Editor’s Note: We continue exploring the meaning of Recovery Month. Our guest contributor is Bill Stauffer, a friend and recovery educator. He reflects on how Lois and Bill Wilson changed his life and the opportunity for us all to carry that message of hope, whether in recovery or not. 

It is Recovery Month, 2025. This is my 38^th September in Recovery. 39 years ago was an ugly September in my life. The very notion of recovery back then was foreign, threatening and beyond my comprehension, yet here I am, with much to celebrate. One of my reflections this year is on a remarkable book published earlier this year that I had the opportunity to be involved with, A Marriage That Changed the World: Lois and Bill Wilson and the Addiction Recovery Movement. It focuses on how the union of Lois and Bill Wilson evolved into a partnership that has changed everything. This couple modeled recovery and resilience in ways that have rippled across time and transformed the way we heal from addiction on every continent and in every culture. While we live in a world of many pathways of recovery, they have common roots that were nurtured in no small way by their hands ninety years ago. 

Through this impactful book, authors Tom Adams and Joy Jones have contributed greatly to the scholarship of our history so that generations beyond ours can understand how this marriage helped create a vast healing force that has spread globally. Those first conversations of hope, emerging from despair that sparked to life within the Wilsons’ home, have shaped entire movements of recovery that emanated out of it. Processes of mutual aid, formal treatment strategies, and recovery support across diverse communities have sprung from this union and their efforts. It would have been impossible, in those days nine decades ago, to know how this marriage would so powerfully influence our world. Millions of people around the globe are alive and thriving today because of what grew from this couple and the community they nurtured. Their work has evolved to support global recovery efforts in ways that would have defied their imaginations.

My own recovery, which took hold at age twenty-one in the mid-1980s, emanated from the recovery capital—a reservoir of resources and support—sown by these pioneers. In my community, those seeds can be traced back to Marty Mann, the first woman in A.A. to stay in continuous recovery, whom the Wilsons invited into their home to help in those early days. She was our nation’s first recovery advocate, who spoke out publicly and formed education centers in the early 1950s, including Alcohol Councils, to raise public awareness about alcohol addiction and recovery. We had one of the first councils in my community. Without the Wilsons, the help I found decades later would have been unlikely at best. The same is true for millions of people worldwide. 

Anything beyond a cursory review of recovery history invariably generates a deep appreciation of the Wilsons’ profound contributions and an even deeper sense of humility in respect to our own efforts to support healing in the next generation. Bill Wilson died when I was six, and Lois passed just short of my second Anniversary in recovery. Like millions of people in recovery around the world, I never got to thank them for what they did for all of us, other than to pay their efforts forward in whatever way I can. A commitment to service to others runs deep within us, a practice that legions of us are engaged in worldwide. The Wilsons’ healing ripples through us and out into the future. I thank them and all who have served to carry the message of recovery forward across our world. It was a marriage that quite literally changed the world, one life at a time, including mine. 

Thank you, Lois and Bill Wilson. You live on in our service to others. Thank you, Tom Adams and Joy Jones, for researching and documenting this marriage and its impact on our world. In celebrating and sharing our own recovery and highlighting how recovery is more than possible, it becomes probable that people who are hurting can get what they need.  Thus, we help widen a path that took hold 90 years ago and transformed pain and despair into hope and purpose. We celebrate not just our own path, but all of those who came before us to make our recovery possible. We do so by paying it forward, as did Lois and Bill Wilson. 

Happy recovery month 2025, to all those who made it possible for us, and to all of those who pay it forward for generations to come. 

Sources

Adams, T., & Jones, J. (2025). A marriage that changed the world: Lois and Bill Wilson and the addiction recovery movement. Greenbelt Publishers LLC. https://www.steppingstones.org/shop/books-literature-in-english/a-marriage-that-changed-the-world/