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Does the Big Book say "fake it till you make it"?

In short:

  • No. "Fake it till you make it" is nowhere in the Big Book, and the word "fake" isn't in it at all. It isn't in any other book in our sources either, in that form.
  • The nearest wording, "act as if," is in one personal story in today's edition (p. 366) and in a talk by a clergyman at the 1955 convention, printed in A.A. Comes of Age (1957). Both are about acting on faith before being sure of it, as an honest trial; neither is about pretending to be well.
  • The program text asks a doubter for willingness, honesty and an open mind (pp. 46–47, 568). It treats the alcoholic's pretending, his "stage character," as part of the trouble (p. 73). What it does ask is action on the strength of willingness, before full belief arrives (pp. 12, 47).

What the search found

All our sources were searched for "fake," "fake it," "act as if," "acting as if" and "as if," with page breaks joined.

  • Big Book program text, forewords, appendices: no "fake" and no "act as if."
  • Personal stories (fourth edition, 2001): in "Tightrope" (Part II), an agnostic writer's sponsor told him A.A. was not a religious program, that it was all right to doubt God, and "that I might try occasionally to act as if I believed" (p. 366). The writer connects it with an idea he'd heard, that it is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking (p. 366). In "Empty on the Inside" (Part III), "acting as if" means the opposite: the pretending she had done all her life, acting as if she knew or didn't care (p. 512).
  • Stories printed in 1939 and later dropped (Experience, Strength and Hope, 2003): neither phrase. One later-edition story there says "I didn't want to be a fake" (Experience, Strength and Hope, 2003).
  • A.A. Comes of Age (1957): at the 1955 St. Louis convention, Dr. Samuel Shoemaker, an Episcopal clergyman and not an alcoholic, described finding faith as being more like science than philosophy: "We choose a hypothesis. We act as if it were true and see whether it works." (A.A. Comes of Age, 1957). If it doesn't work, he said, you discard it.

So where "act as if" appears with approval, it means acting on faith before being sure of it, to see whether it works. Nobody in these sources is told to fake being well.

What the program text asks of a doubter

Chapter 4, "We Agnostics," was written for the reader who can't believe. It asks for much less than belief, and it never asks him to pretend:

  • "We found that as soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results" (p. 46).
  • He is to use his own conception of God, "however inadequate" (p. 46), and ask himself one question: "Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a Power greater than myself?" (p. 47).
  • "Do not let any prejudice you may have against spiritual terms deter you from honestly asking yourself what they mean to you." (p. 47).

Bill W. tells the same thing of himself: "It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself." (p. 12). Appendix II, added later, sums it up: "Willingness, honesty and open mindedness are the essentials of recovery." (p. 568).

Willingness, not pretending

The program does ask the reader to act before he is sure. Bill says growth could start from willingness alone (p. 12); Chapter 4 says that starting from their own conception of God, "however limited it was," was "all we needed to commence spiritual growth" (p. 47); and after the Third Step decision the book launches "on a course of vigorous action" (p. 63). Faith, Chapter 7 says, "must be accompanied by self sacrifice and unselfish, constructive action" (p. 93). That is close to the sense of the story in "Tightrope": act on willingness and let belief follow.

What the book does not ask for is a show. It says the alcoholic already lives a double life: "He is very much the actor." (p. 73), presenting a "stage character" to the world (p. 73), and that this fear and tension "makes for more drinking" (p. 73). Its answer is the opposite of acting: the Fifth Step, telling someone the whole truth (pp. 72–75), and a way of life that "demands rigorous honesty" (p. 58).

So the text leaves room for "act on your willingness before you feel it," and none for "pretend you are what you aren't."

Read it yourself

Sources

Source Pages Date
Alcoholics Anonymous, whole fourth-edition text (searched) — 1939 program text; fourth edition 2001
Chapters 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 12, 46–47, 58, 63, 72–75, 93 1939
Appendix II, "Spiritual Experience" 568 added with the second edition, 1955 (p. xi); post-1950
"Tightrope," Part II; "Empty on the Inside," Part III 366, 512 fourth edition (2001); first edition of each not shown in our sources
A.A. Comes of Age, Dr. Samuel Shoemaker's 1955 talk — talk 1955, book 1957 (post-1950)
Experience, Strength and Hope (searched) — stories from the first three editions; collected 2003

Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. Quotations are brief and cited; the Big Book, Experience, Strength and Hope and A.A. Comes of Age are © A.A. World Services, Inc.

These pages answer questions about A.A. from A.A.'s own published literature, read in full, with every quote checked word for word against the page it cites. Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. What we read, and when each source was written.