8.16.25
I’ve always respected the principle of anonymity in AA, and I would never betray another alcoholic’s anonymity. The fellowship teaches us in Tradition Eleven that “our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.” Tradition Twelve reminds us that “anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.”
There are a lot of reasons people choose to remain anonymous, and those reasons are different for everyone. For me, when I first got sober, anonymity was about shame. I’ll never forget being in rehab and finding out how many people already knew I was there—I was mortified. At the time, the idea of anonymity felt like protection. But when I looked closer, I realized it was mostly me trying to hide.
That’s when I made a decision: I didn’t want to hide anymore. I started SoberAsFuckBlog.com and made the whole world my accountability partner. That was my way of breaking free from the shame. But at the same time, I learned to respect that anonymity means something very different for others. For some, it’s privacy. For some, it’s humility. For some, it’s safety. And all of those reasons are valid.
Integrity ties right into this. AA talks about anonymity not just as keeping names out of the press but as a deeper principle of humility. It’s about living with honesty even when nobody’s watching, and remembering that the program is bigger than any one of us.
Looking back, I liked to believe I had integrity before recovery—but honestly, it was selective integrity. And selective integrity is basically no integrity at all. I’d pick and choose when to be honest depending on whether it benefited me. Today, I understand that integrity doesn’t work that way. You either live it or you don’t.
Working the Twelve Steps and applying AA’s principles in my daily life has given me so much more than sobriety—it’s given me a way to live with integrity. Now, I try to be the same person in public that I am in private. I try to keep my side of the street clean, even when no one else would ever know.
Anonymity. Integrity. Humility. They’re all connected. I’ve yet to meet anyone who said that practicing these principles made them a worse person than they were before.
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