I have heard that new members should go to 90 meetings in 90 days came from court requirements, as an alternative to 90 days in jail. I suppose that it may have been noted that it worked and therefore was adopted in AA in various places. As well as forming a positive habit, it seems to me that it would be a way to get comfortable with AA people, take up time formally spent in bars and give people a safe places to spend time, at a time when it would be pretty easy to get into trouble. I got into AA directly, rather than from a rehab. It seems that a lot of patients taken to AA meetings see this as a part of the treatment, to be dropped when discharged. While in treatment anyway, people may not get a true sense of what meetings could do for them. To me they were a kind of substitute medication that helped me to cope with my job and life in general, and I didn't feel like I could do without them. Going to more meetings was like increasing the dose. I recall a guy in a meeting who said that, if someone offered him a pill that would keep him stoned for the rest of his life, he would say, "OK. I'll take two."
I went to about 10 meetings a week for the first three years, becoming addicted to them as I had been to booze, but I see them now as a pretty healthy addiction. Just before I went to Japan over 20 years ago, I got up at a meeting and said I thought I had probably gone to too many meetings when I was new. A guy called Broken Hill Jack who had been to a lot of my early meetings walked up to me afterwards and asked how I knew I went to too many, as I was still sober and couldn't know if I would be if I hadn't gone to all those meetings. I then recalled that he had spoken of building a foundation for recovery, and that he saw lots of meetings, as well as trying to work on the Steps, as what is needed to build that. In tough times, I have often had to rely on my recollection of what I heard in those meetings.
After three years of 10 meetings a week, I stepped things up a bit by going to work full time as deputy director of a kind of rehab. I went with some kids from there and spoke at a Catholic Girls' high school in Sydney one day. At the back of the room we were in, there was a poster with a picture of an old sailing ship on it, with the following written underneath:
"Ships are safe in harbors, but that's not what ships are built for."
I think most of us need to spend some time in a harbor early in sobriety, concentrating on getting to lots of meetings, saying the Serenity Prayer and staying away from the first drink. There also comes a time to get out of the harbor and do something with life, but not until one is seaworthy. Even when doing 10 meetings a week, that was probably no more than the time I had been spending in pubs, and I doubt I could have found a more productive way to spend my time.
I doubt if 90 in 90 could or should become part of AA gospel. There are only three meetings a week within and hour's drive where I live now, so it probably wouldn't be practical. But it seem that God does help those rare alcoholics willing to do what they can to stay sane and sober as long as they do what they can with what they have. |