The Subtext: What Every Member of Sex Addicts Anonymous Should Know About the 12 Traditions of SAA
The 12 Traditions are carefully crafted to conceal a toxic and predatory environment.
Although they appear innocent or healthy on the surface, when practiced together, they make each member vulnerable to subtle manipulation and increasing pressure over time.
Gradually, the will of each individual is overtaken by the will of the group, and the collective begins to function as God in the conscience of every participant—whether they meant to submit to the “higher power” of the SAA hivemind or not.
I was a member of SAA for about two years. I joined through an “interfaith” seminary sponsored by the local masonic lodges. Their directors steered me towards the program—but I didn’t know the lodge was involved at the time.
I just saw the “interfaith” label and thought, “Great! No denominational mandates. So no pressure!”
Oops.
I was there to study the mechanics of spiritual faith, which have always interested me, since I grew up in a religious home but never quite fit in with any religious culture.
As a student of this particular seminary, I was required to explore secondary spiritual programs for my pathway of study, and honor its traditions; the broader 12 Step tradition was explained as a recovery program for people who struggled with addictive behaviors of any type.
And given my colorful history of liking naked women a lot—a lot—Sex Addicts Anonymous looked like it might be a reasonable fit. Because too much of a good thing can be bad, I guess. I guess.
I worked the program pretty hard.
I trusted the people around me.
I felt like SAA matched my psychology pretty good, to be honest—but in hindsight, I ignored a lot of signs that it was not a healthy circle, and that I did not belong there.
I ignored the gentle discouragement from professionals who insisted (repeatedly) that my type of concerns should not be handled by amateur, community volunteers.
I ignored the many people who came into the room and vanished after one or two meetings, disturbed by what they heard and saw.
I ignored the random personalities who would show up from time to time with seething rage and unspoken wounds, who set everyone on edge, but who could never explain their pain or voice their anger.
They all could see something I didn’t, knew things I hadn’t learned yet. The SAA culture works hard to validate religious fear and shame around sexuality, to normalize all religious shame about sexuality as valid, to justify its own radical methods of sexual control and psychological distortion.
That’s not an exaggeration. I wish it was overly dramatic, but its just the truth.
I wish I had listened to the people who warned me early on that the program was not right for me—but it was part of a program of study I had invested in. And I established relationships with people I came to think of as friends. I cared about their lives. I believed they cared about mine.
I attended a number of local meetings in the San Francisco Bay Area fellowship. I helped run meetings. I gave my number out frequently. I was a temporary sponsor. I really gave myself to the program in good faith. I made no effort to hide my real identity or keep secrets, because I had no secrets from my family or friends. My wife and I had (have) a solid relationship, and she supported my program attendance only because (I later learned) “it was good to make new friends.” Not because she really wanted me there.
I wish she’d said something just a little sooner.
Because then it all went sideways.
It was weird.
I discovered that the program as written did not match the program as practiced.
The nature of the program was carefully hidden, broken up and buried in the “12 Traditions” of the program, which had been taken directly from AA.
Soon, I was heavily pressured to conform to the very specific will of the group—by very unusual methods. People swarmed me with impossible demands for constant contact. I was bombarded with strange messages online, and the heaviest and most bizarre types of collective gaslighting a person might imagine—something meant to break a person down to nothing. People demanded, quite openly at the end of it all, that I give them more and more information, and drag my wife into the program as well. Someone offered us money to cooperate.
It was surreal. Unholy.
Illegal.
(YES DAN BLACKMAIL BY COERCION IS ILLEGAL EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU’RE FIGHTING “ADDICTION” YOU FUCKING LUNATICS). … sorry
When I resisted, a close program contact asserted that I had not been paying close enough attention to these 12 Traditions.
He was a little smug about it.
I got out.
The program wasn't for me.
Here are some things I wish someone had explained to me at the start of my time in Sex Addicts Anonymous. Specifically, I want to explain the subtext of the 12 Traditions that should be explained to anyone thinking about participating in any 12 Step program.
If you are new to SAA, my advice to you is, go slowly.
Be careful.
Good luck.
Caution: Anyone who has your first name and registered phone number can easily look up your full name, registered address, social media profiles, family associations, credit history, employment history, church of attendance, and more.
We put everything online now. Privacy is dead.
Be careful. Consider buying a second phone, and using a fake name, if you’re going to “work the steps.” Your second phone is not for cheating, but to protect your own privacy during your recovery, and the privacy of your loved ones.
Ironic, right?
1. Group welfare comes first. Personal recovery depends upon unity.
In practice, this means that SAA groups prioritize the welfare of the collective over the needs of particular individuals, even in cases of abuse and very serious breaches of trust. If it is better for a group’s image or survival to sweep a case of abuse under the rug, so be it.
In cases of disagreement, this tradition pressures members to conform to the majority opinion or will, when one person believes there is ongoing abuse that needs to be addressed. It means that people will look the other way in cases of serious complaint, to avoid any sense of disagreement.
Threatening to “embarrass” the group in public with reports of abuse therefore represents a betrayal of the program, and everyone’s sobriety and wellbeing. The supposed welfare of the whole is used as a shield to hide the way each individual is subjugated to serious ethical and sexual abuses. The idea of recovery masks the reality of depraved relapse, again and again.
The theory is that ongoing conflicts represent a threat to everyone’s stability or sobriety, and that—theoretically—sacrificing the needs of one person (by looking the other way) to protect the greater good is the better option.
In reality, one person is still part of the group.
If one person is sacrificed for the imaginary welfare of the whole, the group has still been harmed, and diminished. Unity is fractured when abuse is ignored.
Other parts of 12 Step literature, culture, and rhetoric insist that personal recover depends on “rigorous honesty.” Tradition 1 is essentially fine print which allows the group to bury the truth when it becomes inconvenient to the group preference.
The very first tradition is a farce; or rather it shows the 12 Steps to be a farce, a type of spiritual theater, a type of play-acting to cover up the real medicine.
SAA in not an individual recovery program. SAA is a hivemind, a group identity where personhood is defined within and sublimated by the collective identity.
If that sounds extreme at first, wait until you have examined the literature, which constantly encourages newcomers to adopt the group as its new God-conscience, and to surrender their “burden of self” to its collective wisdom.
12 Step culture, SAA included, treats the root problem of addiction as individuality: in the 12 Step system, the root problem causing addiction is being a unique individual with a unique will that seeks self-fulfillment outside of community, a self-ish person who seeks happiness in self-identity rather than collective being and “service” to the group.
The solution to this type of self-being is giving up your individuality and adopting the unrelenting moral conviction that the Godmind of the hive will achieve sobriety for you at any cost, as long as you do not resist its directives.
I know that sounds like an exaggeration.
Give it some time and participation, and before you know it, you will find yourself in this condition, in one degree or another (there are 33).
2. For group purposes there is one ultimate authority—a loving God as made manifest in our group conscience. Our leaders are trusted servants who don’t govern.
This is a Big Deal.
It may sound like this tradition is about placing healthy boundaries on leadership, but this tradition is about the deification of the group.
In practice, this tradition turns the will of the group into the God of each group member—regardless of any other program practice.
Step 2 invites each member to select their own higher power. Any god will do for you, as long as you define that God correctly.
But really, Tradition 2 undoes Step 2. It doesn’t matter what “higher power” you choose for yourself during Step 2 and Step 3, if you are required to subordinate that higher power to the “ultimate authority” of the group conscience.
In SAA (and any other 12 Step program modeled on AA) it does not matter what your Higher Power tells you, if the group conscience overrides that intuition or commandment—especially for individuals who have selected the will of the group as their Higher power. And SAA constantly pushes individuals to select the will of the group as their Higher Power. If you receive SAA newsletters or attend SSA meetings or retreats, you will discover this for yourself quickly enough.
It may sound like a good idea to let a loving God rule through the will of a group, and to disable the leading vote of an elected leader—but when a mob rules with no executive vote, things go sideways fast. This is especially true in a program comprised of addicts and addiction-fighting volunteers.
Why?
Because:
3. The single requirement to join SAA is a desire to stop addictive sexual behavior.
You don’t have to be a sex addict to join Sex Addicts Anonymous.
You just have to have a desire to stop “addictive sexual behavior.”
To join SAA, you don’t have to have a desire to stop addiction, to stop “your own” addictive sexual behavior, or recover from the trauma of addiction—just to force people to stop their sexually addictive behaviors. Stop any addictive sexual behavior. There is no clarification or fine print or mandate to apply your anti-addictive efforts or energy to your self and your own behaviors
The goal of SAA is to modify behavior.
At any cost.
That means anyone motivated by personal grudge, religious belief, or anti-sex vendetta can join SAA, sit in the circle, read any available membership lists you volunteered your info on, get your name and phone number, and listen to your regular shares, your First Step, learn your history, hear about your partner, all with the primary motive of stopping your "addictive sexual behavior.”
Anyone can join SAA, and its sister program COSA.
Undercover police officers.
Private detectives.
Religious fanatics, of any affiliation.
Angry ex-girlfriends.
Divorced ex-wives.
Traumatized victims of sex abuse.
Erotica writers looking for inspiration.
Angry erotica writers looking for someone to hurt.
Lady Pinkertons.
Lady Freemasons.
Out-of-work method actors.
Transpersonal psychopaths.
Transhumanist superbots.
Butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers.
Anyone.
Anyone at all can attend open meetings. Anyone willing to lie a little can attend closed meetings.
Any religious person who feels a tug towards internet porn a tiny bit can self-identify as an “addict” without stretching their conscience too much.
These are the people who decide what God's love looks like in a group, with private—often fanatical—ideas about how God might want them to fight sex addiction.
No single SAA member or leader can override the will of their group—comprised of membership like this—when an individual concern is brought forward.
And, just to clarify real quick: there is no definition or boundary placed on what may be considered “addictive sexual behavior.” That is left to the judgment of the membership. Masturbation may be considered addictive behavior by some, or wearing sexual clothing, or dancing, or listening to sexual music. Anything that makes a Puritan uncomfortable could be considered sexually addictive behavior.
Even if a person is not an addict, their behaviors could become addictive, and that’s enough to justify targeting them for behavioral correction, under the letter of this code.
4. Each SAA group is autonomous unless something affects other groups or ISO as a whole.
As long as a particular SAA meeting or group does not adversely affect the program at large, it is independent, with its own subcultures and unspoken traditions and personalities anchoring the group.
These subcultures and unofficial leaders may not be immediately visible for months or even years, and as long as meetings stay on cookie-cutter script, newcomers may not be aware of “behind the scenes” realities for years.
As long as they are present only in an unofficial capacity, church groups, religious orders, anti-addiction crusaders, and independently motivated clubs may run SAA groups without disclosing their presence.
There are no SAA prohibitions against this.
ISO, the organization running SAA from Houston, Texas, will not interfere with a local SAA group... unless that group brings some kind of visible discredit to the program as a whole, or interferes with the the obvious wellbeing of another group.
No SAA group is allowed to interfere with another SAA group unless that group makes trouble for the program at large.
A hidden culture of one group may not be corrected or challenged by another.
If there were Masonic Lodges
sponsoring a network of meetings in New York,
for example,
Or if Opus Dei were running meetings out in Houston Texas
under the table, inside the parishes of the Anglican Church, but
without disclosing their presence or intention
Or if the California Probation, Parole, and Correctional Association was
sponsoring meetings in the
Oakland, San Diego,
San Francisco, and Bakersfield Kaiser hospital facilities
ISO would do nothing.
A later Tradition (Tradition 6) insists that Sex Addicts Anonymous cannot endorse other groups formally—ISO can’t endorse an invisible Jungian college, or any sort of church group, or any type of law enforcement association, without breaking its own Traditions.
But ISO can’t stop Jungians or religious fanatics from collectively getting together and platforming meetings all across a city, a region, or a state, providing funding and websites and manpower to normalize SAA practices that would otherwise be unwelcome by rational and sane and ethical human beings who aren’t going to burn in the real fires of an actual hell for all of eternity. Dan.
ISO would have no reason to object to groups like this platforming meetings, unofficially, unless the individual meetings sponsored by those peculiar groups brought public discredit to the program as a whole, or if those groups formally entangled their private organizations with the ISO name.
As long as volunteers act in an individual capacity only, as private persons, they can network with any other organization on their private time however they prefer.
Each group can do whatever it wants, as long as it visibly honor the letter of the Steps and Traditions in its outer workings.
5. Each group has a single primary purpose—to carry its message to the sex addict who still suffers.
The primary purpose of each SAA group is not to support existing members who are already in the rooms, but to grow the membership base of ISO by pulling in more and more people—to endorse the message of the 12 Steps regardless of their actual efficacy.
That means no matter what they experience, or how often they relapse, the fundamental goal of each group is to promote the SAA message. No matter how broken the program is, the groups are meant to make the program look like a means of salvation, redemption, or repair to those who are hopelessly desperate for help…. outside the group.
Inside the group? Who cares. That’s not the primary purpose of the group.
That’s literally. What Tradition 5 spells out.
Existing members are not the priority of SAA.
They don’t care so much about individual members already there, trying to stay sober, whether that means no more prostitutes or no more porn or no more massage parlors or no more date rape. (All those things are equivalent "sex addiction" behaviors in SAA.)
Once you're in the circle, once you've heard the message, someone will probably figure out how to stop you and your addictive behaviors, whatever your particular problem is.
The group itself does not primarily exist to support current membership. That is not the function of “the group.”
Each group has the essential purpose of bringing more and more people into the room... not supporting the addicts who are in the room.
That’s official, whether you’re in Sex Addicts Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous or Overeater’s Anonymous.
It’s official, and very, very odd.
No other sincere therapy or religious group would survive if the primary purpose of the program was to find new customers at the expense of current customers. That’s a failing business model.
It could explain the radical turn-over rate of 12 Step programs in general, exceeding by some estimates 90%.
Once you've been inducted, your higher purpose is to pull in new people.
This is confirmed, again, in Step 12 of the 12 Steps. Someone who has been “enlightened” enough to finish the process must validate their awakening by finding new people to bring into the program, and sponsoring newcomers through the same cycle.
It is a pyramid scheme, a giant MLM.
You demonstrate your loyalty by finding new recruits.
6. An SAA group should never endorse, finance, or give the SAA name to any facility or outside business, so that issues of finance, property, and image don’t distract us from our primary mission.
What’s the primary purpose from which we must never stray?
According to the fifth tradition it's recruiting new members. Not helping people stay sober.
Not running support for existing members.
Groups exist to pull in new members by carrying the message forward.
SAA groups that rigorously observe the next tradition, this tradition, the sixth tradition, stay totally independent from any help, obscuring any connection to the outside world, so that the group can keep recruiting new members, without having to worry about their public image getting mixed up with any other label.
This means, also, that SAA groups should stay unentangled from other organizations that have higher standards of conduct and accountability, so that their primary mission of attracting new members may continue unimpeded.
I've seen groups turn down rent-free facilities to avoid being accountable in any way to the host, or feeling accountable to the host, or appearing accountable to the host.
On the flip side, I have also seen SAA groups funnel group donations to church affiliates, even when meetings were suspended, to keep the church afloat during hard times.
"Traditions" aren't legally binding. Keep that in mind.
You can't sue a volunteer-based program if someone you can't legally identify chooses to ignores a "tradition," breaks your anonymity outside a program circle.
Ignoring tradition isn't illegal.
Tradition isn’t legally binding
Violating someone's expectations of anonymity, privacy, or dignity isn't illegal—just disappointing, and unethical, and immoral.
Tradition isn’t legally binding. Underline that and repeat it to yourself like a mantra. Tradition isn’t legally binding. Nothing is stopping other people from exploiting your loyalty to an artificially contrived tradition of secrecy and silence. That’s their tradition: exploitation, with flimsy rationale.
Additionally, this tradition (Tradition 6) reinforces the visible separation between the official function of ISO, SAA, and COSA (the “sister” program of SAA for “codependents” and victims who want to stop addiction from a different angle) and any other organizations unofficially underwriting their activities.
This includes government agencies, benevolent and non-benevolent police officer associations, private-interest religious clubs, amateur psychological associations… all sorts of groups like this have a vested interested in keeping the 12 Steps and the programs that use them well-respected in the public eye. It’s genuinely amazing how many different types of groups have figured out how to exploit the anonymity structures of the 12 Steps over the decades—once I even met a group of amateur ant-sex homeopath shamans in SAA, using fake names and pretending they weren’t larping “wizards” until I caught them. But that’s a different story. (No, it’s this story, actually. #transpersonal).
Tradition 6 provides a stop against the temptation for members to connect the dots between their private interests and their activities in SAA, which has several pragmatic purposes. For example, the public should never wonder if the police are surveilling addicts and sabotaging their sobriety to create episodes of emotional crisis and nadir, because that would constitute cruel and unusual punishment for those sentenced to rehab. Imagine the family wreckage created in the name of some imaginary social justice, by amateurs who literally don’t know what they’re doing, but believe they’re helping the justice system… socially.
Imagine it.
7. SAA groups should be self-supporting, turning away outside donations.
Sounds reasonable.
Just be careful how you donate. Contributions made by check, Paypal, and apps like Venmo may provide "nonprofessional" members inside SAA with critical personal information you may not intend to give away. When you sign up to be a “Lifeline” partner, people in the ISO office gain access to your banking information, which may include your real name and address. Your anonymity is compromised, while theirs is not.
SAA finances are a closed ecosystem. There are no overlapping circles of accountability which invite legal scrutiny from state and federal authorities. Nonprofits are not required to report their sources of income to the IRS. If a Masonic Lodge gives $10,000 to SAA through a private individual, or through 100 small donations made by 10 individual masons who attend meetings as “addicts,” or as people who want to “stop addictive sexual behavior,” there is no way to trace that money back to the specific lodge or inter-lodge network that is funding the program.
Donations to SAA should come from private persons who attend the meetings—even if they attend solely with the motive of stopping addictive behavior, and not as addicts—and never from businesses, corporations, religious groups, or other nonprofits.
Most importantly, as with Tradition 6, there should never be any breadcrumb trails, financial or otherwise, which lead from SAA back to any particular religious institution, group, temple, or lodge, when volunteers go over the books. It should never become obvious to the group conscience that an intergroup cooperative with a vested interest in Jungian therapies is underwriting their shock therapies.
8. Sex Addicts Anonymous is totally nonprofessional, but its service centers might hire special employees.
Because SAA is “forever nonprofessional,” there is no professional accountability for in-program abuse if you experience breaches of confidence and trust from members, known or unknown.
There are no professional standards of behavior for sponsors, service committee members, or recovery partners.
There are no regulations or procedures if people inside the fellowship engage in extended, coordinated abuse of victims with people outside the program
Recently, in 2023, SAA has adopted 12 Concepts with additional nonbinding safeguards to guide the community in cases of very serious and egregious cases of public abuse. For some reason. They just suddenly added 12 Concepts, along with COSA. 12 Concepts they had been sitting on for a decade or more. “Concepts” meant to guide membership behavior, but which have no legal weight.
If people stage a faux “relapse” and use your confidential information in abusive ways, you may be encouraged to overlook their abuse to protect or enhance their "sobriety journey" or their anonymity in the real world, or to protect the reputation or the anonymity of the fellowship in general—even if your own anonymity was threatened, compromised, or destroyed.
Those employees which ISO does hire may be nonspecialist in nature, meaning that they may have no professional qualification in the field of addiction management, and may be held to no professional standards in any type of mental health field.
Or maybe they do have professional training of some type. They may be professional therapists, professional law enforcement officers, professional lawyers… but working as volunteers outside their professional obligations.
Still, perhaps ISO board members and call center employees will follow reporting requirements.
You never know.
Similarly, therapists who recommend you to SAA are not legally responsible for any abuse you might experience at the hands of program volunteers or sponsors—although they may benefit financially and professionally by helping you through any trauma you experience as a consequence of your participation. They are only responsible for their own actions in their own practice.
9. Sex Addicts Anonymous is never really organized, but it might hypothetically create boards or service committees directly responsible to those they serve.
By avoiding formal organization, there are fewer mechanisms and venues for accountability and responsibility in SAA than you would expect, for a nonprofit where people get together and confess their deviant sexual behaviors to each other.
You might be able to report abuse and issues of serious concern inside individual groups, for example in monthly “business meetings” outside of regular group sessions… but if individual groups decline to take action, where will you go?
Will you go public?
Will you hire a lawyer?
Will you hunt down a “service committee” people from multiple groups collaborate at semi-regular meetings, and talk to them about your sex secrets and hope they can solve your problem somehow?
Will you approach an intergroup fellowship and voice your issue before the entire region?
Will you tell your partner how his or her sex secrets got out in front of the entire region?
Will they support your concerns, or would they prefer you just let it go?
A local group or even a regional meeting may find your concerns interesting, but what action can they take?
What are they authorized to do?
What can ISO do about your abuse, really? What do they want to do for you? Nothing. Your welfare is not as important as the public welfare of the program’s image. Tradition 1.
SAA a volunteer program with minimal requirements for membership, with a strong tradition of prioritizing the group's image over individual member welfare.
You’re on your own.
And that structure is intentional.
10. Sex Addicts Anonymous doesn’t have opinions about outside issues, so SAA should never be caught up in public controversy.
The commandment to avoid public controversy doesn’t just apply to hot topics or political controversies, but also to in-program abuse.
If someone assaults you in a program facility,
or shares your information in some way to humiliate or punish you,
or if you discover that someone is storing people’s
information in a private database,
or passing information to law enforcement
or other groups outside the SAA circle,
SAA Tradition 10 can be leveraged to pressure you to remain quiet, to avoid drawing the entire fellowship “into public controversy.”
And yes, people are passing your information to outside participants.
They will use your information to humiliate and punish you, in private and public venues.
They will store your information until they have enough to profile you.
All of this happens regularly in SAA—annually, like clockwork. They have a goddamn group calendar, off the books.
And when they do ambush you, collectively, in a group, they will pressure you to protect the image of the program and keep it from controversy.
11. Because our public relations policy means our program needs to look attractive without us actively promoting it, we desperately need to stay personally anonymous at the level of press, radio, TV, and films.
Imagine, for a moment, telling a victim of rape, assault, or blackmail that she should maintain her personal anonymity in order to protect her church from embarrassing press at the level of radio, TV and films.
Just imagine it for a second.
There you go.
The 12 Steps are aggressively promoted at all these levels, by the way. Recovery programs are actively advertised, discretely, in positive publicity pieces on engines like Yahoo and Google, and in outlets like Psychology Today, like clockwork. AA appears as the background framework in serial sitcoms and murder mysteries as just another theme or motif, right next to “The Comic Book Convention” episode and “The UFO” episode all the time. Movie stars like Anne Hathaway, Brad Pitt, Mel Gibson, and dozens of others regularly mention that they are in X month or year of sobriety, and star in movies that allude to the necessary influence of the 12 Steps for hopelessly desperate addicts of all types.
You’re not supposed to associate your personal name with a particular recovery program—it happens, but you’re not supposed to.
This keeps people who relapse from discrediting the program.
It also means that people who promote the program do so anonymously, often as a group, normalizing the 12 Steps without disclosing their intention to advertise. It’s not advertising. It’s proselytizing, or propaganda.
What do I mean? I mean that—and this is serious 12 Step doctrine—the Steps teach that anyone who participates in the group is spiritually awakened. Anyone. Anyone who participates through to Step 12, and goes through the motions, can declare themselves spiritually awakened. IS spiritually awakened. Just by going through the motions. Whether or not you achieve lasting sobriety, or successfully manage your addiction, you are spiritually awakened (Step 12).
Also…. don’t tell anyone (Tradition 11).
0It is a peculiar doctrine of enlightenment that comes from group obedience. Take a close look at Step 12 and Tradition 11 some time, and see what doesn’t add up.
This little oddities add up quickly, and lead many people to realize the 12 Steps create a cult like environment where people are reprogramed to mirror a group mind.
Get out.
12. Anonymity is the traditional foundation of our spirituality, constantly persuading us to prioritize our ideas over our people.
The precise wording of Tradition 12 says that the fellowship places “principles over personalities.” In practice, that means the physical, flesh-and-blood people are not as important as the general idea of recovery. The principles of SAA—the 12 Steps themselves, the teachings manufactured by Bill W and his theatrical cohort—are more important than the individuals trying to find help through them.
In theory, this means it shouldn’t matter who teaches the Steps and Traditions, as long as they remain faithful to the codes. Particular attitudes, and even specific actions, don’t matter in the long run, as long as the technical letter of the law is observed in the program.
Another way to say this?
“What we say is more important than what we do or who we are.”
Which is absurd. But it is the foundation of 12 Step spirituality.
The written codes mask a different practice, and it was always meant to be that way.
Anonymity allows some sex addicts to escape the crushing shame of their past long enough to talk about what they’ve done.
Anonymity also makes it harder to hold abusers accountable if you decide to take action.
How will you file a legal or formal complaint against someone who has given you an unregistered phone number and only a false first name?
If you come across their real information, will you talk about them in public when everyone is pressuring you to keep their identity a secret?
Are you going to speak up in public, when a giant horde of repressed and traumatized addicts are holding you, your history, your partners, even your family members emotionally hostage?
Program anonymity has a dark side. It enables deceptive personalities to adopt false masks and false identities, alone or in groups. Anonymity makes it possible for narcissists, vigilantes, volunteers, self-identifying victims, and other predators to prey on vulnerable addicts who are in the program trying to understand themselves, trying to recover from the past, trying to better themselves.
Online we call vicious anonymous actors "trolls." In the real world we call those people sociopaths. They come to meetings too.
Watch your Steps.
* The traditions here are closely paraphrased to make the subtext much clearer. You can click on the link and read the official version on the ISO website if you want the verbatim version.
SAA just stole the Traditions from AA anyway, like sex addiction and alcoholism are the same thing, right?
