The Life of Bill Wilson
While the country was emerging from the Great Depression, Bill Wilson was slipping deeper and deeper into his own. In many ways this was familiar territory to him.
Depression, along with alcoholism, ran in his family. It struck him first when his father deserted him at age 10 and again, shortly thereafter, when his mother left him to follow a career in medicine. Once more it visited him when Bertha, his high-school sweetheart died suddenly, leaving him alone in the world again. And then at age 39, he tells us that his sense of despair and hopelessness “deepened unbearably,” just prior to his “white light” experience at Towns Hospital. And now, just when all was starting to go well in his life, it struck again.
He wrote a friend in 1956 that, “In the last twelve years of my life, despite all my blessings and opportunities, I have spent eight in depression, sometimes some very severe ones.” He continued on saying, “But as one neurotic drunk trying to get along and grow, I have often been pathetically rebellious. … Practically all the sins I didn’t have time for when drinking, I’ve since fallen for. … The depression kept me off the road and from making speeches. In fact, I was forced to sit at home and ask what would become of AA and what would become of me.”
Bill Wilson, like many alcoholics and addicts was an emotional extremist. When he was challenged by life and rose successfully to meet the occasion, his ego inflated and he dreamed dreams of still greater glory. But when life handed him a defeat it was crushing to him. He spiraled down just as far as he had been rocketed up. Bill’s secretary would sometimes find him crying uncontrollably at his desk in AA’s New York office. People thought he’d gone back to drinking, but he had not. He was clinically depressed. He began seeing two psychiatrists in attempts to find relief from the crushing depression. One was Harry Tiebout, the first psychiatrist to promote AA among his patients and his peers, later becoming an AA Foundation Trustee. Tiebout traced Wilson’s depression back to deep-seated emotional insecurity. He may well have been thinking of Wilson when he wrote, “Hitting bottom was only half the job for the alcoholic. The real task was to stay there. Praise could go to his head, cause it to swell, and make him feel once more that he could handle liquor. Humility could prevent that rebound.”
Holding on to humility was hard for AA’s founder. Bill’s depression took hold of him shortly after he and his wife Lois returned from a triumphant cross-county tour visiting scores of new AA groups that seemed to have sprung up everywhere. As they traveled along, thousands of grateful recovering alcoholics and their families had come out to see and hear him speak. He was hailed by some a hero and by others a saint. But he could never find enough praise to fill the empty hole he carried inside just like he could never find enough booze. He wrote a friend saying, “Just now my problem is success. I confess I do not find it any easier than the problem of defeat. In some ways it’s more difficult. I find it a hopeless undertaking to keep up with people’s expectations of me.”
Bill would later try to slip into AA meetings in small towns hoping to remain unnoticed and seeking the anonymity he knew his soul needed. But it was never long before someone recognized his six-foot plus frame and he was asked to speak, not as a member but as a founder.
Interestingly, it wasn’t until 1955, when he officially turned the reigns of leadership of AA over to the General Service Board that his depression finally lifted. Dr. Tiebout, who pointed out many of Bill’s self-centered and immature traits to him, was in the audience and could hardly help noticing the message Bill chose for the St. Louis Conference where he officially “let go” of his program: AA Comes of Age.