Please note:

The opinions expressed herein, during the What’s The Point!?!? ~ Twelve Steps to Emotional Sobriety Workshop, and within the workshop materials, are the speakers own, and he does not wish to imply affiliation with, endorsement by nor approval from A.A.; He is not suggesting nor endorsing an expert medical diagnosis or opinion. A.A. neither endorses nor opposes any causes.

With that said, gossip, judgement and condemnation are often directed at those members of a 12-Step fellowship who take what they have learned in their recovery process and then conduct workshops, provide workshop materials, go to work in a treatment program or sober-living environment, write books that help others who are so afflicted, and to help society better understand the problem of alcoholism, addiction, and other ISM-Affliction conditions, by those members who don't think they should take on these tasks and who in turn accuse them of "making money" off A.A. even though these activities do NOT constitute A.A.’s "usual" 12th-Step work.

We have posted an excerpt from A.A.'s Twelve Traditions, written by Bill W., Co-founder of A.A., wherein Tradition 8 he discussed these very things and concluded they are not violations of tradition as they are not conducting A.A.'s "usual" 12th Step work.

Tradition Eight

“Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.”

Tradition 8: "...Caretakers who swept floors, cooks who fried hamburgers, secretaries in offices, authors writing books --all these we have seen hotly assailed because they were, as their critics angrily remarked, "making money out of A.A." Ignoring the fact that these labors were not Twelfth Step jobs at all, the critics attacked as A.A. professionals these workers of ours who were often doing thankless tasks that no one else could or would do.

Even greater furors were provoked when A.A. members began to run rest homes and farms for alcoholics, when some hired out to corporations as personnel men in charge of the alcoholic problem in industry, when some became nurses on alcoholic wards, when others entered the field of alcohol education. In all these instances and more, it was claimed that A.A. knowledge and experience were being sold for money, hence these people, too, were professionals.

At last, however, a plain line of cleavage could be seen between professionalism and non-professionalism. When we had agreed that the Twelfth Step couldn't be sold for money, we had been wise. But when we had declared that our fellowship couldn't hire service workers nor could any A.A. member carry our knowledge into other fields, we were taking the counsel of fear, fear which today has been largely dispelled in the light of experience." (excerpted from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 167).