A picture of someone who inspires me:
I'd like to show a picture of my AA sponsor, but I feel pretty hinky doing that given the whole Anonymous thing. So here's Bill Wilson, the founder of AA. There are people I believe to have been spiritually - divinely, if you'll allow - inspired in life. People whose ideas proved to be a watershed moment for human nature. Wilson isn't that far below King, on the list of people whose divinely-inspired ideas have changed my life in a deeply personal manner. Without AA, I would not be sober - nor would millions of addicts the world over.
Bill Wilson got sober through a "white-light experience" - meaning, the nondenominational equivalent of an Angel of the Lord came down and touched him, and he experienced what is clinically referred to as "complete psychic change." From that day forward, although he would be tempted time and again, alcohol had no power over him. Seeking to reaffirm that experience during a time of temptation, he asked to be directed to an inveterate drinker, someone who was suffering the same inability to control himself that Wilson had once exhibited. He met that man, Dr. Bob Smith (not an alias), and the two of them managed to recreate Wilson's experience for Smith without the Angel-of-the-Lord moment. Dr. Bob, as he's called, went on eventually to lasting sobriety.
In 1939, the two founders, and the first hundred or so alcoholics who achieved sobriety in this simple manner - by sharing their experiences with other alcoholics who conferred upon the drinkers the strength and hope to abstain - published a book, Alcoholics Anonymous, from which the movement took its name. That book and its 1953 companion piece, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, provided me with solace; with an understanding of part of myself that had escaped me all the years of my life, much less the briefer period of my substance abuse; and with direction and hope.
Long before Jellinek, Fonagy, and Gorski wrote the books leading to our present medical understanding of addiction, Wilson and Smith came to an oddly prescient grasp of its nature. It's now known - despite the debate that rages on - that addiction is a disease. It can be proven. But long before the disease concept was even posited, much less researched, Wilson called it a "malady," and "an allergy of the body." And to confront what was later discovered to be a biopsychosocial disease, Wilson and Smith and the first hundred devised a biopsychosocial program of recovery. The biological: total abstinence is required for the brain to reach a "normal" chemical balance. The psychological: the recovering addict must talk through his troubles in a structured format, to gain the insight needed to maintain purchase on that abstinence. The social: recovering addicts must resocialize themselves and each other, forming healthy intra- and interpersonal relationships to make that abstinent life a healthy, happy and productive one.
There are ongoing debates about AA's effectiveness. Some say it doesn't work; they see the millions of addicts who struggle with recovery as failures on AA's part. Others note the millions who are recovering.
I certainly don't write this to proselytize - but it worked for me. In a time when I needed inspiration like the desert-lost need water, this is where I found it. A community of like-minded individuals, suffering from the same problems - people who truly understand this most confusing part of me - and who accept me just as I am. Without that inspiration, I would be - at best - totally bereft, despairing.
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