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The Tablemate

The Tablemate, whose official title is "Alcoholics Anonymous: An Interpretation of the Twelve Steps," was known under a variety of different local names in early A.A. circles. It is sometimes also called the Table Leader's Guide, the Detroit pamphlet, the Washington D.C. pamphlet, and so on. It was based on the four-week Beginners Lessons that began to be used in early Detroit A.A. in June 1943. It is the best surviving set of A.A. beginners lessons, and can be used with enormous effectiveness today. In spite of its deceptively short length, it in fact not only leads beginners into an understanding of how to work the steps, but also gives them a quiet introduction to the spirit of some of the early recommended literature (Emmet Fox, James Allen, and so forth) which went more deeply into the underlying spiritual foundations of the early program. In fact, if you are charge of introducing a group of A.A. newcomers to the program, there is nothing else which even begins to be as effective.

Although there are people who are almost fantically devoted to Wally P.'s Back to Basics: The Alcoholics Anonymous Beginners' Meetings, the only parts of that long book which actually work effectively are the parts which he took over and quoted verbatim from the Tablemate. But the original Tablemate pamphlet from Detroit is far shorter and easier to understand, far less expensive to provide to the newcomers, and far less confusing to them. Our experience in A.A. in northern Indiana in recent years has been that people who go through lessons based on Wally P.'s book do no better in fact than people who go to any other kind of A.A. meetings, but that if you take a group of newcomers and have them spend an entire year working through the Tablemate over and over, at the end of that year, 90% of the newcomers who have attended each week without fail will still be sober. And even some years later, 90% of those are still sober today, which is around an 80% success rate overall. This is one of the ways which can be used today to achieve the kind of success rate that was reported in early A.A. (there are also other successful methods).

The Tablemate also gives a far more sophisticated and useful set of virtues than the Four Absolutes. The four Oxford Group virtues — Absolute Honesty, Absolute Purity, Absolute Unselfishness, and Absolute Love — are certainly worthy goals, but as Bill W. warned, the alcoholic ego does not do well trying to be absolutistic about anything (except not drinking). In fact one central problem in dealing with alcoholics is in trying to get them to quit being so absolutistic about every single thing they believe!

Even more importantly, the typical alcoholic in fact has a good many other virtues that he or she also ought to be striving for in addition to those four: as the Tablemate points out, Humility for starters (!!!), along with Generosity, Simple Justice, Honest Pride in work well done, Simplicity, Patience, Industry (go to work and really work), Faith, Hope, Trust, Willingness, Open-Mindedness, and so on.

And as the Detroit Pamphlet warns, we also need to avoid a whole series of common alcoholic vices: Egotism, False Pride, Impatience, Jealousy, Envy, and Laziness. The Tablemate can serve as one of the best guides to doing the Fourth Step ever written, and discusses a set of character defects which "fit" a good many more alcoholics than the seven deadly sins or breaches of the four absolutes, if we restrict ourselves to either of those two short lists and look at those four (or seven) issues alone.

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