Shame & Guilt -by Ernest Kurtz

Shame & Guilt -by

Ernest Kurtz

© Copyright 2007 by Ernest Kurtz. Second edition, revised and updated. This material
may be copied and reproduced by others subject to the restrictions given
at http://hindsfoot.org/copyright.html.

Originally published as Shame and Guilt: Characteristics of the Dependency Cycle (A

Historical Perspective for Professionals). Center City, Minnesota: Hazelden; 1981.

Prefatory Note

This work -- these ideas -- were first presented in a booklet aimed primarily at alcoholism
counselors and people in recovery from alcoholism. Much of the presentation in this
updated revision remains couched in that language: whatever wisdom appears here
necessarily derives most directly from the experience, strength, and hope of members of
Alcoholics Anonymous and offspring Twelve-Step fellowships and programs.

But over the years I have discovered that these ideas have a far wider application. For in a
very real sense, alcoholic is but "human being" writ large. Alcoholics are human beings
who are both more and less than "merely human." And so, if you will pardon the
momentary grandiosity, the audience for this book is humanity.

Which is one reason why, thanks to the generosity of Hindfoot, it is being made freely
available via the WorldWideWeb.

A final introductory note: although the origin of this booklet's first edition meant that it
sometimes dipped into the vocabulary of therapy, I have attempted in this revision to
translate its ideas into the "language of the heart" that invites identification by all.

Introduction: A Lesson from Alcoholics Anonymous

Two distinct ways of feeling "bad" afflict every human being. How those afflictions work --
and how they can be healed -- find clearest expression in the lives of alcoholics and
addicts.a Neither experience is unique to the alcoholic, but each has a special place in the
process of recovery from alcoholism. In this area perhaps more than in any other, alcoholism
and its healing contribute to our knowledge of the human condition. They do this first by
revealing the importance of distinguishing between these two often-confused phenomena.
Most hurting people could profit from learning this distinction, but for alcoholics and addicts,
learning and living it become a matter of life and death. The distinction is
between guilt and shame.

a Throughout the text, although in general only the terms "alcohol," "alcoholic," and
"alcoholism" will be used, the concept intends to include all mood-altering substances, all
substance-dependent people, and all forms of substance dependency.

Shame differs from guilt. Because they differ, any effective healing of their diverse ways of
"feeling bad" must differ. Some modes of healing, for some conditions, can afford to ignore
the distinction between guilt and shame. But such is not the case with the alcoholic or with
many other sufferers. Most hurting persons, and certainly the alcoholic, suffer both guilt and
shame. And for the alcoholic, distinguishing between guilt and shame and
confronting each constructively is necessary not only to attain sobriety but -- perhaps more
importantly -- to maintain ongoing recovery, to attain a life that is genuinely "happy, joyous,
and free."

Sobriety, the experience of Alcoholics Anonymous teaches, has two phases: first it must be
attained; then it must be maintained. Attaining and maintaining -- getting and keeping --
sobriety require different but related emphases.b As Bill Wilson (quoting Doctor Bob Smith)
told one group of alcoholism professionals: "Honesty gets us sober, but tolerance keeps us
sober." The honesty that lies at the heart of the A.A. program forces the distinction between
guilt and shame. The tolerance that infuses the A.A. fellowship fosters continuing
constructive confrontation with both.

b "Sobriety" has been understood and presented, over the years, as synonymous
with serenity, even with sanctity. In what follows, the reader is encouraged to use and
think in whatever term best fits her or his condition: the effort of any of these terms is to
name that condition of living that is, in the words of the book Alcoholics Anonymous,
"happy, joyous, and free."

Confronting guilt, though painful, is not difficult. The beginner in Alcoholics Anonymous
finds guilt allayed, indeed, by the very concepts of powerlessness and unmanageability that
invite him to confront also his shame. The recovering alcoholic finds further help in dealing
with guilt in the inventory and amendment Steps (Four, Five, Eight, and Nine) of the A.A.
program, which guide directly to guilt's resolution.

The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become
unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood
Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our
wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them
all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure
them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we
understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that
out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this
message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The confrontation with shame, although also set in motion by A.A.'s First Step, proves more
tricky -- and, for most, more difficult. Again, the A.A. program -- all of it, but especially
Steps Two, Six, Seven, and Ten -- suggests shame's solution. It is Alcoholics Anonymous as
fellowship that makes real this solution, but it is only in the conjunction with the Twelve
Steps as program that the full benefits of A.A as fellowship can be real-ized -- made real.

The impressive success of Alcoholics Anonymous in dealing with alcoholism and addiction
flows directly from A.A.'s effectiveness at healing shame.c

c This is also why so many other therapies for difficulties far removed from alcoholism --
obesity, grief, certain deforming diseases, for example -- build their programs on A.A.'s
Twelve Steps. The whole "Self-Help Mutual Aid Group Movement" owes its philosophy
and most of its modalities to Alcoholics Anonymous.

Other therapies fail, especially over time, because un-faced shame proves much more
dangerous to the alcoholic, especially in recovery, than does unresolved guilt. An appreciation
of Alcoholics Anonymous as specifically a modality for the healing of shame thus can offer
much . . . and not only to the alcoholic.

Part One: Discovering and Recognizing Shame

I. Definitions: Embarrassment, Guilt, and Shame

Because of the general confusion about guilt and shame, both terms periodically tend to fall
into disuse. "Guilt" thus seems mainly a legal concept, while the word "shame" is reserved for
training children and animals. The reasons behind this confusion are complex. In briefest
outline, modern psychology's distinctions between "rational" and "irrational" guilt, between
"true guilt" and "guilty fear," have combined with a psychological age's mistrust of moralism
to render most people suspicious of and uncomfortable with the word "guilt" except in
contexts narrowly psychiatric or legal. "Shame" suffers from its association with upbringing
and helpless dependency: it carries connotations of being "caught" and the implication that a
consistently mature person will have no occasion to feel such disgrace.

But that very implication invites probing deeper. "Shame" is tricky, even treacherous: its
usual understanding contains a trap. As commonly thought of, "shame" seems a virtual
synonym for "embarrassment"; that is, to result from being seen by another. This
misunderstanding arises, perhaps, because as children we learn the meaning of "shame" when
someone projects it upon us. "You should be ashamed of yourself" is a reproach of public
behavior -- of something one is seen or caught doing. But the essence of shame consists not in
being seen or being caught, but in what about one is seen, in what one is caught doing.
"Embarrassment," then, is not a synonym for shame, but the result of one's shame being seen.
"Being seen" or "being caught" are not the essence of shame: we are all seen by others, often
and diversely. At times, indeed, we relish being seen: our moments of success and triumph are
enhanced by having an audience. "Being seen," then, is not the core even of embarrassment.
The heart of embarrassment is that another sees our shame. The sense of shame comes before
the sense of being seen -- before, then, any advertence to "other."

Shame inheres in us, in ourselves -- indeed, literally in our self. "Others," as we shall explore,
are neither the problem in nor the source of shame; rather, others offer the only solution for
shame. This is why it is so important to distinguish clearly between the "embarrassment" of
being seen by others and the shame that comes in the recognition of the reality of our own
self.

Both guilt and shame involve feeling "bad" -- feeling bad about one's actions (or omissions) in
the case of guilt; feeling bad about one's self in shame. What does it mean to feel bad? The
deepest meaning of the word bad is "unable to fit": unable to fit into some external context in
the case of guilt, unable to fit into one's own being in the case of shame. For there are, in
human experience, two different ways of discovering that one does not "fit," of feeling "bad."
Each has to do with the boundaries of the human condition.

An image may help to clarify the distinction and its point.

To be human is to be surrounded by boundaries: it is somewhat like standing in the middle of

a football field during a game. As on a football field, there are two kinds of boundaries: side-
lines and end-lines. The side-lines are containing boundaries: to cross them is to "go out of
bounds," to do something wrong. The end-lines are goal-lines: the purpose of the game is to
cross them. One feels "bad" (guilty) when one crosses the side-line, the restraining boundary.
Feeling "bad" about the goal-line (shame) arises not from crossing it but from not crossing it,
from failing to attain it.

Guilt, in this image, arises from the violation -- transgression, stepping across -- of some
limiting boundary; shame occurs when a goal -- an end -- is not reached, is fallen short of.
Guilt thus indicates an infraction, a breaking of the rules; shame, a literal "shortcoming," a
lack or defect of being. The following schema may clarify:

GUILT SHAME
Results from:
A violation, a transgression, a fault A failure, a falling short, a fault of
of doing; the exercise of power being, the failure of power or
or control. control.
Concerned with:
A separate, discrete act, some law The overall self; some ideal or
or rule; one is guilty for something. principle; one is ashamed of self.
Results in:
Feeling of wrong doing; sense of Feeling of inadequacy; sense of
wickedness; "not good"; fear of worthlessness; "no good"; "not
punishment. good enough"; fear of abandon-
ment.
"Feels like":
Pang. Ache.
Repair by:
Opposite acts, "making amends"; As qualitative rather than
can be quantified. quantitative, requires: new way
of seeing (insight), change in
be-ing (conversion).

"Reformed" "Transformed"
Possible outcome:
Surmounting guilt can lead to Transcending shame opens to a
feelings of righteousness. sense of identity and of freedom-
as-human.
In psychoanalytic
vocabulary: Has to do with superego. Has to do with ego ideal.

This understanding of guilt and shame suggests four topics for investigation: (1) how to
distinguish between guilt and shame in actual human experience;
(2) the significance of this distinction for understanding the human condition;
(3) the specific qualities of shame that enable its identification; and
(4) the nature of healing for shame.

We shall examine each topic in turn, keeping always in mind that our effort aims to derive
effective insight from the actual experience of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Distinguishing between guilt and shame

The first difficulty to be confronted arises from the fact that guilt and shame usually come
mingled, together. Although they are distinct experiences, guilt and shame rarely present
themselves separately. Most transgressions, violations of some rule, also involve a failure,

falling short of some ideal. If I steal, I not only violate someone else's right; I also fall short of
my ideal of honesty. The same act (or omission) can thus give rise to both guilt and shame:
one can experience shame and guilt over the same thing.
The success of Alcoholics Anonymous testifies that in such cases of mingled guilt and shame
experienced after a transgression that is also a falling short, distinguishing between guilt and
shame and treating first the shame are essential conditions of therapeutic effectiveness. Let us
examine, then, how and why.

Distinguishing between guilt and shame is not difficult: it can be heard in

the accent informing self-blame, in the dual emphasis that inheres in any description of
feeling "bad."

Guilt focuses on the thing done and thus reveals itself in self-reproaches that run: how could I
have done that; what an injurious thing to have done; how I hurt so-and-so; what a moral
lapse that act was!

Simultaneously, however, shame attends to self as do-er, inducing self-reproaches with a very
different emphasis: how could I have done that; what an idiot I am; what a fool; how awful
and worthless I am!

Those who would attempt to heal, to make whole, persons harboring such mixed feelings --
the mixture revealed by the differing accents in "What have I done?" and "What have I done?"
-- must be sensitive to both components. Too often, therapists settle for the resolution of guilt
when it is the confrontation with shame that is the hurting person's deepest need. Indeed, a
superficial reading of the A.A. Steps -- one that sees the 4th, 5th, 8th, and 9th Steps in
isolation from the rest of the Alcoholics Anonymous program -- can reinforce this too often
tragic error. Those Steps do deal effectively with guilt, but they are only part of the A.A.
program. They come embedded, that is to say, in a life-shaping experience oriented primarily
to the confrontation with shame.

What is this confrontation with shame and how is it achieved? The encounter involves
finding, in experiences of shame, truth about the reality of human existence. It means
learning, from experiences of falling short, wisdom concerning the meaning of being human.
Shame, as its accenting reveals, focuses on the self: it is the perception of not just any lack of
failure, but of the deficiency of the self as self, as human being. Shame testifies not to wrong-
doing but to flawed be-ing.

Perhaps surprisingly, despite the depth of self involved in shame's feeling "bad," the sense of
shame itself is a good thing -- something to be cherished and valued. If this claim that shame
is "good" seems strange, reflect for a moment on shame's opposite: indeed, think about the
opposites of both guilt and shame. "Guiltless" is clearly a term of praise: to be guiltless, free
from guilt, is to be innocent, blameless. "Shameless," on the other hand, is an epithet of
condemnation and opprobrium. To be shameless is to be insensible to oneself, insensitive to
one's self. One who lacks shame is impudent, brazen, without decency.

Shame, then, despite its negative side that points up failure and falling short, also entails
something positive: insight into the reality of the human condition. The experience of shame
highlights the essential existential paradox that inheres in be-ing human: to be human is to be
caught in a contradictory tension between the pull to the unlimited, the more-than-human, and
the drag of the merely limited, the less-than-human. There are two difficult concepts here --
essential limitation and the human as "middle." We shall examine each of them in turn,
carefully, in the light shed by the experience of Alcoholics Anonymous.
II. The Experience and Acceptance of Essential Limitations

Alcoholics Anonymous teaches as fundamental first truth the ultimate reality of personal
essential limitation. "We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had
become unmanageable." A.A. addresses itself not to the thing, alcoholism, but to the person,
the alcoholic; and the First Step of its program states clearly, simply, and thoroughly that the
alcoholic is essentially limited. "Powerless . . unmanageable": the acknowledgment "I am an
alcoholic" that is inherent in these admissions accepts as first truth personal essential
limitation. The newcomer to Alcoholics Anonymous is thus led to admit, to accept, and to
embrace fundamental finitude -- essential limitation -- as the definition of her alcoholic
human condition.

The concept of "essential limitation" comes hard: if it poses problems for philosophers, how
can it be learned by the lowly alcoholic -- indeed, not only learned but inculcated into the very
marrow of his being? The program and fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous accomplish this
in several ways, ways that we shall explore in unfolding detail. Here, we focus on the first
two: the idea of "alcoholic" and the significance of "the first drink."

The two are related. The "alcoholic," A.A. teaches, is one who cannot drink any alcohol
safely. There is an essential "not" -- an inherent limitation -- in the very concept of
"alcoholic." This "not" is an essential rather than an accidental limitation, because it applies to
the first drink. We all know the gropings of the active alcoholic who realizes that he is in
trouble -- his staunch efforts to stop drinking before drunkenness, his tortured attempts to
determine what is "his limit": two drinks? four beers? only with meals? A.A., in teaching that
"the first drink gets the alcoholic drunk," inculcates that the alcoholic does not "have a limit":
she is limited -- and this is the meaning of essential limitation.

To be confronted by one's own essential limitation, to perceive oneself as essentially limited:

these are narrowing, choking, tightening experiences. We experience these sensations in our
innards, and we struggle against their implications with all our might. But struggle and might
aggravate rather alleviate the pain. Although anyone who has felt that pain can never forget it,
the sensation is difficult to name. Philosophers have called it Angst or angoisse; in English,
the dreads of "anxiety" and "anguish." All of these terms derive from the same ancient source:
ANGH, a primitive root the very sound of which conveys the sense of choked tightness
gasped when something squeezes around one's throat. Although difficult to name, this sense is
all too familiar to the alcoholic struggling with his addiction -- the clutching feeling of dread
that arises from the recognition that one is out of control. ANGH is the rub of finitude,
reminding of essential limitation.

Alcoholism is an experience of ANGH: it brings home the realization that to be human is to

be essentially limited. The first response to this reminder is shame. The pain of ANGH arises,
indeed, because something else within "being human" strives to reach beyond limitation and
seeks to impose that one is not limited -- insists, in short, that any limitation marks the failure
of falling short. Here, on the field of essential limitation, Alcoholics Anonymous first wrestles
with the alcoholic's shame.

The lesson is unwelcome and difficult; and therefore Alcoholics Anonymous teaches in
several ways this insight that, because the first truth for the alcoholic is essential limitation,
the first act required for the alcoholic to begin recovery is the acceptance of essential
limitation. Most striking, perhaps, because so often misunderstood, is how A.A. inculcates
this truth by applying the insight to itself.

At its very birth, Alcoholics Anonymous departed Oxford Group auspices because the Group,
with its heritage of Christian perfectionism as revealed in its emphasis upon "The Four
Absolutes," seemed both to demand and to claim too much. Because of this intuition that -- at
least for alcoholics -- the problem of the Oxford Group, as well as one off-putting aspect of all
organized religion, was that they claimed to do too much, Alcoholics Anonymous focused
attention on its own limitations. Thus, A.A.'s claim that its fellowship and program are
"spiritual rather than religious" involves not so much a rejection of religion as a profession of
the acceptance of limitation. This understanding is confirmed by another Alcoholics
Anonymous axiom, one especially dear to the heart and pen of its only philosopher, William
Griffith Wilson. Bill made the point consistently, in many private letters as well as in his
published writings, that even as "spiritual," A.A. was but "a kindergarten of the spirit." He
intended the image both to ensure A.A.'s own humility, its acceptance of its very real
limitations, and to encourage A.A. members to grow in sobriety -- and spirituality -- in their
own individual ways.

The fact of fundamental finitude and the need to accept this essential limitation pervade the
fellowship and program of Alcoholics Anonymous. They are clear in the oft-repeated A.A.
mottoes, "First Things First" and "One Day at a Time." The emphasis upon accepting
limitation infuses A.A.'s own description of "How It Works" from the "Rarely" that opens that
key fifth chapter of its Big Book, through the "tried to" that lies at the heart of its Twelfth
Step, to its concluding qualification of its promise of "progress rather than . . . perfection."

Honesty concerning essential limitation is therefore the core of Alcoholics Anonymous. Such
honesty thus becomes both the price and the reward, both the process and the purpose, of the
A.A. member's First Step acceptance of himself as "powerless over alcohol." In a way
suggestive of the psychoanalytic contract, Alcoholics Anonymous has intuited the existential
truth that accepting the reality of self-as-feared is the essential pre-condition of finding the
reality of self-as-is.

Part Two: Confronting Shame

I. Shame and the Meaning of Being Human

By its own example as well as by its core message, then, Alcoholics Anonymous teaches that
there is a wholeness in limitation. This understanding echoes an ancient tradition of wisdom,
which saw being human as being caught in the middle, containing a contradiction. To be
human, according to this tradition, means to sustain the tension of always being pulled in two
opposite directions: to be more than human and to be less than human.

This vision has haunted many thinkers. Two very different philosophers, whose thoughts span
centuries, can clarify its meaning for us; for their insights anticipate two descriptions of
alcoholic experience that may be heard detailed at virtually any meeting of Alcoholics
Anonymous. Their vision posits an image: man, located on the scale of reality between
"beast" and "angel," contains within himself both "beast" and "angel." To be human, then, is
to experience from within the contradictory pulls to be both angel and beast, both more and
less than merely human. Because of these contradictory pulls, to be human is to live in a
tension: because one is pulled to both, one can exclusively attain neither. Yet the tension
pinches and strains; and some humans strive to resolve it by becoming only one or the other,
beast or angel.

Over three hundred years ago, the French mathematician and mystic Blaise Pascal observed
of one such effort: "He who would be an angel becomes a beast." That is, the attempt to be
more than human leads to being less than human. Early in the present century, the Spanish-
born, Harvard philosopher George Santayana utilized the same image to make its
complementary point: "It is necessary to become a beast if one is ever to be a spirit." To attain
the heights of human existence, one must also touch its depths.

Together, these understandings and their point -- as both angel and beast, one cannot be only
either -- embrace the core perception and process of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the A.A.
understanding that can be heard, paraphrased, at any A.A. meeting, the alcoholic drank in the
attempt or claim to be one or the other, angel or beast; the essence of sobriety resides in the
acceptance that one is both -- that because one can be only both, the effort to be only one or
the other dooms one to insatiable frustration.

This vision of the human as both angel and beast thus captures well the descriptions of
drinking experience heard within Alcoholics Anonymous -- the vivid portrayal of the heights
and the depths reached for and even attained, only to have their opposites relentlessly and
inevitably recur. This understanding of the meaning of being human emphasizes the essential
incongruity -- the inherent conflict, contradiction, antinomy -- at the very core of the human
condition. Much literature explores this theme of inherent incongruity, sensitively delineating
the painful paradox of human aspiration conjoined with human finitude, human hope
subverted by human limitation.

Yet the paradox need not be only painful. One of its modern students, the anthropologist
Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer prize-winning study of The Denial of Death, has captured its
essence in a striking phrase that not only can further our appreciation of the paradox but that
can reveal the humor that lies on the other side of its pain. And that insight into humor can
deepen our understanding of how Alcoholics Anonymous heals shame. In Becker's vivid and
memorable image, to be human is to be "a god who shits."

The humor of being human

Humor, in a definition that reflects itself, "arises from the perception of the juxtaposition of
incongruity." We find funny the placing together of things that do not belong together: the
portly, top-hatted, distinguishedly pompous gentleman slipping on a banana peel, for
example. Humor and laughter may, of course, be aggressive and even cruel -- especially when
the other is objectified rather than identified with. But when humor's incongruity is
recognized as inherent -- a reflection of the essential contradiction of being human with which
one identifies -- there can be no more healing, whole-ing, experience than the laughter that
marks identifying acceptance of that paradoxical incongruity.

Such laughter characterizes meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, revealing much about A.A.'s
healing power. The stories told at these meetings exquisitely demonstrate the essential
incongruity of the human condition, the humor inherent in being human.
I'd sit up all night, just about, watching the late late late movies, tears streaming down my
face, thinking "Yes, that's how life really is, loveless and tragic"; and I'd toast each sad
revelation with another warming swallow of booze. During the breaks I'd go out to the kitchen
to get more ice, and passing the hall mirror I'd look soulfully at my image in it -- with
immense, enormous self-pity, but with no realization at all that the bleary-eyed, puffy,
unshaven condition of my face and its booze-stinking breath just might have something to do
with my being unloved.

Or:

When I first came around A.A., someone suggested that I get down on my knees each
morning and ask for help to not take a drink that day. Well, I resented that! Me, kneel down
and ask for help? No way . . . so I didn't come back, for a while. Instead I went back to
drinking, my usual pattern, until one morning it came to me. There I was, in my accustomed
morning position, kneeling on the cold tile of my bathroom floor with my arms wrapped
around the toilet heaving my guts out. The thought crossed my mind that it wasn't the
kneeling or the asking for help that bothered me -- after all, that's just what I was doing! It
was that those A.A.'s wanted me to do it on a warm, carpeted floor with a serene stomach!
And if that was what bothered me, maybe they were right and I was "sick," and so I decided
to give you folks another try.

Such humor and the laughter that greets it are never aimed at others as objects, but at the
contradictions within self illumined by the human experience described. A.A. laughter
expresses appreciation of the insights into self garnered from the experience of others with
whom one identifies. Thus, humor within Alcoholics Anonymous witnesses to A.A. members'
acceptance of the paradoxical nature of the human condition -- essentially limited but
inherently striving for the unlimited. In attempting and claiming to attain transcendence by
their use of alcohol, alcoholics come to touch -- even to wallow in -- the depths of their own
finitude.

Recognizing the incongruity between that endeavor and its result frees from both. Such humor
is neither veiled aggression nor mere compensation; it rather manifests the central animus of
A.A.'s understanding of human nature. The human essence resides in the human condition's
conjunction of infinite thirst with essentially limited capacity. Acceptance of this reality
comes easily to the alcoholic who understands her alcoholism; the phenomenon of alcoholism
replicates the essence of the human condition.

II. Two Corollaries of Shame

Its own example in accepting limitation and the gift of healing humor that its meetings offer
are not the only ways in which Alcoholics Anonymous inculcates in its members the
acceptance of essential limitation that enables constructive confrontation with shame. A.A.'s
insight into the human condition suggests another understanding, one that illumines both its
diagnosis and its healing of the alcoholic. As Bill Wilson never tired of reminding, "the
alcoholic is an all-or-nothing person." The futility of this effort to deny the essential some-
ness of the human experience manifests itself in especially two areas -- control and
dependence.

In the A.A. understanding, the drinking alcoholic drinks alcohol in an effort to achieve control
-- absolute control -- over his feelings and environment; yet his drinking itself is absolutely
out of control. Similarly, the drinking alcoholic denies all dependence. She drinks in an
attempt to deny dependence upon others, upon anything outside herself; but her dependence
upon alcohol itself has become absolute. The alcoholic's problem, then, involves the demand
for absolute control and the claim to be absolutely independent. A.A.'s healing attacks this
double problem in a twofold way. First, the alcoholic is confronted with the facts that, so far
as alcohol is concerned, he is absolutely out of control and absolutely dependent. Then, when
this reality (contained in the very concept "alcoholic") has been accepted by the admission of
"powerlessness over alcohol,"

Alcoholics Anonymous prescribes limited control and limited dependence.

An image, an ancient posture, clarifies the relationship between the human-as-middle and its
corollaries of limited control and limited dependence. In the original, privately published
version of A.A.'s Twelve Steps, the Seventh Step opened with the phrase: "Humbly on our
knees..."

Kneeling, the Pietist posture, is a middle position -- half-way between standing upright and
lying flat. A.A.'s interpretation of the alcoholic condition may be conceptualized around this
image. The alcoholic is one who, in his claim to absolute independence and absolute control
over alcohol, insists on trying to stand unaided, only to inevitably fall flat on his face -- often
literally in the gutter. To the alcoholic lying prone, Alcoholics Anonymous suggests: "Get up
on your knees -- you can do something, but not everything." Later, in the alcoholic's progress
toward sobriety, A.A. often has occasion to temper tendencies to grandiosity with a similar
suggestion: "Get down on your knees -- you can do something, but not everything." A.A.'s
insight into the middleness of the human condition -- its limited control and limited
dependence -- linchpins the fellowship's total approach to the alcoholic, drinking or sober.

The emphasis on control as limited, as neither absolute nor to be abdicated, pervades the A.A.
program. "You can do something, but not everything": A.A. members are warned against
promising to "never drink again." They learn, rather, "not to take the first drink, one day at a
time." They learn to pick up the telephone instead of the bottle. They are encouraged to attend
A.A. meetings, which they can do, rather than to avoid all contact with alcohol, which they
cannot do. The A.A. sense of limited control is admirably summed up in the famed "Serenity
Prayer" that the fellowship originally borrowed from a newspaper obituary: "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."

The "can" and "cannot" of the Serenity Prayer well inculcate the concepts of limited control
and limited dependence. They also clarify the depth of the dedication of Alcoholics
Anonymous to human freedom. In the A.A. understanding, alcoholism is an obsessive-
compulsive malady: the active alcoholic is one who must drink, who cannot not-drink.
Therefore the alcoholic who joins the A.A. fellowship and embraces its program does not
thereby surrender her freedom to drink; rather, she gains the freedom to not-drink -- no small
liberation for one obsessively-compulsively addicted to alcohol. Within Alcoholics
Anonymous, indeed, the passage from "mere dryness" to "true sobriety" consists precisely in
the change of perception -- perspective -- by which the A.A. member moves from interpreting
his situation as the prohibition, "I cannot drink" to understanding its deeper reality as the
joyous affirmation, "I can not-drink."
For the alcoholic, freedom consists in not drinking; and, as any sober A.A. member will
readily testify, there is a world of difference between the necessary first stage of accepting the
limitation "I cannot drink" and embracing the freedom of the happy new reality "I can not-
drink." A.A.'s success derives in no small part from the fact that it is the only modality for the
healing of alcoholics that contains a philosophy that embraces and teaches such an
understanding of the reality of human freedom.

"Limited control," however, is but one side of the coin of human freedom: its obverse face
reveals limited dependence. Here, the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous again subtly
challenges a frequent, modern assumption. Most therapies approach the alcoholic from a point
of view that sees all dependence -- but especially the dependence that binds the alcoholic to
his chemical -- as humiliating and dehumanizing. They tell the alcoholic that maturity --
becoming fully human -- involves overcoming all such dependencies. Diagnosing alcoholism,
virtually all modern therapies proclaim that the alcoholic's problem is "dependence on
alcohol," and they endeavor to break the alcoholic's dependence.

The larger-wisdomed insight of Alcoholics Anonymous does not exactly contradict this
understanding. Indeed, A.A. agrees with and accepts this diagnosis that the alcoholic's
problem is "dependence on alcohol." But Alcoholics Anonymous locates the definition's
deeper truth by shifting its implicit emphasis. A.A. interprets the experience of its members as
revealing that the alcoholic's problem is not "dependence on alcohol," but "dependence
on alcohol." To be human, to be essentially limited, Alcoholics Anonymous insists, is to be
essentially dependent. The alcoholic's choice -- the human choice -- lies not between
dependence and independence, but between that upon which one will acknowledge
dependence: a less than human substance such as alcohol within oneself, or a more than
individual reality that remains essentially outside -- beyond -- the self.

III. The Qualities of Shame

We seem, perhaps, to have come a long way, a far distance, from our stated topic of shame
and guilt. Yet have we? Shame, recall, arises from the feeling of failure, from the sense of
falling short. But, in the understanding of the human condition mediated by Alcoholics
Anonymous, to be human is to fall short. Any healing of shame, then, must confront the
inevitability of falling short that the alcoholic -- or any other "all-or-nothing person" -- seeks
to avoid or to deny by such measures as the use of alcohol.

How is this to be done? The confrontation with shame, the acceptance of self as essentially
limited, involves two stages: (1) recognizing shame for what it is, and especially its
distinction from guilt; (2) finding and applying the mode of healing that enables one to live
constructively with one's own essential limitation and therefore with that positive shame
without which one becomes "shameless." We turn then, first, to the qualities that characterize
shame: avenues that open to touching shame and therefore to embracing one's own essential
limitation.

Three characteristics of shame -- or better, of its occasion -- both aid in distinguishing shame
from guilt and illumine the nature of the essential limitation that lies at the core of being
human. Guilt, recall, arises from the violation of some restraining boundary: it
characteristically has to do with moral transgression, results from a voluntary act, and tends to
be proportionate to the gravity of the offense committed. Shame, in contrast, can be
recognized because it may be evoked by a non-moral lapse, may arise for an involuntary act,
and tends to be magnified by the very triviality of its stimulus.

The non-moral

Shame may arise from either a moral or a non-moral lapse. For some, the possibility of non-
moral shame provides the key to understanding its differentiation from guilt. Two cases of
non-moral shame are especially relevant in the present context: failure in love and the failure
of sickness.

Perhaps the most common source of non-moral shame is disappointment or frustration, and
specifically disappointment in love. One who seeks to win another's love, and fails, suffers
not the guilt of moral transgression but the constricted hollowness of felt inadequacy.
Experiences of defeat, disappointment, frustration, or failure evoke shame. Guilt, as
transgression, always involves aggression: one feels guilty about the aggression. Shame,
although it may involve an aspect of aggression, arises over the attempt's failure rather than
over the attempt itself.

Both the "disease-concept of alcoholism" and A.A.'s emphasis on alcoholism as "malady"

serve to bring the alcoholic's drinking under the heading of shame. To be ill is not to
transgress, but to fall short. One large contribution of Alcoholics Anonymous has been to
remove alcoholism from moral categories. This removal, of course, is more easily claimed
than achieved; but distinguishing between guilt and shame can help further that achievement.

The alcoholic who knows from experience that she should not drink alcohol but who
obsessively-compulsively does drink it will of course and inevitably feel "bad." If she knows
only the category of guilt, she cannot help but judge her drinking to be somehow a moral
transgression. Learning the disease concept enables transcending guilt by inviting
confrontation with shame. A.A.'s contribution here is to distinguish clearly between the guilty
feeling of wickedness and the shamed sense of worthlessness. The experience of Alcoholics
Anonymous teaches that the alcoholic's key problem is not that he is wicked, but that he feels
worthless. A.A.'s healing, then, touches most deeply not guilt but shame.

The involuntary

The concept of disease and the experience of many diversely sick people who are ashamed of
their illnesses also clarify the second characteristic of occasions of specifically shame -- their
involuntariness. That shame arises involuntarily, from the failure of choice, should be clear
from its very concept as outlined near the beginning of this piece. Guilt implies choice;
haggling over guilt often focuses upon the question of how free was the choice, but the fact of
choice is assumed. Shame, on the other hand, occurs over a falling short, a missing of the
mark, a failure of powers.d

d A "missing of the mark": those familiar with ancient languages or theological thought
may recognize the concept of hamartia -- an ancient term for "sin."

Involuntariness is a necessary concomitant of shame's focus upon the deficiency of self. The
core of the pain in shame arises from the insufficiency of will. An example may clarify. One
seduced into adultery might feel both guilt and shame: guilt over the violation of the marriage
promise; shame at falling short of the marriage ideal. The man who finds himself sexually
impotent with a woman he loves will feel predominantly shame: the question of morality does
not enter, and -- at least in his conscious mind -- his sexual disability is anything but
voluntary.

When an alcoholic says "Why?": "Why do I drink (or do x) -- l know I don't want to!"
someone imbued with the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous knows better than to try to
probe and to prove that he really did want to. The A.A. answer, accepting involuntariness, is
simple. "You didn't want to, but you did. You did because you are an alcoholic. That is what
an alcoholic is: one who drinks when he doesn't want to. The answer to 'Why' lies not in your
will or in some unconscious drive, but in the fact that you are an alcoholic . . . the simple fact
that you are 'all too human.'"

Experiences of shame are valuable because, by their involuntariness, they teach about the
limitation of human will. The alcoholic cannot will to not-drink any more than the insomniac
can will to fall asleep. The example is exact; for, in both cases, one can will the means, but
any attempt directly to will the end proves self-defeating. There are, it seems, two distinct
kinds of "will," two different realms in which human will operates. In some matters, will
chooses to move in a certain direction; in others, will chooses to possess a particular object.
Problems arise when we attempt to apply the will of the second realm -- the utilitarian will
that chooses objects -- to those portions of life that, because they are directions or
orientations, wilt or even vanish under such coercion.

Let me try to clarify by suggesting a few other examples, probably familiar to anyone, of this
distinction: I can will knowledge, but not wisdom; submission, but not humility; self-
assertion, but not courage; congratulations, but not admiration; religiosity, but not faith;
reading, but not understanding; physical nearness, but not emotional closeness; dryness, but
not sobriety.e

e Several of these examples, and the ideas in this and the following paragraph, have been
suggested and are treated at greater depth in two essays by Leslie H. Farber: "Thinking
About Will" and "Will and Anxiety," in Lying, Despair, Jealousy, Envy, Sex, Suicide,
Drugs, and the Good Life (New York: Basic Books 1976), pp. 3-34.

Because shame often arises from the failure of the effort to will what cannot be willed,
experiences of shame contain an important lesson, and not only for the alcoholic. To know
shame is to realize that certain things -- the realm of orientation and direction, as in the
examples above -- fall beyond the scope of the utilitarian will that chooses objects. This
realization is important because a major source of anxiety is the effort to will what cannot be
willed. The addict seeks chemical relief from such anxiety because drugs -- for example,
alcohol -- offer the illusion of healing this split between the will and its impossible goal.
Addiction, indeed, is the effort to will what cannot be willed.

The recovering alcoholic or addict knows that such chemical pacification is "illusion," but its
remembered attractiveness can haunt one pinched by the pain of anxiety. Insofar, then, as will
and its failure enter into the alcoholic's problem, experiences of shame offer a potent reminder
of the essential limitation of will with which the alcoholic -- like any human -- must learn to
live.
The trivial

The third and final characteristic of shame to be examined is the apparent disproportion that
renders shame literally so monstrous an experience. Usually, the depth and extent of guilt
correlate with the gravity of the offense: the more serious the transgression, the greater the
guilt. Shame, on the contrary, tends to be triggered by the most trivial of stimuli, by some
seemingly small and even picayune detail. Such details, precisely as trivial, reveal most
unmistakably the deficiency of self as self rather than as violator of some abstract code. The
employee who embezzled ten thousand dollars, when he comes to doing his Eighth and Ninth
-- amends -- Steps, tends to feel predominantly guilt. The person who has cadged quarters off
his co-workers' desks, who has habitually ignored the office coffee-pot's plea for coin
contributions, will feel more shame than guilt. If a sensitive therapist can tap that shame, can
touch that triviality, she will more acutely and thoroughly help one contemplating A.A.'s
Eighth and Ninth Steps to confront himself as he is. The trivial invites examining "What kind
of person am I to have done that?" The more trivial the "that," the more readily the emphasis
moves to "person."

The disproportion that tends to inhere in shame -- its tendency to be greater according as its
stimulus is smaller -- reveals another intriguing facet of shame that renders it especially
appropriate for the kind of healing made available by Alcoholics Anonymous. In one sense,
albeit not technically, shame is addictive. The disproportion inherent in it serves to magnify
shame, for one becomes ashamed at the very inappropriateness of one's reaction, and
therefore ashamed of shame itself. Perhaps because of this insatiable quality in shame over the
trivial, it is upon the disproportion inherent in experiences of shame that the program of
Alcoholics Anonymous fastens in turning shame to constructive use.

Alcoholics Anonymous locates the "root of [the alcoholic's] troubles" in the selfishness of
"self-centeredness" -- in pride. The drinking alcoholic tends to deem himself exceptional,
different, special; and this tendency does not suddenly cease in early sobriety. Thus, one trap
for the newly recovering alcoholic, freshly enthusiastic about his dawning recovery, lies in the
temptation to judge himself, as he reviews his personal history of alcoholism, especially
"wicked." As one observer acutely noted of both drinking and sober alcoholics: "The
alcoholic's problem is not that he feels, 'I am a worm,' nor even that he feels, 'I am very
special.' The main obstacle to recovery is that the alcoholic is convinced that 'I am a very
special worm.'" Admittedly, the telling of stories at Twelve-Step meetings can on occasion
exacerbate this problem by degenerating into "Can you top this?" competitions. Yet as usually
and properly used, the telling of stories at such. meetings, and especially the program's Fifth
Step, offer a healing that skirts the "very special worm" trap.

"Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs."
Such confession is, of course, ancient religious practice. Yet within Alcoholics Anonymous as
within its parent Oxford Group, this practice ministers to shame more than to guilt. The
essential point was already clear in the Oxford Group understanding: "This sharing leads to
the discovery that sins we thought were so bad are quite run-of-the-mill. The regard of one's
sins as particularly awful is a vicious form of pride that is overcome by sharing." A.A.'s Fifth
Step, like its practice of story-telling, serves to inculcate a similar awareness: the alcoholic,
essentially limited, is very ordinary. This is why A.A.'s Fifth Step is presented as ending "the
old pangs of anxious apartness" and beginning the alcoholic's "emergence from isolation."

IV. Shame, Exposure, Denial, and Hiding

Because of the disproportion inherent in shame, because shame's stimulus is so often trivial
and shame itself therefore usually so surprising, experiences of shame are experiences of
exposure. Experiences of shame throw a flooding and searching light on what and who we
are, painfully uncovering unrecognized aspects of personality. Exposure -- exposure to
oneself -- lies at the heart of shame.

The root meaning of the word "shame" implies this process: to uncover, to expose, to wound.
Experiences of shame are thus experiences of the exposure of peculiarly sensitive, intimate,
vulnerable aspects of the self. The exposure may be to others; but, whether others are
involved or not, the significant exposure is always to one's own eyes. An incident described
by Somerset Maugham in his study Of Human Bondage vividly penetrates to the essence of
shame as the exposure to oneself of one's own weakness.

The protagonist in the story, Philip, as a new boy at school, was ragged by his classmates who
demanded to see his clubfoot. Despite his almost obsequious desire for friendship, Philip
adamantly refused to show his handicap. Finally, one night, a group of boys attacked Philip in
his bed, and the school bully twisted his arm until Philip stuck his leg out of the bed to let
them see his deformity. The boys then laughed and left. And then,

Philip . . . got his teeth in the pillow so that his sobbing should be inaudible. He was not
crying for the pain they had caused him, nor for the humiliation he had suffered when they
looked at his foot, but with rage at himself because, unable to stand the torture, he had put out
his foot on his own accord.

Exposure to others of his physical deformity was less painful to Philip than the exposure to
himself of his own weakness.

Alcoholism -- indeed, any form of addictive dependency -- often arises from and usually is
connected with the effort to conceal such weakness, to prevent its exposure to oneself. The
alcoholic or addict uses his chemical in order to hide, and especially to hide from himself. The
endeavor to hide reveals that the critical problem underlying such behavior is shame.

Guilt moves to solving problems; shame leads to hiding feelings. "Wanting to be absolved of
guilt is not the addict's problem." Usually, the addicted person within herself is pleading
passionately to be able to feel guilty. Guilt-oriented therapies, however sophisticated, fail
because the addict or alcoholic cannot "mend his ways" or, by willing it, "grow up." He must
maintain his addiction precisely to conceal his unendurable shame from himself. Any
interference with his addictive dependency threatens to reveal that shame and therefore
becomes "a primary survival threat." In any case in which the avoidance of pain -- the
existential pain of shame -- plays a basic part in the organization and maintenance of the
psychopathology, effective healing must address itself first to the existential nature of that
pain and shame.

This is one reason why effective treatment for the alcoholic involves caring rather
than curing. The approach of Alcoholics Anonymous utilizes the realization that to induce --
or, more exactly, to allow -- humiliation can be an important initial therapeutic goal. The
informal format of A.A. meetings, their atmosphere of badinage and humorous confrontation,
is well-designed to achieve this goal.
An often-acted-out image may help to clarify: Any hurting person who seeks help brings to
therapy a tiny, flickering flame of self-esteem. Classic, guilt-oriented therapies strive to
nourish that tiny glimmer, to enlarge self-esteem. The initial response of Alcoholics
Anonymous is different. The newcomer who leads from self-esteem meets with caring
confrontation: he is offered, for example, a carefully half-filled cup of coffee. Such
confrontation of lingering denial invites the hesitant newcomer both to acknowledge the fact
of his shakes and to realize that the coffee-server who recognizes the shakes accepts them --
and him. The message is less "It's okay" than "It's tough, but I've been there too." Any flicker
of self-esteem that signals denial of the felt-worthlessness of shame is gently quashed rather
than nourished within A.A. Why? Because A.A. experience testifies that, until that denial is
shattered, its own constructive healing cannot be effective. The alcoholic must confront self-
as-feared if he is ever to find the reality of self-as-is.

This understanding captures the insight of Dr. Harry Tiebout in his classic psychiatric
exploration of the healing dynamic operative in Alcoholics Anonymous. Tiebout
distinguished between "compliance," which he saw as worse than useless because it obscured
the obsessive-compulsive nature of alcoholism, and "surrender," which he presented as the
key to the process of recovery. Tiebout's "compliance" may be understood as motivated by
guilt; "surrender," as enabled by the alcoholic's acceptance of his shame.

Denial, Tiebout realized, could continue despite acknowledgment of -- despite even attempts
at reparation for -- guilt. Guilt may even be a defense against confronting and accepting what
is denied, as when the alcoholic accepts responsibility for what he has done when drinking as
preferable to admitting that the drinking itself was beyond his control. Real guilt fears
punishment and tries to escape it. The shamed person, on the other hand, for example the
alcoholic just described, may seek and embrace punishment -- even by admitting "guilt" -- as
a confirmation aiding denial of what is most deeply feared: his own failure of being, his sense
of having failed as a human being.

Part Three: The Healing of Shame

I. Needing Others

In order to get beyond this hiding, in order to transcend this denial, in order to succeed as a
human being, any human being needs others. Despite the far too common misunderstanding
that has confused shame with embarrassment, "others" are not the problem in shame; they are
its solution.

Because of their essential limitation, human beings have needs. The denial of essential
limitation usually manifests itself not directly, but in the denial of need. The alcoholic's denial
of need is twofold: his denial of his need for alcohol blends into and intertwines with his
denial of his need for others. Early in the process of alcoholism, the alcoholic denies that it is
his unmet because insatiable need for others that leads him to seek comfort or excitement in
alcohol. "A few drinks" become more important than the people at a party, for example, as
alcohol becomes a surer source of satisfaction than human interaction. Later in the process,
after a few failures of "I can stop whenever I want to" (denial of the need for alcohol) the
denial becomes again of the need for others: "Just leave me alone -- I can lick this thing by
myself."

Alcoholics Anonymous breaks through these twin denials of need. As fellowship, A.A. invites
the alcoholic to discover her own need for others by being the one place where the alcoholic
herself is needed, and needed precisely and only as alcoholic. This leads to self-identification
as "alcoholic," and thus to admission of the need for alcohol. As program, A.A. builds on the
admission of the need for alcohol -- "I am an alcoholic" -- ever deepening awareness of one's
need for others. The Twelve Steps of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous begin with the
word "We," and A.A. ever emphasizes that it is "fellowship" as well as "program." Thus, the
vicious circle of denial of need -- for alcohol and for others -- is broken and replaced by a
twofold, mutually enhancing admission of need.

The "need for others" is, of course, the most famous facet of Alcoholics Anonymous. Those
outside A.A. often regard it condescendingly, interpreting it away as "the substitution of a
social dependence for a drug dependence"; or as "accepting the emotional immaturity of
alcoholics and supplying a crutch for it."

Yet independent observers have also recognized positive aspects in the acceptance of the
human need for others as inculcated by Alcoholics Anonymous. One psychiatrist located the
reason for A.A.'s success in this approach, which -- as opposed to some mere disease concept
of alcoholism -- inculcates in the alcoholic and many who would help him the "understanding
that human involvement is needed." Alcoholics Anonymous itself, faithful to its Tenth
Tradition, remains silent in the midst of this controversy. A.A. -- that is, A.A. members --
simply performs its chosen task -- helping alcoholics get and stay sober. And awarely or not,
they do this in part by healing shame.

II. Shame, Objectivity, and Caring

In dealing with shame, other people are not the problem: they are the solution. Both guilt and
shame are characterized by "shoulds," but it is the "should" of guilt that comes from outside,
from rules made by others. The "should" of shame arises from within, from the nature of the
human as essentially limited, yet craving infinity.

Another way of stating this is to observe that guilt is objective; shame, subjective. Because it
comes from outside, guilt arises objectively: the line that is crossed, the rule that is broken,
has objective existence outside oneself. Shame, in contrast, is a more subjective experience:
the goal fallen short of, the self-ideal that quests and claims unlimitedness -- these are part of
one's own nature, of the be-ing that one "owns." Because of this, shame cannot be healed
"objectively."

A funny thing about the modern world: the term "objective" tends to have a good connotation;
the term "subjective," to be pejorative. "Objectivity" is a praiseworthy goal: to speak
"objectively" is to require credence; calling someone's presentation "objective" is to praise it.
The parallel terms "subjectivity," "subjectively," and "subjective" are, on the contrary, put-
downs. One hears before them "merely," the implication of flaw and error. We live in a world,
indeed, in which "objective" equates with real, whereas "subjective" is taken to mean false,
unreal, imaginary.
Objectivity is especially desired and valued in the medical -- curing -- model. We need think
no further than the example of the surgeon. Surgeons do not operate on their own family
members, on persons with whom they have a caring relationship. Further, even the ordinary
patient's body is so prepared and draped for surgery that his personhood and individuality are
concealed insofar as possible. Everything about the aura, ritual, and procedures of the
operating theater is designed to enable the surgeon to perform her skill upon a body rather
than upon a person.

In dealing with things as do the physical sciences, or in applying the curing model to human
bodies as does medical science, "objectivity" is an obvious virtue. Objects are "out there":
how the perceiver relates to them does not make a difference to them. As for the perceiver,
"objectivity" enhances her observations of and actions upon objects.

But applied to human beings as human beings, as persons who are also subjects, the subject-
object model with its demand for "objectivity" dooms to failure. Thinking in terms of subject-
object renders others "they" -- necessarily apart from and over-against the self. Such a result,
indeed such an effort, inevitably distorts: human phenomena are never merely objects. In
dealing with human phenomena, that is to say, the flaw of "mereness" inheres in objectivity
rather than in subjectivity.

Accepting persons as ends-in-themselves, the Kantian imperative, is impossible in a Cartesian

world of subject-object relationships. Such acceptance of persons as persons becomes
possible only in a world-view that transcends the subject-object dichotomy -- a world in
which human relationships can be reciprocal and mutual because the subjectivity, the
personhood, of each individual is accepted as first truth. Alcoholics Anonymous is not the
only entity to postulate such a vision, such a reality, such a model of caring. But it is
specifically the A.A. world-view that concerns us here, and therefore it is the understanding of
human relationships that is witnessed to by the experience of Alcoholics Anonymous that we
shall examine in this exploration of the healing of shame.

II. Complementarity and the Mutualities that Heal Shame

Within Alcoholics Anonymous, human relationships are characterized by complementarity

and mutuality. Complementarity means that individuals fit into each other, thus enhancing
each other rather than merely "bumping into" and so chipping away at, diminishing, self and
others. In such relationships, each is to each other according to the needs of
both. Mutuality underlines this back-and-forth-ness: the two-way, reciprocal nature of
relationships that are truly human.

Such relationships furnish the invitation and the opportunity to grow and to expand; they are,
indeed, the only way to grow as human. As one profound student of the phenomenon of
shame has observed:

The ability to enter into relations of intimacy and mutuality opens the way to experiences in
which the self expands beyond its own limitations in depth of feeling, understanding, and
insight. One's own identity may be not weakened, but strengthened by the meaning one has
for others... and by respect for these other persons as distinct individuals.

This experience involves the risk of trusting oneself to other persons instead of regarding
them in object, status, or audience relations. It also means not allowing disappointment in
response from another person to lead to a denial of the expectation and possibility of love . . . .
A person who is unable to love cannot reveal himself.

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous achieve this ability and experience -- this vision of
complementary mutuality -- by deriving their awareness of their need for others from the
fundamental realization that they, as alcoholic, as essentially limited, can be fulfilled, made
whole, only by other essentially limited beings who also accept that limitation . . . by other
alcoholics.

The acceptance of essential limitation is not merely privative, the recognition of a lack. A.A.
members find a positive identity in their essential limitation. Within Alcoholics Anonymous,
the identification, "I am an alcoholic," is spoken not hesitatingly, in shy embarrassment, but
as a joyous affirmation. For within that setting of individuals who accept their own essential
limitation, one realizes not only that one needs others, but that one is oneself needed by those
others: thus the foundation for mutuality is established.

Making a difference

It is this perception and acceptance of mutuality that enables transcending the "self-
centeredness" that members of Alcoholics Anonymous understand to be "the root of our
troubles." The mutualities that Alcoholics Anonymous teaches, enables, and lives out are
especially three: they involve making a difference, honesty and dependence.

The sense that one is able to make a difference is a deeply basic human need; indeed,
Alcoholics Anonymous very unintentionally founded its fellowship upon this vital need. For
five months after A.A.'s chronologically first co-founder stopped drinking, he found no one
willing to accept his help. Then, alone in "the hick-town" of Akron, Ohio, in May 1935,
William Griffith Wilson, the sophisticated New Yorker, discovered that he needed another
alcoholic if he himself was to stay sober, and so he began the series of telephone calls that led
to his first meeting with Doctor Robert Holbrook Smith, not for the purpose of helping Doctor
Bob, but for what Bob, as another alcoholic, could give him. Perhaps an even more significant
moment occurred some days later at the bedside of the alcoholic who was to become "A.A.
Number Three." Wilson and Smith told Bill D. that talking with him was the only way they
could stay sober. Bill D. believed them, and therefore he listened:

All the other people that had talked to me wanted to help me, and my pride prevented me
from listening to them, and caused only resentment on my part, but 1 felt as if I would be a
real stinker if I did not listen to a couple of fellows for a short time, if that would cure them.

Later wise men have shared the same insight. The psychoanalyst R. D. Laing, for example,
criticized the classic therapeutic approach as defective precisely because of the model that
classic therapists present: "A prototype of the other as giver but not receiver...tends to
generate in self a sense of failure... Frustration becomes despair when the person begins to
question his own capacity to 'mean' anything to anyone." Elsewhere, Laing goes further,
suggesting explicitly that the sense of being "not able to make a difference" issues in shame
and despair rather than guilt: "the person experiences, not the absence of the presence of the
other, but the absence of his own presence as other for the other."

To appreciate the human necessity for a feeling of efficacy, the human need to make a
difference, is to touch the depths of the wisdom of Alcoholics Anonymous. Precisely here,
A.A. taps one of the few unchanging facets of the essence of the human condition. Ponder, for
example, in this context of how A.A. works, this insight (again Laing's) into the nature of the
thirst of modern mankind:

Every human being, whether child or adult, seems to require significance, that is place in
another person's world . . . . It seems to be a universal human desire to wish to occupy a place
in the world of at least one other person. Perhaps the greatest solace in religion is in the sense
that one lives in the Presence of an Other.

And, one might add, in "the Presence of an Other to whom what one does makes a
difference."

Mutuality means making a difference not by "giving and getting" but by giving by getting,
getting bygiving. This reciprocal conjunction of the experience of giving and the experience
of receiving characterizes not only Alcoholics Anonymous, but all expressions of human love.
This reality of love is one deep reason why Alcoholics Anonymous works.

We ourselves want to be needed. We do not only have needs, we are also strongly motivated
by neededness . . . . We are restless when we are not needed, because we feel "unfinished,"
"incomplete," and we can only get completed in and through these relationships. We are
motivated to search not only for what we lack and need but also for that for which we are
needed, what is wanted from us.

Honesty with self and others

The second mutuality taught by and put into practice within Alcoholics Anonymous involves
honesty. A.A. experience teaches that there exists an essential mutuality between honesty with
self and honesty with others: both may be present or both may be absent, but neither can exist
for any length of time without the other. Most newcomers to Alcoholics Anonymous come to
understand the necessary mutuality between honesty with self and with others precisely from
their personal experience of the inevitable mutuality of dishonesty with self and others.

Those who deceive themselves are obliged to deceive others. It is impossible for me to
maintain a false picture of myself unless I falsify your picture of yourself and me.

. . . it is a form of self-deception to suppose that one can say one thing and think another.

As with the mutuality of making a difference, of giving and getting, the mutuality involved in
honesty and dishonesty with self and others is not a unique discovery of Alcoholics
Anonymous. The most profound description of the process underlying this mutuality has been
offered by the research psychoanalyst who was called "the poet-philosopher of the current
human condition," Dr. Leslie H. Farber. His insight merits quotation at length, for it captures
a theme heard often in the personal histories narrated at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous --
and not only at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous:

As a child grows gradually aware of the absolute separateness of his being from all others in
the world, he discovers that this condition offers both pleasure and terror . . . To the extent
that he must -- or believes that he must -- toy with his own presentation of himself to others to
earn the attention and approval he craves . . . he will experience a queer, unnamable
apprehension . . . . This uneasy state is both painful and corrupting.
It is commonly believed that this pain and corruption are consequences of his low self-esteem
and fear of others' indifference and rejection, that these cause him to project himself falsely. It
seems more likely that once this habit begins to harden, the crucial source of pain is his
corruption. In his constant inability or unwillingness to tell the truth about who he is, he
knows himself in his heart to be faking.

Not merely is he ashamed of having and harboring a secret, unlovely, illegitimate self. The
spiritual burden of not appearing as the person he "is," or not "being" the person he appears to
be -- the extended and deliberate confusion of seeming and being -- is by and large intolerable
if held in direct view. If the integrity he craves is to be denied him, at least he will have its
illusion. If he cannot publicize his private self, . . then he will command his private self to
conform to the public one. This beguiles to a loss of truth; not only "telling" it,
but knowing it.

There are some things it is impossible both to do and at the same time to impersonate oneself
doing. Speaking truthfully is one of them.

There is, thus, a mutuality between honesty with self and honesty with others: it is necessary
to avoid self-deception if one is to be honest with others, but at the same time one must be
honest with others if one is to avoid self-deception. The drinking alcoholic, if she glimpses
this realization at all, finds in it only the most vicious of circles. One gift of A.A.'s insight is
the revelation that this mutuality can enhance growth rather than hasten self-destruction. How
to live its paradoxical wisdom becomes, for the sober alcoholic, an essential part of her
continuing participation in Alcoholics Anonymous as both fellowship and program.

Dependence and independence

Both mutualities already examined -- making a difference and honesty -- flow into the third
mutuality inherent in A.A.'s healing: that between dependence and independence. Here also,
A.A.'s insight into the essential connection between personal dependence and personal
independence derives from its central focus on the reality of essential limitation as the first
truth of the human condition. It is because the human is somehow the juncture of the infinite
with the limited -- because to be human is to be both angel and beast -- that human
dependence and human independence must be mutually related, not only between people but
within each person.

Mutuality means that each enables and fulfills the other. To speak of a mutuality between
human dependence and human independence, then, is to point out not only that both are
necessary within human experience, but also that each -- dependence and independence --
becomes fully human and humanizing only by connection with the other.

As already noted, most therapeutic approaches aim to make the alcoholic independent,
viewing personal dependence and personal independence as contradictory rather than
enhancing. Their goal of independence is not unrelated to their ideal of objectivity and their
hope of curing. Yet, as we saw in our treatment of the A.A. goals of limited control and
limited dependence, the alcoholic gains the freedom to not-drink only by acknowledging that
his problem is not "dependence on alcohol," but "dependence on alcohol." The experience of
Alcoholics Anonymous suggests that dependence is no more "cured" than is alcoholism:
rather, the alcoholic's dependence comes to be healed -- to be integrated into her whole
personality in a way that enhances her humanity -- by the mutuality of caring.

For specific reasons within the history of psychological thought, the study of continuing
human dependence has not found a central place in any theory of human development. Not
too long ago, this surprising lacuna began to be filled. At least one school of analytic
psychiatry achieved success by building on the fundamental insight: "Dependence versus
independence is the basic neurotic conflict." According to Donald Winnicott, one leader of
this school of thought that has given rise to "personal relationship therapy," for the truly
mature person, "dependence and independence do not become conflicting issues, rather they
are complementary."

The truly mature person, that is, experiences "ontological security." For the individual whose
own being becomes secured in this primary experiential sense, to be related with others is
potentially gratifying and fulfilling. The "ontologically insecure person," on the contrary, one
who has not come to terms with the complementarity of dependence and independence, is pre-
occupied with preserving rather than fulfilling self: he becomes obsessed with the task of
preventing himself from losing himself. Such an ontologically insecure person reaches out to
others in self-seeking dependency, out of the same needs that drive the alcoholic or addict to
seek chemical relief. Ontological insecurity undermines any possibility of true mutuality.

To be not-God, to be both beast and angel, is to be neither "all" nor "nothing": one is rather
some-one. The acceptance and affirmation of some-ness closes the door to the infantile claim
to be "all": "His Majesty the Baby," in the Freudian term of Dr. Harry Tiebout. The embrace
and cherishing of one-ness invites to the joyous pluralism of complementarity that is the
essential dynamic of Alcoholics Anonymous: the shared honesty of mutual vulnerability
openly acknowledged.

Dependence and independence, then, are mutually related. Independence is enriched by

dependence just as our waking hours can be fruitful only if we obtain adequate sleep.
Likewise, constructive dependence requires independence just as healthy sleep requires
adequate waking exercise. The very rhythms of human life reflect the mutuality inherent in
human nature. In a sense one "charges batteries" by dependence, thus enabling independent
operation. The reverse of the analogy proves equally true: being dependent without exercising
independence is like over-charging a battery rarely used -- destructive of both the self and the
source.

Alcoholics Anonymous, both in its suggestion of a "Higher Power" and in the way its
meetings work, invites and enables the living out of this mutuality between human
dependence and personal independence. The First Step of the A.A. program establishes the
foundation for this understanding: only by acknowledging continuing dependence upon
alcohol does the A.A. member achieve the continuing independence of freedom from
addiction to alcohol.

Part Four: Conclusion

I. Being "Both": The Nature of Freedom

Any true healing of shame will accept the necessary mutualities that flow from the essential
limitation of the human condition. It will recognize that "others" -- other individuals aware of
their own essential limitation -- play a twofold role in this healing: (1) their example
facilitates the acceptance of one's own limitation; (2) their presence enables a degree of
transcendence of limitation, for they invite living the mutualities of making a difference,
honesty, and dependence-independence.

Shame contains a "not"-- the "not" imposed by essential limitation. That "not" is to be neither
severed nor undone: it is lodged in the very essence of our human be-ing. To be honestly
human is to be aware that one falls short -- to accept that the ability to be is also the ability to
be not. Thus, to be human is to experience shame -- to feel "bad" about the not-ness lodged in
one's essence. Why this feeling-bad of shame? Because of the anomalous nature of the human
as beast-angel, as essentially limited yet craving unlimitedness. The anomaly is inherent, for
to be human is to be "both/and" rather than "either-or." Confronted with the task of being
human, one must live both its polarities: one cannot be only either. The shame of "feeling to
blame" arises from the necessary imperfection of such both-ness: inevitably one falls short of
being either beast or angel -- neither can be total so long as both are actual.

Within Alcoholics Anonymous, within any group based on the shared honest of mutual
vulnerability openly acknowledged, the individual in the process of recovering her humanity
learns that there exists a necessary connection between being limited and being real. The
practice of mutuality -- and it does take "practice" -- inculcates the truths that to be real is to
be limited, and that to be limited is to be real.

This necessary fact of the human condition is perhaps clearest in the matter of the alcoholic's
"freedom" in relation to alcohol. The recovering alcoholic learns first in Alcoholics
Anonymous that his freedom, although real, is limited -- and that his freedom, although
limited, is real. Free to drink, the alcoholic is not free to not drink. To attain the freedom to
not drink, the alcoholic accepts limitation of his freedom to drink. But this realization,
important as it is, does not suffice for true, joyous sobriety. The alcoholic in recovery must
come to see, however hazily, that this acceptance is not a concession. The word "although,"
that is to say, must be replaced by the affirmation "because": because real, freedom is
limited; because limited, freedom is real.

The ongoing experience of recovery continually reminds the alcoholic how the apparently
unlimited freedom to drink inevitably leads to increasing bondage and ever greater losses of
freedom (to work, to love and to be loved, to live). The same experience of recovery also
progressively reveals, on the other hand, how the limited freedom to not drink brings in its
wake ever increasing freedoms. The recovering alcoholic within Alcoholics Anonymous thus
learns a profound truth: with freedom as with any other human phenomenon, to be real is to
be limited, for limitation proves reality. This understanding enables joyous acceptance of the
human condition as well as true recovery from alcoholic addiction. It enables these "both"
because, at depth, that acceptance and that recovery are one and the same.

In some almost incomprehensible way, the words sobriety, serenity, and, yes, sanctity name
the same reality.

II. Pluralism, Tolerance, Complementarity, and Love

This is the profound lesson of Alcoholics Anonymous: truly human living begins with the
creative acceptance of the reality of essential human limitation -- with the embrace of the not-
ness, the "shame," that inheres at the core of human be-ing. Two final concepts carry that
insight to its conclusion as that is lived out in groups rooted in the shared honesty of mutual
vulnerability openly acknowledged:pluralism and complementarity.

Pluralism means accepting that, among those essentially limited, there can be no one way of
being that is perfect or "best." "Easy Does It," cautions A.A.: "Live and Let Live."

Complementarity suggests that imperfect beings can aid in completing or fulfilling each other.
The "experience, strength, and hope" of each alcoholic enhances the experience, strength, and
hope of every other alcoholic within A.A.

Alcoholics Anonymous enables -- indeed thrives on -- pluralistic complementarity because

each member not only accepts limitation but finds in that very limitation ("I am an alcoholic")
the basis for relating to others within their fellowship. Because they relate to each other so
consciously from shared weakness (their alcoholism), A.A. members give and get without
threat: alike in weakness, they find in their differences only strength. Most other human
associations are formed on the basis of some strength, some positive quality by which one
contributes to the group. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous belong to their fellowship
because of their weakness, something they cannot do -- imbibe alcohol in a way their culture
deems normal.

Alcoholics Anonymous arrived at its acceptance of pluralism honestly. The insight, and its
implications, were at first uncongenial to a fellowship whose members were characterized by
obsessive-compulsive behavior -- alcoholics who, as co-founder Bill Wilson never tired of
reminding, tended to be "all-or-nothing people." Yet Alcoholics Anonymous, largely through
Bill Wilson, learned the lesson of pluralistic tolerance from early on:

In the early days of A.A. I spent a lot of time trying to get people to agree with me, to practice
A.A. principles as I did, and so forth. For so long as I did this . . . A.A. grew very slowly.

A.A. works for people with differing views -- that is good.

Honesty gets us sober but tolerance keeps us sober.

Very early in A.A. history, indeed, Wilson intuited and skillfully inculcated the unshakeable
basis for the fellowship's tolerance of even apparent perversity as well as of every diversity:

The way our "worthy" alcoholics have sometimes tried to judge the "less worthy" is, as we
look back on it, rather comical. Imagine, if you can, one alcoholic judging another!

Tolerance flows naturally from A.A.'s central focus on human essential limitation. Because
human beings are essentially limited, any individual's possession of truth must be limited, if it
is real. In fostering such tolerance, Alcoholics Anonymous teaches not only an openness to
pluralism that accepts difference, but the sense of complementarity that welcomes and values
diversity. ". . . tolerance keeps us sober." And without differences, after all, there could be no
tolerance.
Because of the essential limitation of human existence, because of the mixed nature of the
human condition as not-God, as beast-angel, as essentially limited yet craving "more," each
human being is incomplete. Because of this incompleteness, each needs others. Because of
this essential incompleteness, indeed, each person most clearly discovers and reveals his own
nature by the particular ways in which he needs other essentially limited human beings.

Because any "other" is also essentially incomplete, any constructive human relationship is
characterized by complementarity -- the sense that each fulfills the other. Complementarity,
because it is founded on the essential limitation of both, involves acceptance by each of the
other as an-other who is also person, and therefore as concrete, unique, different, potentially
enriching individual. This awareness of complementarity opens to the mutual sense of mutual
fulfillment. The sense of complementarity consists in the realization that the existence of both
is affirmed by each other, that the differences of each enrich rather than threaten the other.

This understanding reflects the model of love hymned throughout the ages by poets and
philosophers: biological heterosexuality, the complementarity of male and female. Most
obviously in this prototype, love -- the mutuality of giving and receiving that enhances and
fulfills -- flourishes because of difference rather than despite it. Alcoholics Anonymous
teaches love because love itself derives from the acceptance of essential human limitation.
The denial of essential limitation renders love impossible, for denying limitation and therefore
rejecting complementarity leads to demanding in "love" only likeness -- a demand that results
either in narcissism or in the destructive attempt to impose likeness, and neither of these can
be love. The pluralistic insight, the kind of tolerance that derives from the acceptance of
essential limitation, on the other hand, finds difference enriching rather than threatening: it
thus opens to the love that flourishes not despite difference, but because of it.

Recognizing, admitting, and accepting essential limitation can be terrifying. Consciousness of

essential limitation can raise the defenses that wall off others and therefore preclude love. But
it need not, as the experience of Alcoholics Anonymous testifies. Members of Alcoholics
Anonymous seem not only to grasp but to improve upon Goethe's maxim: "Against the
superiority [difference] of another, there is no remedy but love.

Enlarging the possibilities of mutuality -- of pluralism and complementarity -- requires risk.

Expanding the scope of mutual love depends upon risking exposure: the honesty that reveals
essential limitation and thus admits need must confront shame. The program and fellowship
of Alcoholics Anonymous enable such risk and confrontation by inculcating the qualities of
hope and trust that permit truly free choice. Accepting contingency (not-God-ness) equips one
to survive and even to flourish in a world of possibility. Such acceptance cures addiction, in
the sense that it reveals addiction's inherent untruth.

Whenever the desire for emotional security becomes primary over all else, for whatever
reason, addiction sets in . . . . Because he is so vulnerable, what the addict is ideally striving
for is perfect invulnerability. He only gives himself in exchange for the promise of safety.

But there is no absolute safety, not for the alcoholic, not for the addict, not for any human
being. For the human condition admits of neither perfection nor invulnerability. The
"experience, strength, and hope" of the members of Alcoholics Anonymous suggest that it is
precisely the crack of imperfection, the admission of vulnerability, that reveal -- un-veil -- the
reality of human be-ing. And if this be true for alcoholics, perhaps all of us might glimpse its
truth for us in a brief meditation:
Honesty involves exposure: the exposure of self-as-feared that leads to the discovery of self-
as-is. Both of these selves are essentially vulnerable: to be is to be able to hurt and to be hurt.
But something tells us that we should not hurt: that we should neither hurt others nor hurt
within ourselves. Yet we do -- both hurt and hurt, both cause and feel pain.

When we cause pain, we experience guilt; when we feel pain, we suffer shame. The pain, the
hurt, the guilt of the first is overt: it exists outside of us, "objectively." The pain, the hurt, the
shame of the second is hidden: it gnaws within, it is "subjective." Neither can be healed
without confronting the other. A bridge is needed -- a connection between the hurt that we
cause and the hurt that we are.

That bridge cannot be built alone. The honesty that is its foundation must be shared. A bridge
cannot have only one end. Without sharing, there can be no bridge. But a bridge needs a span
as well as foundations. This bridge's span is vulnerability -- the capacity to be wounded, the
ability to know hurt. "I need" because "I hurt" -- if deepest need is honest. What I need is
another's hurt, another's need. Such a need on my part would be "sick" -- if the other had not
the same need of me, of my hurt and my need. Because we share hurt, we can share healing.
Because we know need, we can heal each other.

Our mutual healing will be not the healing of curing, but the healing of caring. To heal is to
make whole. Curing makes whole from the outside: it is good healing, but it cannot touch my
deepest need, my deepest hurt -- my shame, the dread of myself that I harbor within. Caring
makes whole from within: it reconciles me to myself-as-I-am -- not-God, beast-angel, human.
Caring enables me to touch the joy of living that is the other side of my shame, of my not-
God-ness, of my humanity.

But I can care, can become whole, only if you care enough -- need enough -- to share your
shame with me.

Could the same be true for you?

NOTES

1. [William Griffith Wilson], "The Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous," in Alcohol,

Science and Society (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1945), p. 472.

2. Often, the kind of fellowships described here are referred to as "Self-Help Groups." As
students of these groups are increasingly recognizing, that term is a misnomer: fellowships
such as Alcoholics Anonymous are far more accurately named and understood as "Mutual-
Aid Groups." Some reasons for this will be made clear in the concluding part of this
presentation.

3. Cf. Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, & World, 1958), pp. 35-36.

4. Cf Lynd, pp. 24-26.

5. Cf. William Barrett, Irrational Man (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 225-227; on the
root, angh-, cf. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, rev. and ed. by
Calvert Watkins (Boston: Houthton Mifflin, 1985), p. 2.

6. Letters in which Wilson used this phrase or "spiritual kindergarten" include (all from New
York City) to Caryl Chessman, 3 May 1954; to Dr. Tom P., 4 April 1955; to Walter B., 1 July
1958; to Father K., 28 July 1958; to Betty L., 8 December 1967.

7. Alcoholics Anonymous (Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. New York: 2001 rev.
ed), pp. 58-60.

8. As quoted by Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God (New York: Humanities Press, 1964), p.
188.

9. As quoted by Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City (New York:
Mentor, 1964), p. 188.

10. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 58.

11. Cf. Lynd, pp. 94-96, 145-147.

12. On alcoholism as a metaphor for the human condition, cf. Ernest Kurtz, Not-God: A
History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1991 rev. ed.), pp. 200-202.

13. e.g. Wilson (New York) to Howard Clinebell, 15 November 1960; to Patricia N., 7
January 1963; to Bob C., 23 June 1964.

14. The original wording of A.A.'s Seventh Step may be found in the "Pre-Publication
(Multilith) Copy of the Big Book(1939)": Alcoholic's [sic] Anonymous (Newark, NJ: Works
Publishing, 1939), p. 26; this version and adaptations of it are now (2007) plentifully available
on the internet.

15. For the story of A.A.'s discovery and adoption of "The Serenity Prayer," cf. Alcoholics
Anonymous /comes of Age (New York: A.A. World Services, Inc., 1957), p. 196; As Bill Sees
It (New York: A.A. World Services, Inc., 1967), p. 108.

16. Cf. Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (New York: International
Universities Press, 1971), pp. 81, 84.

17. On "the disease-concept of alcoholism," cf E. M. Jellinek, The Disease Concept of

Alcoholism (New Haven: College and University Press, 1960; Mark Keller, "The Disease
Concept of Alcoholism Revisited," Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 37: 1674-1717 (1976) Cf.
also Ernest Kurtz, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (Center City, MN: Hazelden,
1991 rev ed.) pp 22-23 on A.A.'s use of the term malady and Part Two on the "disease-
metaphor of alcoholism."

18. Cf, Lynd, On Shame, pp. 40, 64, 235.

19. Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 62.

20. H.J. Almond, "Moral Re-Armament: The Oxford Group," unpublished Master's thesis,
Yale University, 1947, p.12. [A copy of this thesis, with no further identification, was made
available to me by a member of Moral Re-Armament during my own dissertation research
that became the book, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous.]

21. Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (New York: A.A World Services, Inc, 1978), pp. 57,
62; note that this is according to the "Sixteenth Printing, February 1978"; the pagination of
this book differs in different printings; earlier than 1978, for example, these quotations
appeared on pp. 59 and 63.

22. On the root of shame, cf. Joseph T. Shipley, The Origins of English Words (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins, 1984), p. 363; also Lynd, On Shame, pp. 27-32; the excerpt from Maugham
appears on pp. 29-30.

23. For a deeper exploration of this idea, cf. David G. Edwards, "Shame and Pain and 'Shut up
or I'll Really Give You Something to Cry About,'" Clinical Social Work Journal 4: 3-13
(1976); for the quotations in the next paragraph, 7-12.

24. Harry M. Tiebout, "The Act of Surrender in the Therapeutic Process," Quarterly Journal
of Studies on Alcohol 10: 48-58 (1959); "Surrender Versus Compliance in
Therapy," QJSA 14: 58-68 (1963).

25. Stanton Peele (with Archie Brodsky), Love and Addiction (New York: Taplinger, 1975),
p. 232.

26. Francis T. Chambers, Jr., "Analysis and Comparison of Three Treatment Measures for
Alcoholism: Antabuse, the Alcoholics Anonymous Approach, and Psychotheraphy," British
Journal of Addiction 50: 29-41 (1951).

27. William Glasser, The Identity Society (New York: Harper and Row Perennial, 1976), p.
58.

28. I am aware of Heisenberg and the insights others have brought especially to the world of
sub-atomic physics, also of the various vagaries of post-modern imaginings; but as stated
here, the point is valid for ordinary people dealing with ordinary realities in ordinary daily
life.

29. Lynd, On Shame, pp. 159-160.

30. Alcoholics Anonymous [1976, 3rd ed.], p. 185.

31. R. D. Laing, Self and Others (Baltimore: Pelican, 1971), pp.84-85.

32. Laing, Self and Others, p. 138.

33. Laing, Self and Others, p. 136.

34. Andras Angyal, quoted by Milton Mayeroff, On Caring (New York: Harper and Row
Perennial, 1971), frontispiece.
35. Laing, Self and Others, p. 143.

36. R. D. Laing,

The Divided Self (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965), p. 18.

37. Leslie H. Farber, Lying, Despair, Jealousy, Envy, Sex, Suicide, Drugs and the Good
Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 196-198.

38. A brief summary of this point may be found in Willard Gaylin, "In the Beginning," in
Gaylin et al, Doing Good: The Limits of Benevolence (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 12 ff.
Readers will also find helpful on this and related topics Philip Cushman, Constructing the
Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (Boston: Addison-Wesley,
1995).

39. This line of thought is best summarized in Harry Guntrip, Psychoanalytic Theory,
Therapy, and the Self (New York: Basic Books, 19731), cf. especially, and for he quotations
here, pp. 115, 118, 126, 190.

40. The dangers inherent in the alcoholic's craving for inappropriate dependence were a
constant theme of A.A. co-founder Bill W.; cf. Kurtz, Not-God, pp. 210 ff. and the sources
cited there.

41. Wilson (New York) to May M., 24 August 1964.

42. Wilson (New York) to John G., 9 October 1967.

43. [William G. Wilson], "The Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous," in Alcohol, Science

and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945), p. 472.

44. [Wilson], "Who is a Member of Alcoholics Anonymous -- by Bill," The A.A.

Grapevine 3:3 (August 1946), 3.

45. Gegen grosse Vorzuge eines andern gibt es kein rettungsmittel als die Leibe: Johann
Wolfgang Goethe, Gedenkausgabe Der Werke, Briefe Und Gesprache (Zurich: Ernst Beutler,
1949), p. 176; a translation may be found in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Elective Affinities; tr.
Elizabeth Mayer and Louise Bogan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963), p. 191.

46. Peele, Love and Addiction, pp. 111, 67.

© Copyright 2007 by Ernest Kurtz. From the Hindsfoot Foundation website

at http://hindsfoot.org/ This material may be copied and reproduced by others subject to the
restrictions given at http://hindsfoot.org/copyright.html
In practicing our Traditions, Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. has neither
endorsed nor are they affiliated with Silkworth.net. Alcoholics Anonymous®, AA®, and the
Big Book® are registered trademarks of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.

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