I appreciate your comment. Sorry that it stayed in que for so long! I get a lot of spam on this site, so I have to manually approve comments. I thought I had approved it the day after you gave it, but for some reason it didn’t go through, and I just saw it again in the cue tonight.

First off, I should say that I agree with you that, when practiced correctly, the SAA approach is the best, and its members wind up with a more tailored, and often stricter set of boundaries for their “inner circle” (definition of sobriety). But this presupposes that they are honest with their sponsor, that they are even working with a sponsor at all, and that their sponsor knows what he/she is doing.

You’ve listed an example of someone engaging in a behavior that is destructive and addictive, but does not fit the “MAP” criteria. I agree with you that in such a case, the SA definition, or the MAP definition of sobriety doesn’t cover this kind of behavior. But I would also guess that this kind of behavior wouldn’t get addressed in the general meetings at an SAA meeting either. Working with a sponsor, and being honest with a sponsor in whatever program one is in is the key, and is the only way to make sure that all our behaviors get addressed.

The fact is that we can find lots of examples of extreme interpretations of sobriety, and problems with how the various programs approach it. We can certainly find that with SAA.

All too often, members of SAA set their boundaries so low that “sobriety” is almost meaningless. My mentor often tells the story of an SAA group he went to (pretty sure it was the last SAA group he went to) where the guy who got a two or three year medallion turned out to have a definition of sobriety which was “To refrain from having sex with someone if I don’t know their first name.” I first thought that was a crazy, extreme story … but over the past few years, I’ve been to a number of SAA meetings around the country, and have contact with a lot of people in SAA, and I have found it is not uncommon to find this kind of absurdly broad definition of sobriety. It’s sort of like an alcoholic trying to define sobriety as “Only drinking alcohol to the point where I’m able to walk across the room without falling down or throwing up.” Try that at an AA meeting!

So we’re back to this bottom line point: get in a program, get a sponsor, work the steps, and get honest with that sponsor about what is happening in your life. I still think that MAP is a good guide, but that in some instances (like the example you bring up) working with a sponsor might unearth something that might be considered “middle circle” to many people actually needs to be part of the “inner circle” (sobriety definition).

- Mark