AA meaning in Community ?
Answer: What is Alcoholics Anonymous mean?
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is an international fellowship requiring no membership dues or fees dedicated to helping alcoholics peer to peer in sobriety through its spiritually inclined Twelve Steps program. Non-professional, non-denominational, self-supporting and apolitical, an avowed desire to stop drinking is its sole requirement for membership. Despite not endorsing the disease model of alcoholism, to which its program is nonetheless sympathetic, its wider acceptance is partly due to many AA members independently promulgating it. As of 2020, having spread to diverse cultures, including geopolitical areas normally resistant to grassroots movements, AA has had an estimated worldwide membership of over two million with 75% of those in the U.S. and Canada.
AA marks 1935 as its beginning when a 6 months sober Bill Wilson (Bill W.), believing he could prolong his sobriety through helping another alcoholic, met a detoxing Dr. Bob Smith M.D. (Dr. Bob) in an Akron, Ohio hospital. Wilson put to Smith that alcoholism was not a failure of will or morals, but a malady from which he had recovered as a member of the Christian revivalist Oxford Group. After exiting the Oxford Group to form a fellowship of alcoholics only, Wilson and Smith, along with other early members, wrote Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism. Published in 1939 and commonly called "the Big Book", it contains AA's Twelve Step recovery program. Later editions added the Twelve Traditions, first adopted in 1946, to formalize and unify the fellowship as a “benign anarchy”.
The Twelve Steps are presented as a suggested self-improvement program of initially admitting powerlessness over alcohol and acknowledging its damage, then listing and striving to correct personal failings, making of amends for past misdeeds, and continued spiritual development while helping other alcoholics towards sobriety through the Steps. The Steps also suggest the healing aid of an unspecified God—"as we understood Him"—but are nonetheless accommodating to agnostic, atheist, and non-theist members.
The Traditions hold that helping others recover from alcoholism is AA's primary purpose. That it should have no opinions on anything else to avoid public controversy. That members and groups should not use AA to gain wealth, prestige, or property. That dogma and hierarchies are to be avoided. That AA groups are autonomous and self-supporting—declining outside contributions—but are barred from lending the AA name to other entities. And, without threat of retribution or means of enforcement, that members should remain anonymous in public media.
With AA's permission, subsequent fellowships such as Narcotics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous have adapted the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions to their addiction recovery programs.
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