Atlanta, the first days of July 2015. Around fifty-seven thousand members of Alcoholics Anonymous filled the convention halls and the stadium for the fellowship’s eightieth anniversary. Herbert Kaighan (b. c. 1940) was there with his family, celebrating two things at once: his seventy-fifth birthday and his thirty-first year without a drink. It was his first International Convention. He spent part of it counting.<\/p>\n
Over three days he tallied more than two hundred and twenty topic meetings. Then he sorted them. By his count, about thirty percent touched the book Alcoholics Anonymous, the Twelve Steps, spiritual awakening, or the daily practice of Steps Ten, Eleven, and Twelve. The rest were about something else. Fourteen months later, on September 13, 2016, he published the arithmetic in an open letter to AA’s General Service Office leadership and Board of Trustees under a single question: when did AA meetings become the AA program?<\/p>\n
The letter is a claim he has been making for four decades. Meetings gave him fellowship and kept him from drinking. They did not change him. The change came from a precise personal application of twelve written instructions, and he thinks the fellowship that owns those instructions has drifted away from teaching them. He named the slogans he considers dangerous, the ones about putting the plug in the jug and making meetings, and wrote that they may function as death sentences. He noted that the Big Book mentions meetings twice. He proposed that the 2020 convention in Detroit be built around the renewal of AA’s first legacy.<\/p>\n
He was seventy-six years old, unpaid, with no office and no standing in the service structure, writing to a board about a book.<\/p>\n
The man who wrote that letter had spent thirty years in rooms where nothing worked. He entered a Claretian seminary and stayed seven years, preparing for the priesthood, and left before ordination. He pursued graduate study in psychology for about four years and went through therapy for longer. He tried the self-improvement movements available to an educated Southern Californian in the 1970s and early 1980s. He learned the vocabularies. He acquired the religious one, then the psychological one, then the therapeutic one. His conduct held steady. In the open letter he described the whole stretch in five words: “a seeker but not a finder.”
\nretreat<\/p>\n
Alongside it he built a career in human resources consulting, work he has described as forty years and elsewhere as forty-one, advising large insurance brokerages, retiring in November 2006. The corporate trade left a mark on everything he later built. He thinks about spiritual change the way a consultant thinks about competency: assignments, sequence, worksheets, definitions, review, accountability, a binder.<\/p>\n
Mary Catherine Flanagan (1941\u20132018) came to California from Chicago in 1962 and took a human resources job at Blue Cross\/Blue Shield. Part of her work was welcoming new employees. One of the new hires was Herbert Kaighan. They married in April 1966 and had three children: Christina, then Kymberly in 1970, then Michael in 1972. Mary kept the home and volunteered through the parish schools, St. John Fisher through the 1980s, later Bishop Montgomery High School. When the children left, she started giving time to the Daughters of Mary and Joseph Retreat Center on Crest Road in Rancho Palos Verdes, above the ocean, and rose to become its first lay director. She held that post until she retired in 2006, the same year her husband left consulting. Her family remembered that she ended phone calls by telling people “to have as much fun as possible.” She was also an alcoholic. <\/p>\n
Her treatment, in 1984, is what put Herb in a treatment center. He went to support her. Several weeks in, the staff asked him to stop drinking while she was in the program. He agreed, and the next day, February 21, 1984, became his sobriety date. Then they asked him to write out his history with alcohol, honestly.<\/p>\n
The writing took about an hour. On the page a thirty-year pattern assembled itself, beginning with his first drink at twelve: he drank everything available, blacked out, passed out, and woke in his own vomit. What unsettled him was not the presence of a drinking problem. It was that the evidence had been in plain sight for three decades and he had never seen it. His mind had been sorting experience the entire time, keeping the picture of himself intact. He has described this since as a closed system, and it became the center of his teaching.<\/p>\n
In April he went to his first AA meeting and introduced himself as Herb, exploring whether he was an alcoholic. After several meetings he dropped the qualifier. The elders told him to get a sponsor. The sponsor told him to call daily, attend daily, and be of service. He did all of it for four years and stayed sober, and by his own account remained restless, irritable, and discontented, in trouble at work and at home, a man without internal governing principles.<\/p>\n
That gap is the load he has been carrying ever since. In his reading of Step One, the wreckage a drinker leaves behind is the first half. Jobs, money, health, and marriages can improve once the drinking stops. The second half concerns the man’s inability to regulate his own thinking, release a grievance, tolerate an outcome he did not choose, or stop managing other people’s conduct and opinions. The alcohol can be gone while the bondage of self stays.<\/p>\n
In 1988 he heard a man at a meeting describe being changed by working the Twelve Steps as the book gives them. He asked the man for help. Over roughly a year they went through reading, prayer, writing, disclosure, inventory, and amends. By the end of Step Nine, Kaighan says, he had been radically changed in how he thought, felt, and behaved, and he insists on the grammar: the thing was done to him, not by him. His part had been willingness. His career problems resolved. His marriage healed. He calls this an authentic spiritual awakening and he draws the definition from Appendix II of the book, which distinguishes the sudden spiritual experience from the slower educational variety. No vision, no voice, no conversion drama. The evidence sits in changed behavior.<\/p>\n
Then he did the entire Step process four more times over fifteen years with four different guides. Each guide asked different questions. One took him through what alcohol had done to his body, another through the failures of his will, another through his inherited ideas about God. He describes the Steps as a spiral rather than a checklist. A man comes back to the same paragraph with less capacity for self-deception and finds material he could not see the first time.<\/p>\n
This explains the shape of what he built. Anyone can watch it work. The 2026 workshop meets on Zoom, Tuesdays, four to five thirty in the afternoon Pacific time, starting January 6. Registration is free. The suggested donation is five dollars a week for technology, administration, and materials. A volunteer named Nan handles the mailing list. Participants are asked to bring an unmarked Fourth Edition of the Big Book, a binder, paper, and a pen, to pray daily, read weekly, listen to the recorded commentary for each Step, write weekly, and show up to discuss.<\/p>\n
The assignments run to thirty-three over twelve months, and they read like a training manual written by a man who does not trust vague introspection. Assignment One asks the participant to compose and pray a Set Aside Prayer: a request that everything he thinks he knows about himself, his unmanageability, the Steps, and God be set aside so he can have an open mind and a new experience of all four. It is prayed every morning and again before touching any assignment. Assignment Two gives four questions to hold while reading the front matter, with the instruction not to answer them but to ask them, and then, after the reading is done, to write one sentence to one page on each. Then the dictionary work begins. Look up anonymous. Look up recovered. Later, allergy, phenomenon, craving, addiction, reprieve, malady, concede, willfulness, solipsism, bedevilment. Write the definitions out. Highlight while reading, always, whether or not the instruction says to.<\/p>\n
Step One breaks into three weeks of worksheets: body, mind, will. Step Two asks the participant to write what he believes about God, with the qualifier that the question is not what he knows, feels, wants, or has been told. Then he rereads the chapter “We Agnostics” in a second color, marking only what he resists, and a third time in another color, marking only what he can accept, and from that second list he chooses attributes he needs a higher power to have, and writes out a concept. Step Three asks him to identify a relationship, Architect, Healer, Teacher, Coach, and to compose his own prayer modeled on the one in the book.<\/p>\n
Step Four is an audit. Column one is a list of resentments, with resentment defined as anger still felt in the present moment rather than remembered. Column two lists causes, lettered a, b, c, one per incident. In the middle of these instructions Kaighan drops an aside about his own list: “I had A-Z for my father.” Column three is a printed worksheet, three at a time. Column four asks the five questions from page sixty-seven and adds others, and the instruction attached to it draws the line he draws everywhere: this is not self-blame, it is taking responsibility for your own anger, and your reaction is the problem. For deep resentments he tells the participant to write a prayer for their removal and pray it every morning, one prayer per person, suggesting he do it on his knees, and to keep at it until he knows in his body that the resentment is gone. Eight resentments, eight prayers. He warns that the first one may take many months.
\nAmazon<\/p>\n
The fear inventory begins with an uncensored dump, then a walk through life in brackets, grammar school, each year of high school, each year after. Then the participant takes one fear onto its own page and asks why he has it, and asks again of the answer, and again, pushing past comfort until he hits a wall or the answers start circling. The sex inventory runs from earliest memory forward and ends by turning the ninth question, what should we have done instead, into a list of principles the man is willing to live up to, with a note attached: no one here is the arbiter of anyone else’s sexual conduct, and the book has no opinion. Step Eight moves onto three-by-five cards, one per person or institution, carrying the harm, the act, the damage done, and the proportional repair. Every card gets reviewed with a guide before the amend is made, and if the guide has no experience with that kind of amend, the participant finds someone who does.<\/p>\n
The 2026 supporting document runs seventy-one pages of graphics, commentary, prayers, and worksheets, and includes material from the DSM on personality disorder. The bibliography is where the traditionalism cracks open. Thomas Keating (1923\u20132018) is there, and Thomas Merton, and Thich Nhat Hanh, Shunryu Suzuki, Ken Wilber, Teilhard de Chardin, Gurdjieff, Byron Katie, Viktor Frankl, William James (1842\u20131910), Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, Gregory Boyle, Richard Rohr, and four books by the psychologist Allen Berger. One entry carries a ranking in Kaighan’s own hand: Frederic Luskin’s Forgive for Good is second in importance in his development, behind the Big Book.<\/p>\n
So the man who tells AA to return to one text has assembled a reading list drawn from Cistercian contemplatives, Zen teachers, integral theory, and trauma psychiatry. His fidelity attaches to a sequence of actions, not to a sealed canon. Anything that helps a man complete the actions is admissible. The Steps are the process; the rest is equipment.<\/p>\n
Two collaborations organize his later work. With Berger, a clinical psychologist sober since July 1971 who came into recovery through a program for Marines returning from Vietnam, he teaches emotional sobriety. Berger supplies the language of dependency, self-esteem, differentiation, and the true self. Kaighan supplies Step Ten as the daily instrument and the distinction between not drinking and not needing the world to arrange itself around you. For a Berlin group they built a thirty-six month rotation: Kaighan on a Step one month, Berger on the same Step the next, both together in the third, twelve Steps deep. With Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, he teaches forgiveness as a process rather than an event, defined by what it excludes: it does not require condoning, forgetting, tolerating, staying, or reconciling. Kaighan wrote the foreword to Luskin and Lyndon Harris’s The Forgive for Good Recovery Workbook, published by New Harbinger in April 2025, which brings a research-based secular method into the same room as Step Four.<\/p>\n
His own books are self-consciously unliterary. Twelve-Step Guide to Using The Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book came out from Capizon Publishing in 2004, a hundred and forty-four oversized pages built around assignment focus and intent. His description of it on a recovery bookseller’s page is flat: “It is a book of instructions.” No commentary, no editorializing, no personal experience. Twelve Steps to Spiritual Awakening: Enlightenment for Everyone followed from the same press in 2010 at three hundred and fifty pages, extending the claim past alcoholism to anyone trapped in illusion, fear, resentment, and the need to control. Hazelden published Practicing the Here and Now in 2017, two hundred pages on Step Eleven and what he calls intentional consciousness. A revised edition of the 2010 book was listed for pre-order through Mascot Books in the summer of 2026. In his author note he sets out the mission in a sentence: “To help others get on a spiritual path and stay on it.” <\/p>\n
The contemplative line is more specific than the books suggest. He began a daily meditation practice from the Step Eleven instructions in 1989. In 1990, by his account, Thomas Keating initiated him into centering prayer, and he has practiced it every day since and led a centering prayer group at the Mary & Joseph Retreat Center for decades. That is the same center his wife directed. She died at home on March 27, 2018, after almost fifty-two years of marriage. He kept teaching in her building.<\/p>\n
The credentials accumulated in institutions that rarely share a table. He completed a three-year program for certification as a spiritual director, which he dates to 1989 and one of his profiles dates to 1990. He taught a full-semester course in Twelve-Step spirituality to fourth-year theologians at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, ran workshops through Loyola Marymount’s Los Angeles Center for Spirituality, and taught in the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health’s clergy academy. He served as outreach coordinator for the Thelma McMillen Center at Torrance Memorial Medical Center and gave spiritual counseling at an intensive outpatient program in Culver City. Catholic formation, twelve-step fellowship, clinical treatment, and county mental health each got a piece of him.<\/p>\n
What he did that others in the Big Book revival did not do is publish the apparatus and give it away. HerbK.com holds the recorded workshops, the assignment manual, the seventy-one page document, the participation agreement, the Spanish translations, the Berlin talks, and fifty-two recordings from a previous year-long cycle. The site carries the standard disclaimer that it is neither endorsed nor approved by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services. The monthly Step Guide meeting, last Tuesday of the month, runs as a train-the-trainer group, recorded and posted for other time zones, with a recorded series called “Becoming a Lantern.” The rules there are thin by design. Participants should have finished the Step work or be finishing Step Nine. The list is confidential and is not a referral service. “We do not take roll”, the page says, and regular attendance is not required. The lantern gives light. It does not own the road. <\/p>\n
By 2024 he was posting that his energy, stamina, and resilience had decreased, and asking the international twelve-step community to pick up the baton and run their own workshops. He did not retire. He narrowed. In 2025, he remarried. In 2026, in his mid-eighties, he was still running the Tuesday workshop, the Step Guide meeting, the centering prayer group, emotional sobriety sessions with Berger, and forgiveness sessions with Luskin, including a three-day retreat in June on the Palos Verdes bluffs.<\/p>\n
A 2015 newspaper interview has him retiring in 1996 from consulting to insurance brokerages; his own biography says November 2006. He describes forty years in human resources in one place and forty-one in another. His certification as a spiritual director is dated 1989 by him and 1990 by a profile written about him. The workshops are dated to twenty years in one statement and twenty-seven in another. His birth date appears nowhere; it has to be inferred from a line about his seventy-fifth birthday falling in the summer of 2015. He named the man who guided him through the Steps in 1988 nowhere I can find. There is no controlled outcome data on any of it. The evidence for his method consists of his own testimony, four decades of workshop practice, and the accounts of participants.<\/p>\n
His claim that the Steps as written are the only program of recovery will read as too narrow to anyone whose sobriety was assembled from medication, therapy, community, religion, mutual aid, and some Step work. His complaint about meetings lands hardest on the people who need meetings most, since the room is where a man first hears his own story in someone else’s mouth, and Kaighan himself got four sober years out of exactly that before he ever opened the book properly. And a twelve-month curriculum with dictionary assignments, weekly writing, printed worksheets, and a year of homework selects for people who can do a year of homework. The population that can meet his commitment is not the population in the worst trouble.<\/p>\n
Set against that is the thing he identified, which travels well past alcoholism and past America. Practices that begin as preparation turn into substitutes for the work they were meant to prepare. Attendance stands in for inventory. Identification stands in for surrender. Discussion stands in for repair. Spiritual language stands in for spiritual change. Years of good standing become evidence that no further examination is required. Any institution that trains people can be audited on this, and most fail the audit, and the failure is comfortable for everyone inside it. Kaighan ran the audit on his own fellowship at seventy-six with a legal pad and a program of meetings, and published the number.<\/p>\n
The convention he wanted redirected never met. Detroit 2020 was canceled in the pandemic. Its theme had been set as “Love and Tolerance Is Our Code,” not the one he proposed. When the fellowship next gathered, in Vancouver in July 2025 for its ninetieth anniversary, the theme was “90 Years \u2013 Language of the Heart.” His letter changed nothing at the top.<\/p>\n
What he built instead sits on a website, free, in three languages, with a binder’s worth of worksheets, a monthly call for the people who guide other people, and a standing instruction to set aside everything you think you know before you begin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Atlanta, the first days of July 2015. Around fifty-seven thousand members of Alcoholics Anonymous filled the convention halls and the stadium for the fellowship’s eightieth anniversary. Herbert Kaighan (b. c. 1940) was there with his family, celebrating two things at … Continue reading