Booth, Fr. Leo

An author and trainer in spirituality and recovery.

His self-description at FatherLeo.com includes:

…Father Leo Booth is a priest cut from a very different cloth. He says you don’t have to be religious to be spiritual. He’s as likely to quote from the Beatles, The Velveteen Rabbit, or Oscar Wilde, as he is from the Bible. His passion is to help people discover that God and spirituality are not “out there” somewhere, but are found within ourselves and our world…

Father Leo was born in England and raised in a home divided by religious arguments. Driven and ambitious, he became one of the youngest rectors in England. He also became an alcoholic and a religious addict. After a drunken car crash in 1977 led to his treatment for alcoholism, he subsequently devoted his work to helping addicts and others who suffer from low self-esteem. From his work as both priest and an addictions counselor, he has developed a new spiritual model based on Choice, Action, Responsibility, and Empowerment.

Dodes, Lance

Dr. Lance Dodes (DOE-dess), MD is a psychiatrist with more than a quarter-century of clinical experience. He takes a psychoanalytic approach to working with substance abuse, as described in his 2002 book, The Heart of Addiction: A New Approach to Understanding and Managing Alcoholism and Other Addictive Behaviors.

An article at HippoPress.com, expands on his qualifications:

He teaches at Harvard Medical School and directs the Boston Center for Problem Gambling. He has treated hundreds of addicts and directed various alcoholism treatment units in New England.

And it describes his thoughts on powerlessness:

People with addiction, believes Dodes, need to feel less powerless. This seems to conflict with the Alcoholics Anonymous credo that alcoholics need to admit they are powerless over alcohol… Dodes finds value in AA, but takes issue with this tenet.

On page 4 of his book, Dodes says:

Virtually every addictive act is preceded by a feeling of helplessness or powerlessness. Addictive behavior functions to repair this underlying feeling of helplessness. It is able to do this because taking the addictive action (or even deciding to take this action) creates a sense of being empowered, of regaining control over one’s emotional experience and one’s life.

And, the HippoPress article sums up his response to powerlessness this way:

AA’s injunction to surrender your power “is clearly not for everyone. However, along with other AA concepts, the ‘surrendering’ notion is often described as the only way to address alcoholism … and that is a myth that is both wrong and hurtful.”

Read more about Dr. Dodes in this 3-page PDF at the Harvard Medical School website.

London psychotherapist James Hamilton, whose specialties include addiction and smoking cessation, named Dodes’ book “the most important book on addiction to be written in the last ten years.”

He also explains a key Dodes concept here in the context of a commuter who has fought large crowds and late trains on his trip home after a long day:

Lance Dodes notices something very important that I had missed entirely. He spotted that addicts of all stripes … start to feel better at the moment they have decided to indulge their addiction, not at the time when the addiction action actually takes place. So my commuter, who has decided to get drunk, starts to feel better not at the time of the first drink, but at the moment he or she decides to get drunk i.e. somewhat earlier. There is a moment when the addict, experiencing frustration and helplessness, says “f*** it! I’m just going to drink/inject/smoke/gamble/ring a sex line”; and it’s then that they start to feel better.

Ford, Betty

A layperson by training, and a leader because of her collaboration with co-founders in the founding of the Betty Ford Center (BFC).

Entered treatment for alcohol and prescription drug abuse in 1978; BFC was founded in 1982.

Her openness contributed to long-term growth in alcoholism awareness, as seen in widespread acceptance of 12-step programs and increased sales of the Big Book during the 1980s.

Wilson, Bill

Bill W. co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous.

At a time when his doctors believed his only viable path to abstinence might be long-term institutionalization, Bill Wilson had an awakening late in 1934.

It spurred him not only into sobriety but ignited a life-long desire to help other alcoholics get sober and stay sober.

Religious influences

The folks who helped Bill were members of the Oxford Group, a Christian group seeking personal growth through their faith. He tested his religious options, particularly in the early portion of his sobriety, but the long-term religious theme for his life was agnosticism.

Dr. Bob

Five months into his sobriety, after disappointing attempts to help other alcoholics, Bill met Dr. Bob. A physician whose practice was failing due to his years of alcoholism, Bill was instrumental in bringing a fresh approach to sobriety into Bob’s life.

They joined forces in expanding the Oxford Group’s outreach to help other alcoholics.

Founding of AA

Ultimately, the Oxford Group and its alcoholic contingent parted ways, and Bill and Dr. Bob’s voices grew clearer and more determined. Although not named as such until a couple of years afterward, the start of Bob’s long-term abstinence in June 1935 has been marked as the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Author of the 12 Steps and the Big Book

Bill was the initial drafter of the 12 steps as part of his authorship of the first 11 chapters of the Big Book, published in 1939.

He visualized AA as a movement which would help alcoholics everywhere with the concepts he molded, and yet with an organizational structure driven by principles, not personalities, requiring him to lead by consensus-building.

Gentle, human giant

Respected by his peers in AA as a gentle giant, Bill was known as a man who welcomed all and liked nothing better than talking things out one-on-one with an alcoholic in need.

Succeeding in recovery still left him human and challenged, as recounted by Francis Hartigan on page 2 of Bill W.: A Biography of Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounder Bill Wilson:

Even after he quit drinking, Wilson had a number of personal problems, and he regarded as moral failings his inability to deal with them successfully. His financial situation never truly righted itself, his womanizing continued, and no matter how severely it affected his health, he could never manage to quit smoking. There was also the fact that he could not find any effective means of dealing with his cripping depression.

Bill’s lesser-known thoughts

Although skeptical about moderate drinking as a long-term solution, Bill encouraged folks who didn’t find their lives to be unmanageable to work on controlled drinking. In the description of the first step in 12 Steps and 12 Traditions, he noted that some of the folks trying out AA were “scarcely more than potential alcoholics”, and:

To the doubters we could say, “Perhaps you’re not an alcoholic after all. Why don’t you try some more controlled drinking, bearing in mind meanwhile what we have told you about alcoholism?” This attitude brought immediate and practical results. It was then discovered that when one alcoholic had planted in the mind of another the true nature of his malady, that person could never be the same again. Following every spree, he would say to himself, “Maybe those A.A.’s were right…”

He was painfully aware of, and frustrated by, the large numbers who had not been reached or helped by AA. From the Afterward of his autobiography Bill W: My First 40 years, p. 167:

While the overall AA program moved toward stability and maturity, Bill still seemed obsessed with those who somehow weren’t able to make AA work for them. Warning of the dangers of pride and complacency, he challenged AA members at AA’s thirtieth anniversary meeting [in 1965] with a question: “What happened to the 600,000 who approached AA and left?”

That concern was tied to the friends who had been instrumental in Bill’s path to sobriety, yet unable to sustain it themselves. One of them was Ebby Thacher, who had led Bill to the Oxford Group, but relapsed a couple of years later and many more times before his death by emphysema in 1966. As recounted in the Hartigan bio:

Whenever a grateful AA member asked Bill if there was anything he could do for him, Bill invariably replied, “Well, I just wish there was something we could do to help Ebby.”