Not a Verdict on Doctors

This is where the Tradition gets misused most often — as a stick to beat professionals with. It is not that, and it never was. Read what A.A. said about itself in its own history, A.A. Comes of Age: "at the point of professionalism money and spirituality do not mix." And then, in the very next breath of the same book, the sentence almost nobody quotes: "We do not decry professionalism in other fields, but we accept the sober fact that it does not work for us." That is not a verdict on counsellors, doctors, nurses or therapists. It is a structural finding about one Fellowship, made by that Fellowship, about the one specific thing it does. Surgeons should be paid. Psychiatrists should be paid. The nurse who sat with us on the worst night of our lives should be paid, and paid well — and A.A. says so out loud rather than sniffing at people who take a wage for healing. A.A.'s claim is narrower and stranger: this particular act, one drunk sitting with another, stops working when it is bought. Not because money is dirty, but because the act was never a service being delivered. It was one man staying alive by helping another, and you cannot pay a man to need something. Get it wrong and Tradition 8 curdles into contempt for anyone with a credential. Get it right and it is a Fellowship being honest about the one thing it cannot sell without destroying.