What
Is LifeRing's History?
Many of the earliest members of LifeRing were members of Secular
Organizations for Sobriety (SOS). In 1999 a
federal lawsuit in Northern California ended with a
final ruling that
the national SOS organization did not own and could not
use that name in the northern half of the state. Accordingly,
the Northern California meetings of SOS, making up one of the
oldest and by far the largest cluster of SOS meetings in the
world, were faced with a permanent injunction that forced
them to change their name. As the LifeRing name
had become intimately associated with secular recovery
through the formation of LifeRing Press two years
earlier, representatives of the Northern California
meetings, meeting on May 23, 1999, adopted the name LifeRing Secular Recovery.
With the name change
came a new sense of purpose and direction. The
lawsuit had focused attention on the status of SOS as a
wholly-owned subcommittee of the Council for Secular
Humanism (CSH), and on CSH's lack of concern, direction,
and knowledge about the secular recovery movement.
The simple process of renaming the meetings gave birth
to a new sense of activism and a new level of
energy. Since May, 1999, many other
former SOS
meetings and individuals across the country and in some
other countries have affiliated with LifeRing Secular
Recovery, and LifeRing has gradually emerged during the year
2000 as an
independent organization.
This was only natural under the circumstances:
Historically, LifeRing
is a product of the early democratizing influence of the
Internet. The concept of a free-standing,
democratic and participatory organization -- the original SOS
concept when it was still called Secular Sobriety Groups
(SSG) -- was reborn in 1995 with the founding of the
unofficial SOS email list. That list is today LSRmail,
probably the largest online secular community of
recovery in the world.
The movement grew further
with the establishment in 1996 of the unofficial SOS web
site, www.unhooked.com
-- today the main web site of LifeRing Secular
Recovery.
It matured with the founding in 1997 of
LifeRing Press as the unofficial SOS publishing house,
and with the online and print publication of the SOS Handbook
-- today the publishing arm and the online and print Handbook
of LifeRing Secular Recovery.
In its short history,
LifeRing has achieved a great deal.
- In September 1999,
LifeRing sponsored and organized the first nationwide
democratic gathering of secular recovery activists in
eight years, the Secular Recovery
Convention.
- LifeRing has won the
first letters of recommendation from chemical dependency
treatment professionals.
- For the first time,
LifeRing meetings run side-by-side with 12-Step meetings
in the same time slot in treatment facilities, providing
recovering people in treatment with a choice of
abstinence support groups.
- LifeRing has
initiated and conducts the first meeting of its kind
in a 28-day inpatient treatment
facility.
- LifeRing conducts
the first meeting of its kind for patients in a dual
diagnosis crisis intervention ward.
- LifeRing has published
the first book explaining its secular methods for
treatment professionals.
- LifeRing has popularized
its philosophy in a book of collected email messages, Keepers.
-
Recently, LifeRing Press has published the first
workbook for people in early recovery who want to build
personal recovery programs using modern, secular,
evidence-based principles.
- Today, LifeRing offers
convenors a comprehensive toolkit of literature,
together with periodic workshops, a special convenors'
email list, and this convenors' web site with its
internal newsletter.
- LifeRing has
converted its philosophy into organizational
practice, adopting a democratic set of bylaws at its
Feb. 2001 Constitutional Congress.
Although LifeRing is financially poor, it
is rich in energy and vision. More and more LifeRing participants today have no
history with and no memory
of the former SOS connection. That is as it should
be. LifeRing has made
and is making its own history.
LifeRing
Home