Stick with the winners

By definition, if there are winners, then there must be losers, right?

And therein has always been my problem with this slogan.

For the new kids, AA has any number of mottoes -- among the most famous of course are Easy Does It and One Day at a Time.  Whether you think they're cornball or cogent (come on, that was pretty good) the great thing about the slogans is they stick in your head -- they boil an important idea down to its essence -- and I can tell you from personal experience that when an alcoholic is in meltdown a slogan can get through the fog better than a more complex thought.

Another of these AA slogans, a bit less well known, is "Stick with the winners."  The spirit of this credo is obviously smart.  If you want to be successful at something, identify the people who are achieving the result you want and do what they did.  Hardly a revolutionary idea.

So "stick with the winners" means, in this sense, to find the people who seem happy and successful in staying sober and model your AA Program after theirs.  

Without placing a big winner/loser value judgment on anyone, if you have a friend (for example) who regularly suggests ditching the meeting to go see the latest Pixar release ... well, they may be a terrific person and a blast to hang out with, but this is not what I would call a 'winning' way to approach staying sober.  I could be wrong though.  Next time you want to drink give Pixar a call and see if that helps.

But there is a stealth assumption that slithers along underneath this "winners" slogan.  If the people who are involved in AA and thus staying sober are in fact winners ... then ... the people who have a hard time with AA and a difficult time with relapse are ...

not winners.

And the word in Western Culture for "not winners" is "losers."

But there are no losers in AA.

AA does not have any losers.

No one is an AA loser.

Pop Quiz:

How many losers are there in AA?  (Correct answer: Zero).

The slogan "stick with the winners" is great -- good advice all the way around.  It's the inferred corollary which is false.

Finally, consider this:

If someone had a hard time, due to a fear of needles, self-administering their insulin to treat diabetes, would you call them a loser?  If a person felt so lousy after chemo they found it difficult to be compliant with their after-care protocol, would you call them a loser?  Obviously not.  Those are medical issues with understandable complications which make it hard to follow through on treatment.

And the same is true of alcoholism and recovery.  Our fear and our lousy feelings get in the way of our medicine too, sometimes.

So yes, AA has winners.

But never any losers.  The stakes are far, far too high for that.