There is Nothing Anonymous About AA

I have met so many people who gladly share (as if we care):

"My name is . . . and I am a friend of Bill W."

Or they tell us plainly "I am an alcoholic."

I cannot believe how brazenly individuals violate anonymity.

The very program which they claim to participate in mandates that they do not disclose their affiliation with the program.

The Twelfth Tradition mandates that the members of AA remain anonymous at the level of press, radio, and film so that everyone remembers to place principles before personalities.

Yet the personalities of too many members just will not permit them to keep quiet about their membership.

Not only that, but the program has now been reaching out to people through advertisements in local papers and on television.

The cult is losing its cult-like hold on members as more people seek real life and real solutions as opposed to a program which keeps them in bondage by compelling them to identify with a failing.

Terrible, just terrible.

Besides, there is very little anonymity in meetings to begin with. Members share their most difficult struggles or worst trials, and someone else who was supposed to keep these sins and defects of character in place noises them about for all to hear.

Where's the life in that? Where's the anonymity in that?

The very notion of "anonymity" rests on the real problem which afflicts alcoholics, and all individuals who struggle with addictions, perversions, or bad habits.

Shame, reproach, condemnation.

Seeking to remain anonymous does not give anyone any solace from shame or blame. The seared conscience of wrong-doing never leaves a person, even if they have confided their worst sins to a priest, a Rabbi, or any other trustworthy figure.

I had done and thought and said things that caused me great shame, but the sense of guilt and shame still never left me. No matter how many times I confided to another person the things that I had thought or done, I never felt safe, either.

Oftentimes in meetings, I would share with others the fear that I had of other people finding out what I had said or done.

The terror does not go away. The anonymity about these issues does not solve the problem.

"Someone else knows! Someone else will find out!"

Thank God for the blood of Jesus Christ:

"O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? 25I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin." (Romans 7: 24-25)

and then

"There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." (Romans 8: 1, ASB)

No condemnation at all because we are in Christ, and in Christ all our sins were paid for.

We have a New Covenant cut for us, because Christ is our representative at the right hand of God the Father, and there Jesus justifies us and intercedes for us (Romans 8: 31-34)

We are not anonymous to God the Father, because He knows us better than we know ourselves, and He knows us because He reckons us alive in Christ Jesus:

"Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

12Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof." (Romans 6: 11-12)

That versus "let not sin reign" gives us the power to overcome every perversion in our flesh, including drugs and alcohol, because we see that we are dead to all of those evil motions of sin in our bodies and our carnal mind.