Alanon's Best Kept Secrets: The Concepts of Service

The Concepts of Service are called one of Alanon's “best kept secrets”. I've never come across a meeting on a concept in my area. We give lip service to them in the beginning of most of the meetings in this county. We'll read the same twelve statements, usually one per each meeting and call it a wrap. I used to sit there during the reading of the Concepts and wonder what all these things meant and we we were reading them if we weren't going to ever use them. It seemed like a lot of wasted time when we could just get right to the sharing.

We barely do meetings on Traditions either. I remember a few years ago in my home group, we had a group conscious meeting about changing the format of the meeting so that we would do Step study on the first Thursday of the week like we were already doing and then some people wanted to add in Tradition study on the third Thursday of the week. So many people were against doing this because they didn't see any point in studying the Traditions.

However, as I did my own reading and studying of the traditions a whole new world opened up for me. It's said that the Steps are for our own recovery and the Traditions show us how to have group unity. Once I started studying them I found helpful ideas on promotion versus attraction, supporting yourself financially and emotional, remaining anonymous and all these other life lessons that I was never taught growing up in a dysfunctional home that was plagued by alcoholism. It was as if someone had given me the handbook for life, opening my eyes wide while they said, “here's all those things you always wanted to know but never knew where to ask.”

My first inkling that Traditions were a guide to practical relationships and unity came from this article: http://www.upperroomcomm.com/insights/traditions.shtml and also later from this PDF file: http://storiesofrecovery.org/downloader/index.php?afg/TraditionsAsAGuideToHealthyRelations.pdf . It was such a wonderful a-ha moment! When my home group passed the motion that we would start studying the Traditions I volunteered to speak on the first one-- mostly just because I wanted to open other people's eyes to what I'd found through those two readings. I like to think they were impressed because a lot of them were like me and didn't really know that the Traditions were of any use outside of the Alanon groups. Why isn't this being taught more?

Now that I've come back to Alanon I want to dive back into the murky depths and pull up as much treasure as I can find in these waters. I want to know the program deeply. I've had many slips in these past few years and I feel like maybe if I grab onto something new or something I haven't learned about yet it'll stick this time and I'll keep coming back to the rooms. This probably has to do with my over-eagerness and maybe a misplaced sense of guilt for the slips that have occurred. Still, I want to teach myself the Concepts of Service. They are said to be a good guide to working well with others-- something that as a child from a dysfunctional home I know very little about.

Unfortunately, unlike the Traditions which have so much written about them information about the Concepts seems very bare. When I CAN find it I find it so hard to wrap my head around the business like legal jargon and translate it into English. It's hard to figure out what is trying to be said though I still feel like there's some awesome information in there if I can just figure it out. There's stuff about participating to create harmony, effective leadership and how responsibility and authority are two sides of the same coin if I can just reach down far enough to pull these secrets out from where they're hidden so tightly away. Here's hoping I hit the jackpot! I'll let you know what I find.