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Thank you very much. Good evening, everybody. My name's Christian. I'm a very, very grateful recovered alcoholic. And by a power greater than myself, which I choose to call God today, through the 12-step program of recovery, good sponsorship, and clear-cut directions from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, I haven't found it necessary to take a drink, drug, or mind-altering substance today.

Are you sure you didn't lie to everybody, Dave? Usually when I mention the word traditions, everybody just gets their coat and heads for the door. Are you sure he hasn't lied to you lot and told you it's something else going on here tonight? There seems to be a lot of you. That's fantastic. It just means that we're all on the same page, and that's a wonderful thing.

So yes, we are going to talk about the traditions tonight. And first of all, I'm going to qualify myself. When I drank, I had little or no control over how much I drank. When I tried to stop, I found that I couldn't. In fact, when I got here, I was an actual professional stopper. I was so good at it, I stopped three times in one day once. That's how good I was.

At 9 in the morning, I drank a quarter of a bottle of vodka. I said, "This has got to stop. I'm not doing this no more." And at 4 that afternoon, I drank another quarter bottle of vodka and said, "This has got to stop. I'm not doing that no more." And at last 10 that night, I drunk another quarter of vodka, and I went into absolute paralysis with my head at the table. I said, "I got to stop doing this." So that's how good I am at it.

I like to keep things light because that's the way that I learn. We're not a glum lot, so I don't believe in sitting here being all too serious and trying to lecture you in any way. I'm not going to be using any big words tonight, and that's not because I don't want to confuse you. It's just because I don't know any.

In the spirit of learning light and in the spirit of keeping it interactive, what I'd like you to do is look over to somebody who you haven't seen for a while or you don't know, and I'd like you to get up and introduce yourself to them and ask them how they are.

Well done, everybody. You just took part in tradition one. You went over, you asked your fellows about their common welfare, and we all did that in unity. So let's go to tradition two. It's that simple. No, it's not. I'm joking. That is what tradition one is about. It's our common welfare coming first. It's about us asking, how are you? What's happening for you? What's happening with the group?

The steps are my individual personal recovery. They're our personal recovery. The traditions are the group's recovery. And the concepts is the fellowship's recovery.

For me, basically, the steps help me live with me. The traditions help me live with you. Or as one old-timer put it, the steps are there to stop me committing suicide. The traditions are there to stop me committing homicide. After you've been around a while, you will understand that. Tell you, you really will.

Tradition one: A common welfare comes first. Bill Wilson knew that the common welfare of any group, any country, any population has to come first. I mean, if you look at something like an army, what they will do is they will sacrifice a regiment in order to win a battle, and sometimes they'll sacrifice winning a battle to win the war. A country will sometimes sacrifice an army in order to save the population. So our individual welfare comes second—a close second. The common welfare of all of us has to come first. And the reason it comes first is because without a group, I am not going to get recovery. The common welfare of the group has to come first.

So I'll ask you a question because this is an interactive workshop we're doing. Do we have the right to throw somebody out of a meeting if they're causing problems?

Yeah, I think it's important for secretaries, if there are secretaries in here, to know that we absolutely have the right to ask somebody to leave. And if they don't leave, then we ask the police to come and get them, because the common welfare of the group must come first.

As we go through the traditions, I'm going to talk about the Oxford group and I'm going to talk about the Washingtonians. The Washingtonians was in 1848, and it was started by six men in Clancy's Bar in Baltimore. They got together and decided not to drink. Within four years of them forming, they had over a million members, and they grew at 10 times the rate of AA. Four years later, they were gone off the face of the planet.

As we go through the traditions, I'm going to go back and forth to the Washingtonians to explain why we have the traditions that we have. It was the same with the Oxford group. By 1940, the Oxford group had gone. We learned a lot of our steps, and you'll see that from the tenets that the Oxford group had.

So I wonder past you that I just found out recently—I didn't know it. It blew me away. The Washingtonians in 1848 had six steps. These were their six steps:

One, we must recognize that alcohol is our problem and it's destroyed our lives.
Two, we must seek help from God.
Three, we must serve God.
Four, we must take a moral inventory of ourselves.
Five, we make restitution.
And I love this, right? Number six, we have to go and recruit a new member every week. I mean, is that Step 12 or what?

In 1848, they had that, and it was gone within four years. So the common welfare must come first, and that depends upon our unity. You know, we go to meetings. In my experience, he's saying take your time doing steps. She's saying get a sponsor when you're ready in two years time. Somebody else is doing a step a year. Somebody else is saying don't worry about the Big Book. You can read that when you get well.

No unity, you know? And I think you're very lucky here because I've been here before, and you're all on the same page. You don't use the same book. You're on the same page. And I think it's absolutely paramount to keeping a group strong.

And I want to read something to you from Bill Wilson. This is what he said: "Unless each AA member follows to the best of their ability the suggested 12 steps of recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant. Drunkenness and disintegration are not penalties inflicted by people in authority. They are the results of personal disobedience to spiritual principles. We must obey certain principles or we die. And the same stern threat applies to the group itself. Unless there is an approximate conformity to AA traditions, the groups too can deteriorate and die. So we of AA do obey spiritual principles first because we must, and ultimately because we like the kind of life such obedience brings."

These are a set of guidelines. What happened was in 1944, Bill and Bob decided to go on a little road trip. They started to go around the country, through the states, to have a look at how the groups were doing. The World Service office at the time was receiving bundles of letters each week. Everything from, "Can you sort this out?" and "We need to sort this out." It just seemed like it was in chaos. So they went on a bit of a road trip to have a look around for themselves.

In 1946, Bill Wilson got a letter from a bloke talking about the Washingtonians. Bill had never heard about the Washingtonians. So he really delved into the Washingtonians and what they did, and then came up with the 12 traditions. They came out in an article in the Grapevine in 1949 and they were called "12 Points to Ensure Our Future."

And if you look at the word traditions, it's very, very clever, because it makes it sound like they've been around for hundreds of years, and they hadn't even been accepted yet. But he's making it sound like we've had them for hundreds of years. So that was accepted in 1950.

It's absolutely paramount that in unity we support our common welfare of each group. So that's tradition one—nice and simple. I'm not going to bore the hell out of you with it. There's lots of different other ways you can go at it, but for me, it really is about us keeping the group strong, being in unity with the message that we carry within the group. All the traditions go back to tradition five: our primary purpose to carry a message. I'll talk about that in tradition five.

So tradition two: For our purpose, our group purpose, there is but one ultimate authority, a loving God as he may express himself in our group conscience. And our leaders are but trusted servants. They do not govern.

I love that bit. He said, "God may express himself in our group conscience," and sometimes God may not express himself in a group conscience, as far as I'm concerned.

I started a meeting up with a friend of mine called Simon over in Richmond a couple of years ago, and my commitment came to an end about three months ago. So I had to rotate out of my secretary commitment. We're in the group conscience, and somebody volunteered me to do the sweeping up after the meeting and pick the cigarette butts up.

There's no God in that. Let's have it right. Where's God in that? You know what I mean? So I smiled and I said, "Lovely, I'd love to do it." And in my head, I went, "Don't you know who I think I am? I'm the founder member of this group. Like, how dare you do that to the great me."

And I found out two months later that there was a lot of God in that decision, because what that did was really keep me humble. Because no matter how long I'm around, right, I'm still one of you. And the minute I start thinking I'm too big for my boots, I'm going to pick up and I'm going to go. So there was a lot of God in that.

Do we have the right, if a group conscience has gone off, if it's gone against what we think is a good idea, do we have the right to call six or seven of our sponsors down to the coffee shop the next day, talk to them about it, and get them to go back next week and change the group conscience? Do we have the right to do that?

God speaks through the group conscience. You know what? If you're not happy with it, then go and find another group. Simple as that. Just go and find another group. God may express himself, and sometimes in our opinion, when we're like that, he may not.

The first time the group conscience was used, I think you'll find it in the 12 and 12, was when Bill Wilson was asked to be a professional at Town's Hospital. Charlie Wilson asked him to be a professional there. And he went back to the group and said, "Look, me and Lois are skint. We're on the floor. We're living on people's couches. We got no money. We got nothing. We're in trouble here."

And the group conscience said, "We don't think that's a good idea, because how can you sell a gift from God?" He didn't like it. He wasn't happy with it, but he obeyed it.

And of course, Alcoholics Anonymous has grown and grown and grown. We've stayed nonprofessional as a direct result of that. So even for him, he had to obey the group conscience.

And I'm going to give you my experience on this very quickly. I got a friend of mine who started a meeting up in Chiswick. His meeting was on a Saturday, and there was another meeting on a Sunday. So what he wanted to do was affiliate himself with the other meeting and have basically the same secretaries, the same GSRs, because there was a great message there, and he wanted to be able to say this is where we carry a message of this type.

So on the Sunday, they had a group conscience to sort of affiliate with the other group, and 25 people who don't usually go to that meeting showed up to the group conscience to vote it out. Is that right? Can I do that?

The group conscience is up to you because you're autonomous as a group. Therefore, you can have anything going on within that group. If you want to make it that you got to turn up three times in a row to be able to vote in a group conscience, then so be it. So be it, because it will stop that happening. Because for me, I just think there was no God in that. That was an absolute travesty.

It goes on to talk about our trusted servants are leaders. They do not govern. So how can we have leaders when there are no leaders here? The leaders are simply the people that have been around the longest, usually, and they don't lead by telling you to go here and go there and do that. They just lead by example. That's what it means. We lead by example for the new person walking in the door.

So that's tradition two.

Tradition three: The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking.

When I go through the work responses and we talk about tradition three, I get them to put underneath: I am an AA member because I say I am. That does not make me an alcoholic. It doesn't.

When Bill Wilson wrote this, right, one of the worst things you could have was alcoholism. It was such a stigma. So he didn't believe that anyone was going to turn up at these meetings who wasn't an alcoholic.

And for me, years later, my own opinion—and I'm not expressing the opinions of AA, these are my own opinions—we tend to see a lot of people from treatment centers. We see a lot of people that have a bit of a drink problem, and they're told, "Come to AA." So not everybody sitting in here, as far as I'm concerned, is an alcoholic.

If you stop and you're okay and you do nothing and you don't suffer from the spiritual malady—the irritable restlessness and discontent—then I'm sorry, you're not like me. And unfortunately, what will happen is you will tell me to do nothing, and that will kill me.

I want to talk about a woman as well. In 1940, 1941, her name was Irma. I think her last name was Leavone. She was a woman of the night, a prostitute. She was a woman of ill repute. At the time, Southern California had two meetings a week. The wives and the townspeople were seeing her turn up at the meetings, and they didn't like it and they didn't want her in there.

At the time, there were only like three women in AA. So it was not only a stigma to be a man and be an alcoholic, but if you were a woman, it was even worse.

So if you go on a computer and you look up Barefoot, I think it is, you'll find that there's a letter on there from AA to Irma, and it basically states, "We don't want you in here. You're not one of us. You're not one of our members. Please leave."

She wrote to Bill Wilson, and he said, "There's nothing I can do because these groups just do whatever they want at the time. There's no conditions."

And two and a half years later, Irma died of alcoholism. Now, that's not specifically the reason why they did tradition three, but I'm sure that it must have contributed to it. That anybody who's suffering, and what I do is like I prefer got it there. I prefer the long form: "A membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism. Hence, we may refuse none who wish to recover." If you're suffering from alcoholism, you're welcome here. If you're not, you need to get therapy and you need to go away. You need to do that stuff, because this is not a place of therapy. This is not a self-help program. This is an altruistic program where we look out to fix what's within.

So that's tradition three.

Tradition four: Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole.

So can I start a meeting up and call it the Heavy Bikers Meeting? What do you reckon?

Okay. So what about if I call it the Gay Hairy Bikers Meeting? Can I do that?

If you're gay, it's up to you. It's your life.

Each group is self-governing. That's what autonomy means. We're all self-governing.

One of my sponsors rung me up a little while ago. He's at a meeting over in Ealing, and he said to me that the meeting on say the Tuesday night at 6:00 was rubbish. And I said there's no such thing as a bad meeting. It's just bad members, right? So don't give me that it's rubbish bit.

Well, we want to start a meeting up at the same time down the road with like a really strong message so the people who want to hear a solution can come to this meeting. Is he allowed to do that?

I don't think he is. On the toes of another meeting, is he?

Okay. Anybody else?

Matt's right. If you're going to affect another group, then the best thing that you can do is go and see the secretary of that group and say, "Look, we want to start another meeting up. When's it best to start it up? Is it best to start before your meeting or after your meeting, but not at the same time?"

Your autonomy stops when you start affecting AA as a whole or another group. Therefore, you can only do your own stuff as long as it doesn't affect anybody else. Otherwise, you can call your meeting what you want.

And here's the thing about autonomy, right? You can be autonomous and call your meeting whatever you want as long as the common welfare comes first, as long as God expresses himself in the group conscience, as long as you have a primary purpose, as long as money and prestige doesn't divert you from that purpose, as long as you're self-supporting, as long as you're not organized and nonprofessional, you can have that. You can have that autonomy and do what you want as long as you adhere to these traditions that are set out.

So you're autonomous up until the point of having to comply to these 12 traditions so that we don't fold up and die.

That's about autonomy, and you can do basically whatever you want as long as you follow these traditions.

Tradition five: Each group has one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

What message? What's the message?

The solution. The Big Book. Spiritual experience. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps.

So our primary purpose as a group is to tell the person coming through the door: I have had a spiritual experience as a direct result of doing the 12 steps contained within the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. That has relieved me of the obsession to drink and use, whatever your substance is, and has given me a life that I'm able to deal with my problems. That is the message that you carry as a group.

And it says in there that you ought to be one spiritual entity, one voice together. How many meetings will you go to where it's about his dog, her plumber, his hearing aid—everything under the sun other than having a vital spiritual experience, which is to relieve me of the obsession to drink and use? That is the primary purpose.

Going back to the Washingtonians, they diverted from their primary purpose, which was about stopping alcoholism and how to get well from it. They started going into politics and they started going into religion. They got involved in everything they could get their hands on. And slowly but surely, the alcoholics started to leave.

Their membership got up to a million because what they did was they opened the doors and said that anybody could come. You didn't even have to be an alcoholic. And that's why they got to a million so quickly. But very quickly, they were gone because they started getting involved in all this other stuff.

So as a group, you're to act as one spiritual entity having exactly the same message. How you deliver that message is entirely up to you, but you're supposed to act as one single entity together.

I don't know if you know what the success rates are and what they were. The book says it's 75%. I read an article the other day by a man called Wally P, back to basics. He said that his groups, what they would do is when you came to a meeting, you were taken in the back room. Over the next four weeks, you were made to do the 12 steps before you were allowed in the meeting.

What that did was it weeded out the people who didn't want to do it because they didn't bother showing up. But the ones who did want to do it went through the 12 steps before they were allowed in the meeting. Their success rate was 95 percent. 95 percent.

Today, the success rate in Alcoholics Anonymous is somewhere between 3 and 6 percent. Why? Any ideas?

Because the message being told is diluted too much with the dogs, the washing machines, the hearing aids.

I think a lot of it comes down to sponsorship as well. I've been in meetings and I've heard people say, "I'm not going to sponsor you till you're two or three weeks sober." Well, I couldn't get two or three weeks sober in my life. You know, when I was at that moment when I wanted this, I needed it there and then. I wasn't, I couldn't do two weeks sober on my own. I'm a crazy.

Therefore, we have to carry this one primary purpose, right? That you can have a spiritual experience as a result of this. If you take anything back to the groups that you go back to, please take this back. This is our primary purpose, right?

Is it more spiritual to not say anything, or is it more spiritual to tell people the truth? You know, people sitting there dying, and we just keep patting them on the back and say, "Just keep coming back. Just don't take the first one and you won't get drunk." That's what we tell them. That's what they've been told. You know, that's not what the book says. The book says, "Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps." This is the message that we try to carry. The 12-step program. That's our message.

So tradition five.

Tradition six: An AA group will never endorse, finance, or lend the AA name to any related facilities or outside enterprise. These properties, money, prestige divert primary purpose.

There was a group, I think it was Maryland—I could be wrong on that. I'm not sure. They found that they became quite a big group and they became quite successful and started earning lots of money in the pot. So they bought a building. I'm sure it's in the 12 and 12. On the bottom floor, it was going to be AA meetings. The second floor, it's going to be a mother and baby unit. Third floor, it was going to be a detox center. Fourth floor, counseling.

And they wrote to the World Service office and said, "This is what we're going to do." And they wrote back and said, "We don't think that's a good idea, but you have the right to be wrong. Crack on and do whatever you want, being autonomous."

So that's what they did. I think it was very quickly after they started getting all the money in and getting all that stuff that it all started to just fall apart. They were arguing about money. They were arguing about what they should have on this floor, what they should have on that floor.

And it didn't take long for them to almost disappear off the face of the planet.

I don't know if you've seen it in the 12 and 12. The World Service office got a letter from this group, from one of the group members who said basically, "We should have listened to you. It all went to pieces." And he put a card in it, and it had on the front of it "Rule 62."

And he opened it and it said, "Don't take yourself too damn seriously."

Because that's what they did. They diverted themselves away from our primary purpose, which is to help a drunk walking through the doors. That's what our primary purpose is. Not the mother and baby unit, not the counseling session, not the hospital detox. This is what it's about.

And we got to remember as well, right, that when we start getting affiliated with other things like treatment centers, detox centers, the public out there doesn't know that we're not affiliated with these people. They just presume that we are.

So we can't get involved with anybody else. We just have to stick to our primary purpose and not let any of that outside stuff divert us from what we're doing here.

So that's tradition six.

Tradition seven: Fully self-supporting.

Just as we are as individuals, we must be fully self-supporting. So Alcoholics Anonymous must be fully self-supporting.

Can you imagine if we were sponsored by Coke, right? The 12 steps as sponsored by Coca-Cola. It wouldn't take long before Coca-Cola started asking you to go and do talks for them. It's as simple as this: Whoever's got the money makes the policy.

How long before they said, "Do you know what? We don't really like that word recovered. All right, let's take that out. Can we take that out the book, please?" Or what about we take alcohol out and put like Bacardi, because we don't like them?

The minute we're taking money from other people, they're calling the shots. So we must always be fully self-supporting. But also as well, we must be fully self-supporting, but not to the point where we get too rich. We must never get too rich.

And that's why each group usually has a prudent reserve about what they keep.

There was a woman in the states who died, and she'd had about 30 odd years of sobriety. She left a will, and in her will she said, "I'd like to thank Alcoholics Anonymous for the last 33 years I've had of my sobriety," and she left $10,000, which of course they picked up and was like, "Wow, we're back in the 1940s here. $10,000. That's a lot of money."

And of course, they all spoke about it and talked about it. And this is what they said about it: Like the alcoholic's first drink, if taken, would inevitably set up a disastrous chain reaction. And where would that land us?

What they found out was that during looking at this woman's will, another 180 people had died also leaving $10,000, $30,000, $25,000. We would have become too rich, and money once again would have diverted us from our primary purpose.

So it was refused. In the states today, I think you'll find—and I'm not sure it's the same over here—one person is only allowed to donate up to $1,000 a year. That's it. No one person is allowed to donate more money than that.

And that's why they've kept it so that we never become too rich, because sooner or later we're going to be arguing about money, what we should spend it on, what we shouldn't spend it on, what we should put it to, who we should sponsor. And then once again, we're going to get diverted.

So that's the reason why we're fully self-supporting and we decline outside contributions.

Tradition eight: Alcoholics Anonymous should always remain nonprofessional, but service centers may employ special workers.

As I talked about Bill W earlier, he was being offered by Charlie Town to come in as a lay therapist, and they were going to pay him $1,000 a year, which he absolutely thought was a fantastic idea until the group said no.

And I'll ask you the same question that he was asked: How can we give a God-given gift and sell it? We can't.

You know, one of the things I see is I've been around a while, and I know a lot of people that work within the treatment industry. Now, I'm not knocking them, right? What the book says is: "None of us make a sole vocation to this work. Nor would we think this effectiveness would be improved if we did. A much more important demonstration of our principles lies before our respective homes, occupations, and affairs."

Now, I'm not knocking anybody who works in the treatment center. That's your thing, and if you want to go and work in that, fantastic. I worked in the treatment center myself. But I was under no illusions that what I did on a daily basis with the addicts and alcoholics I worked with wasn't the same as I did in a coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon with sponsees. I absolutely knew the difference. One was money and one was spiritual, and I kept them separate.

I've seen so many people go down the road of thinking that what I'm doing at work is spiritual, therefore I'm doing the work, therefore I'm okay. And a lot of these people are now dead. They're either dead or they're out there using, drinking, smashing themselves to pieces because they've got mixed up between what is the spiritual, what is the money side of it.

So we must stay nonprofessional with this stuff. There is a difference between the two. That's my experience of seeing people within the treatment industry that do that stuff.

Tradition nine: AA as such ought never be organized, but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those that they serve.

Can you imagine AA being organized, right? And it sounds a bit of a mad one, because we have to have some sort of organization. So how can that be right, that we can't be organized but we can? Anyone got any ideas? How can we be organized but we can't be organized?

We create our group members, and it goes up to York and all the way along the line, doesn't it? It starts at the bottom. It starts here and goes up to York, doesn't it?

Can you imagine an old-timer standing at the back of the room saying, "Right, you need to stand over there. You need to go there. You need to go there." One, their ego would just be manifesting in the illness, right? "You need to do this. You need to do that. You need to do that." And then comes everyone else just going, "I ain't doing that. There's no way."

So what we really have is a sort of organized chaos. That's what we have. But what we rely on is each person within the group adhering to the traditions.

So that makes us organized in a certain way. I don't know if you've ever seen a big company business. You got like they have a triangle which is like the company CEO, the vice chair, the directors of the board, the general board, then the workers, and it goes down. Well, we have the triangle that's upside down.

So what we actually have is we have the group that serves the individual. The committee serves the group. Intergroup serves the committee. Region serves the intergroup. Conference serves the region.

So when you hear the newcomer is the most important person in the meeting, this is the reason why. The conference serves the region. The region serves the intergroup. The intergroup serves your committee. Your committee serves your group, and you serve the newcomer walking through the door.

Now, here's the paradox in that, right? If you're new, brand new, you're not the most important person at the meeting. The person next to you is. Get your head around that one.

Right? No matter how many times you sit here thinking, "I'm a newcomer, I'm the most important person in the meeting"—no, you're not. It's the person next to you who's just as new as you are, because that's what we do. We look out.

So we have organization, but we only have it to a certain point. It's like I said—it's a sort of organized chaos that we have, as long as we adhere to the principles within the traditions.

Tradition ten: We have no opinion on outside issues. Hence, the AA ought never to join in public controversy.

Going back to the Washingtonians in 1848, 1849, 1850, the Washingtonians decided to put their name to a senator who was up for election. Part of his policy for election was that people shouldn't drink, which they absolutely loved. So they threw their weight behind him—their million members—to get him elected.

Two weeks before the elections were due, he was caught in bed with his secretary, which of course in 1848 could get your hands cut off in them days, right? So it was all over the newspaper: "Washingtonians support Senate candidate, and so he's been caught with his pants down."

It didn't take long for them to be completely ostracized by everybody.

Going on from the Washingtonians to the Oxford group—and I don't know if you know about the Oxford group—but the Oxford group did the same thing in 1937, 1938, 1939. They were quite taken by a fellow in Germany. What he did was he invented this car called the Volkswagen, and they thought it was one of the greatest things they'd ever heard because what he did was he wanted to give it to everybody in the country to use this Volkswagen. So they threw the weight of the Oxford group behind this man and said, "He's our savior. He's going to be fantastic." His name was Adolf Hitler.

You can imagine by 1940 how long the Oxford group was still around, because this savior who was such a social giant was invading Poland and Czechoslovakia, and they were saying, "He's such a fantastic fellow."

So we don't lend our name to anything, and that's born out of the experience of the Washingtonians and the Oxford group, and that's where it comes from.

Tradition eleven: Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion. We may always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and film.

Dave, introduce yourself as what?

Dave Wiggins.

Why'd you do that, Dave?

Because to let people know that I'm alive. There's only one Dave Wiggins. This day wants to know.

Okay. So we're anonymous at the level of press, radio, and film. Now, the reason we're anonymous at that level is because