual, and liked to read while his parents did not go to college. He has this sense of disconnection in common with the woman from The Big Book, so if she could reframe her negative judgments of her parents to say, “they did the best they knew how as far as I was concerned,” then he could (and did) too.
This process is healing because if someone has gone through similar experiences as the narrator of the story, and the narrator has reached sobriety and serenity, the individual gains hope that they can get better too.
This structured exercise of relating personal stories to similar themes from The Big Book transparently teaches participants to reframe their narratives in specific ways. My dad explains, AA creates “buckets, narrative buckets, that people put their experience in and it resonates enough so they adopt it.”
For example, in our 2019 conversation, my dad noticed he could map the story he presented in the 2016 interview onto the narrative of the “geographic cure,” as AA calls it. People who are dissatisfied in one place think things will be better in another town or state.
Lily: When and why did you move away and where did you go?
Dad: Well the first step was college. But once I graduated from college, I had not a clue how to earn a living. I mean I was, another way I was different is that I was an electrician’s helper in the summers, and my allergies would make me sick every summer. But construction is a very rough, you know people, people are pretty rough and I didn’t, I didn’t fit in there either. So the first step was going to college and then once I graduated college with an English major in Boise, Idaho, I got out and, you know, my friends, my best friend Mark and Louden, best friends, they moved away and I was in Boise, which is the biggest city in Idaho, but I just felt like there was something more, I wanted to experience more, I felt like there was a world out there that I wanted to experience, I wanted to experience a big city. And since one of my best friends was going to school in Boston, I moved from a state that had 600,000 people in the entire state to a city that had 6 times the number of people in a very confined area.
My father says he “moved out of Idaho to Boston to down here [Durham, NC], but unfortunately myself followed.” Imagining his life’s journey as an attempt at a geographic cure means he can relate to other narratives that feature similar actions. And his story can resonate with others, too.
Dad: One of the things people talk about is a relocation cure. So that there’re people who’re dissatisfied in one place, whether it’s their hometown or where they move or where they work, and they think things will be better in the next town. And so this happens a lot. But what they also say is, and people will say this, one person will say this, like I’ll say, “Oh I moved, you know, out of Idaho and then to Boston and down here, and unfortunately myself followed.” Meaning that the problem is myself. But relocation or moving to escape your past is something that a lot of people respond to.
Through repeated narratives, like the geographic cure, AA builds a set of frames within which people mold their stories and find meaning. To me, the most powerful is the overarching frame of the Serenity Prayer itself. According to my father, the Serenity Prayer tries to erase the pain and shame of the past, so one can better live in the present. Thus, even if one cannot rewrite the events of the past, AA aims to change the emotions tied to them. This, in turn, impacts the meaning-making process as one imagines – and re-imagines – their own narrative.
For example, in our 2016 interview, my father only brought up alcoholism one time, in passing, at the very beginning when I asked him to tell me about his childhood. In our recent conversation, I pointed this out to him. He was surprised; he could not believe it. Those themes are so central to his life story, yet they were barely mentioned. When I asked him about this discrepancy, he told me, it’s “so much part of my story… That’s really interesting. Maybe I’ve just become more accepting and have more forgiveness now. That’s really interesting.”
My father told me there are two types of stories in AA: those for learning – such as those from The Big Book – and those for re-defining one’s narrative, “for sweeping away the destructive messages of the past. You get rid of the old, and have new stories to take their place.” This is AA’s narrative reframing and meaning-making pedagogy in action.
But there were also parts of the 2016 interview that were imbued with AA language and themes, though my father didn’t realize it at the time.
Dad: And I think as you get older, you, you want to, especially if you had a difficult childhood, you want to fill that again. I know talk about holes a lot, but you want to fill in those holes, you want to erase the, or not erase, but replace some of the pain of growing up in a difficult family, in a town that you weren’t comfortable in, you know that kind of discomfort is always with you. I mean it gets less and less important but it’s still there.
A key part of our 2016 interview was my father’s discussion of holes, of a lingering emptiness inside that has not been filled. At the time, he said, “I think as you get older you want to, especially if you’ve had a difficult childhood, you want to fill [the holes] again, … replace some of the pain of growing up in a difficult family, in a town that you weren’t comfortable in, you know that kind of discomfort is always with you, I mean it gets less and less important but it’s still there.”
In our recent conversation, my dad told me his prior emphasis on holes stood out when he listened back to the 2016 recording. He said he had heard that phrase occasionally back then at AA, but three years ago he thought it was something only a few people said. Now he understands how widespread the image is in AA discourse. He reflects that “it’s kind of the basic tenet of AA and everybody says it. It’s almost turned into a cliché and lost its meaning because it’s routine that people mention [holes] in their story.” This is a clear example of how the language and ideas used in AA can insert themselves seamlessly into participants’ narratives.
This is one example of unconscious connections between AA discussions and my father’s story that he could identify years later. But was anything else my dad mentioned in the 2016 interview impacted by AA that he could not yet explicitly identify? That he may never realize? Is there a way to pinpoint these places to gain a stronger understanding of how deeply AA teaching and influence permeates my father’s current understanding of self?
I am in awe of the immense power of storytelling in AA to create personal change and provide social support for individuals struggling with addiction. But I am left with lingering questions outside the scope of this singular exercise with my father. Is this method used in groups other than 12-Step programs? What is the strength of building connections and community through storytelling, as opposed to other means? How can it be utilized in other contexts? How can this method contribute to societal and personal healing and growth? Is there a downside to telling one’s life story within pre-described frames? What happens when one’s experiences cannot be contained in the pre-determined “narrative buckets”?
Lily Doron is a student in Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts program. From Durham, North Carolina, she graduated from Duke University in 2017 with a self-designed major entitled, “Rights and Representations: Ethics, Human Rights, and Documentary Narratives.” She is interested in how oral history can be used for community-building and activism.
This post represents the opinion of the author, and not of OHMA.