7th Stepping

[mithygato]

Hi everybody,

What is seventh stepping?
My roomate has an AA book, but it lacks any form of index.
I'm curious to know what it means - Orwellian Newspeak I'm sure.

David
M.I.A.
Straight Richardson Tx. 88/89 ::

[Don Smith]

7th Stepping was another term for graduating the program. It meant that you were no longer on your active phases of the program.  From there you had to go through 6 months of after care.

Don

[Antigen]

Yeah, it's not an AA thing. Strictly Straight lingo.

Don, I will never forget the day when staff came into group and announced the creation of the 7th Step Society. I wasn't the only one having a rough time trying to fake gleeful entheusiasm. Had you gone in about 2 years sooner, you might have dodged that bullet altogether.

Ginger Warbis ~ Antigen
American P.O.W. 10/80 - 10/82
Straight South (Sarasota, FL)
Anonymity Anonymous

[Don Smith]

Don, I will never forget the day when staff came into group and announced the creation of the 7th Step Society.


What year was it created?  I remember the 7th Step Society as something a lot of people feared.  We were always told that the 7th Step Society was so much stronger than the group.  I think it was used as a tool of fear to keep a kid straight once they got out.  But I later learned that as long as I stayed out of trouble or just didn't tell anyone what was going on, they left you alone.  
The only time I was confronted in 7th Step raps was only after my best friend ratted me out for seeting up a time to see an old girlfriend of mine.  He told them I had set up a date. A complete lie I might add.  A-hole!!  
After that I became an Officer and didn't have to worry about ever being confronted again.

Don

[Antigen]

It was in `81 or `82, I think. It's hard to remember one day from another when they were all alike and mostly filled with things I don't want to remember.

But I do remember that moment and thinking that really fucked up my plans. When my Seedling brothers and sister graduated their programs, they just didn't ever go back, except for the mandatory open meeting or two a month early on. That was my plan. I didn't think it would take more than a year to get through and then just never go back. Then I come to find that I'll have to keep up a fascade for as much involvement as it would take afterward and I started to get the felling that, by the time I met whatever requirements they'd just added, they'd have been busy dreaming up ways to keep us all on lock down till the grave.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time, and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

--Thomas Carlyle

[85 Day Jerk]

Following the Tampa Screw-up, something had to be done to bring about some credibility to Straight. It was bad enough that kids in the Straight Program had been doing drugs, but god forbid premarital sex, and casual alchohol use from the graduate society.  George and Helen cooked up this whole 7 Step Society thing as a bastardized form of A.A.  There was a big anouncement in a Friday night Open Meeting.  This was near the end of August in the year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Seventy Eight.  I was there.  I was being a Jerk that night too!

The following were the first "products" off the assembly line;
Steve Jordany
Vinnie Lawrence
Mike Saylor
Lance Cantrell
Lewis Cantrell
Steve Howe
Rick Humbert
Jimmy Cassidy

Susan Moran
Cindy Gardener? (she had 2 brothers)
Suzanne Harting?

That's all I can remember,  I was running full throttle as a Jerk at this particular meeting.  This was around the time that I yelled "Spit!!" at the top of my lungs when a front row girl who had made Home got so excited that she forgot to yell "Coming Home," and just left her seat and ran the moment her mom stood up with the microphone.

[Anonymous]

yeah, it was called comencement in Dallas for some reason.