A new group had formed a few months earlier in a village
close to where I lived. The people were, I was told,
friendly and compassionate, solidly grounded in the
principles of recovery. I checked out the meeting and,
liking what I heard, continued going frequently. The first
week of every month was a Step meeting: so there I was in
the sixth month with the group discussing the Sixth Step.
The meeting was half-over when the outside door slammed
and I could hear quick steps coming down the hall. The young
woman I had seen a few times there over the past months
walked in and sat down. She was obviously distressed. The
person speaking had hardly finished when she broke in. She
didn't know what the topic was, she said, but she had to get
something off her chest. She had discovered that some people
(and, it seemed, some in the room) had been taking her
inventory big-time in the "meeting after the meeting" at the
local coffee joint. It had been going on for some weeks --
gossip, rumor, speculation about her and her life-style, none
of it complimentary. She was very angry at the fact that
some of the gossipers had been "friends" of hers whom she had
helped generously in the past. She felt betrayed. "I
thought I'd be treated decently here. How can people speak
so much about spirituality and yet kick others around? One

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of the first lessons I learned was to mind my own business,
and not to take other people's inventories." By this time
she was standing. "This is the last time you'll see me here.
I'll find other rooms where people practice the program
instead of giving lip service to it." There was a brief
silence after she left, and then one of the men began to
speak about what the Sixth Step meant to him.
Apparently, she has not returned to that meeting. Her
name is occasionally mentioned and many people miss her since
she had brought uncommon wisdom and strength to the group.
Among those who go regularly to that meeting, there are hard
feelings over the incident and some other "regulars" don't
show up any more.
I remembered all of this recently when, at my home
group, one of the members asked for a discussion of the First
Tradition. He felt the group needed to discuss it since he
had been hearing whispering and innuendo circulating for
weeks about another member. He was disgusted with it and if,
as the First Tradition had it, "our common welfare comes
first", then a quick way to destroy that welfare was by the
kind of talk that was going around.
Lots of people spoke, almost all of them persons who had
found themselves talked about at one time or another, their

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inventory taken by another member, or by a clique. Many
spoke of being deeply hurt when they learned that others had
been going around voicing suspicion that they were still
using. What would lead people to do something like that? If
they were really concerned about whether another person was
secretly using, wouldn't the right thing to do would be to
come to that person directly to offer some help? One woman
said that early in her recovery, she found out that some
people were trading misinformation about her private life.
She felt angry at those people, and angry at N.A., and had
stayed away from all meetings; the inevitable happened and
she relapsed. She finally found her way back to the
fellowship, but only after one of her friends had helped her
realize that what any one individual does or says does not
represent N.A., least of all N.A. at its best. Saints and
sinners, wise people and fools, people we can trust and
people we can't, the mature and the immature -- N.A. is made
up of people of many different types who have one thing in
common: the desire to stop using. The common N.A.
denominator, she had learned, was not people who are healthy!
(One man added: "If you take the booze away from a drunken
horse-thief, all you have is a dried-out horse-thief!")
Mack, the patriarch of the group, spoke about the
gossiping type. The person who gossips about you to me will
turn around and gossip about me to you! I have also found,
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he continued, that gossipers aren't generally trusted or
liked or admired. I tolerate them only because N.A. has
taught me to be tolerant. When they start their back-biting
in front of me, I just tell them I don't want to listen to
garbage and walk away. So I haven't heard much "talk" in
years!
Another man reinforced my experience with the young
woman and the village meeting: he had observed that people
who are gossiped about will often not come back, and so the
group loses their wisdom and experience. And more than that:
if a group has a gossiping member, or clique, the word gets
around and people who would otherwise go to that group stay
away.
Peter, who was chairing that day, wrapped it up for us.
Even our own local fellowship, our own group, will sometimes
let us down, he said. But the program will never let us
down. And, he concluded, I was once told that N.A. is like
the ocean. It cleanses itself.
That day, our meeting -- which usually "starts on time
and ends on time" -- had gone well beyond the customary hour.
My home group was busy cleansing itself.

Jamie C