Emotions Anonymous - History

History

The conception of Neurotics Anonymous began with Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill W. After achieving sobriety Bill continued to suffer from neurosis, specifically depression. In letters to other AA members he wrote about his personal experience with neurosis, its prevalence in AA, and how he and others learned to cope with it. Bill expressed that as he learned to let go of his dependence on people and situations for emotional security and replaced that dependence with "showing outgoing love as best as he could," his depression began to subside. In correspondence with another AA member about neurosis and psychoanalyst Karen Horney Bill suggested how a Neurotics Anonymous fellowship might operate.

You interest me very much when you talk of Karen Horney. I have the highest admiration of her. That gal's insights have been most helpful to me. Also for the benefit of screwballs like ourselves, it may be that someday we shall devise some common denominator of psychiatry — of course, throwing away their much abused terminology — common denominators which neurotics could use on each other. The idea would be to extend the moral inventory of AA to a deeper level, making it an inventory of psychic damages, reliving in conversation episodes, etc. I suppose someday a Neurotics Anonymous will be formed and will actually do all this.

— Bill W., Letter to Ollie in California, January 4, 1956.

In a subsequent letter to Ollie in June 1956, Bill suggested the inventory of psychic damages include inferiority, shame, guilt and anger. He added that the effectiveness of the inventory would come from reliving the experiences and sharing them with other people.

Neurotics Anonymous was created eight years later, February 3, 1964 in Washington, D.C. by Grover Boydston (August 16, 1924 - December 17, 1996). Grover was an AA member, recovering alcoholic, psychologist, and Ed.M. Grover had attempted suicide five times before the age of 21 and, like Bill W., was neurotic. Grover believed members of twelve-step programs shared the same underlying neuroses caused by self-centeredness, a view expressed in other twelve-step programs. Grover went as far as to say, "All of us are, indeed, brothers, and the variations in detail are no more than if one of us likes chocolate ice cream, and the other likes vanilla."

While in AA, Grover discovered working the Twelve Steps helped remove the neuroses underlying his alcoholism. As an experiment Grover instructed a woman who suffered from neurosis, but not alcoholism, to work the Twelve Steps. He discovered that they aided her recovery from neurosis as well. He wrote Alcoholics Anonymous World Services for permission to use their Twelve Steps with the word "alcohol" in the First Step replaced with "our emotions." Permission was granted. Grover placed an ad in a Washington, D.C. newspaper for Neurotics Anonymous, and organized the first meeting from those who responded to it. NAIL grew modestly until an article was published on it in Parade magazine. The Associated Press and United Press International republished the story, and NAIL groups began forming internationally.

Marion Flesch (July 24, 1911 - October 10, 2004) is responsible for starting what would become Emotions Anonymous. Marion was a graduate of St. Cloud State Teachers College (now St. Cloud State University) and at various times worked as a teacher, secretary, clerk, accountant, bookkeeper and office manager. Later in life she became a certified chemical dependency counselor through the University of Minnesota and started work on a master's degree, but stopped at age 80 due to health concerns. Marion originally went to Al-Anon meetings at the advice of a friend to help deal with panic attacks. After she learned of NAIL, she started the first such meeting in Minnesota. It was held April 13, 1966, at the Merriam Park Community Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. NAIL grew quickly in Minnesota, and by Fall of 1966 there were thirty active groups in the state.

Differences developed between the Minnesota groups and the central offices of NAIL. The Minnesota Intergroup Association separated from NAIL on July 6, 1971, after unsuccessful attempts to reconcile differences with NAIL and later adopted the name Emotions Anonymous. They wrote to Alcoholics Anonymous World Services for permission to use the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Permissions was granted. Emotions Anonymous officially filed Articles of Incorporation on July 22, 1971.

By 1974 the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, at the time in second edition (DSM-II), was undergoing revision. The framework developed for the third edition (DSM-III) was no longer based on psychoanalytic principles such as neurosis. The connotation of neurosis in common language also began to change. "Neurosis" was being used, increasingly, in a facetious or pejorative sense, rather than a diagnostic sense. These combined factors could make it difficult to take an organization known as Neurotics Anonymous seriously. In current NAIL literature, there is not a scientific definition ascribed to neurosis. As used in the NAIL program, a neurotic is defined as any person who accepts that he or she has emotional problems.

Although EA outgrew NAIL in the United States, NAIL in Latin America continued to grow. It has only been since early 2007 that NAIL groups have again begun to formally organize in the United States, composed largely of Spanish-speaking members. EA groups are mostly distributed throughout Europe and English-speaking parts of the world, with some notable exceptions being Brazil, Japan and India. Outside of the Americas, NAIL is only active in Portugal.

Emotional Health Anonymous was created sometime before July 27, 1973. Currently, EHA is only active in the Los Angeles area.