Responding to the response

Hello Everyone:

Happy Memorial Day to my readers in the United States.  It's a day when we honor fallen service personal in past wars.  If you meet a service person, shake his or her hand and thank them.  They chose to serve and protect our freedoms.

I've been following an unusual string of posts on Facebook for the last almost twenty-four hours.  The posts are in response to a blog about one person's addiction-recovery journey and his decision to make that knowledge public.  The reason I say unusual is that, to me, it seems odd that anyone would comment on it.  I guess that's a byproduct of the social media sites.  It's even more strange because I can tell from some of the reponses that the people posting them have no experience or knowledge of what a 12-step is about.  Let me explain what a 12-step program is based on the time I spent in it.

Twelve programs, specifically Alcoholics Anonymous, was started in thirties by Bill W. and Dr. Bob.  To protect anonymity, no last names are used.  The idea was to treat alcoholism as disease of the spirit rather than a moral or personal failing.  The founders developed twelve steps and principles that became the core values of the program.  From it's humble beginnings, AA has grown into a world-wide movement and spawned offshoots such as Al-Anon for families of alcoholics and sister programs based on the foundation values.  For more information go to http://www.aa.org.  Two of the primary values are anonimity and then12th step.  The twelfth step reads, "Having had a spiritual as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affair."  This where this string of responses gets a bit odd for me.

I found the blog writer very courageous the way he "outed" himself and his struggles with addiction-recovery.  Yet, at the same time, I thought he was contradicting himself by breaking his anonimity to work the 12th step.  I can understand wanting to share his experience, strength, and hope as part of presenting a more authentic picture of himself but what I don't quite is the nature of the responses.  Most are quite supportive while others seem to have a critical tone.  My feeling is that unless you've had the same experiences, you shouldn't judge.  You judge a person anyway, especially if they're being painfully honest with you.  You can look at it from the perspective of people reacting in their own way to the blog.  To me it seems that the hostile tone of some of the responses indicate an unfamiliarity with the process.  

Anyway, that's just my thought.