Conquering the Cleverest Foe of All

On a recent Sunday night, while other Valleyites try to squeeze the last bit of sweetness from the weekend, 14 people gather in a rented office in Reseda. Fueled by coffee and the desire to change, they sit on penitential folding chairs and recount the trials and triumphs of the previous week.

They are here not because they are powerless over drink, drugs or games of chance nor because they are dependent, interdependent, independent or co-dependent.

They have gathered because they are members of Fear of Success Anonymous--or FOSA--a 12-step program in the tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Your initial response is probably much like mine: “You’ve got to be kidding. Fear of success in Los Angeles ?” Here, under the palm trees, it often seems that self-promotion is a residency requirement. People don’t just seek success in Los Angeles, they stalk it and choke it into submission.

And we’re not just talking about people with great beauty, talent, intelligence, virtue, wealth or any of the other traditional qualifications for achieving success.

Does Angelyne fear success? Does George Hamilton? This is a town where jurors have agents.

But FOSA has not just come to Los Angeles, it was born here--in Encino, of all places--born in the very shadow of Angelyne’s ubiquitous billboards.

A brief guide to the program given to first-time visitors tells the tale. The prime movers were co-founders Les and Gerry. No last names, since anonymity is one of the 12 traditions of 12-step programs, which began with Alcoholics Anonymous. Les and Gerry each “had recovery in other 12-step programs but felt elements of their lives and careers were still out of control because of self-sabotage,” the guide says.

The kinds of self-defeating behavior that frustrated Les and Gerry are demons most of us have wrestled with at one time or another, including procrastination, chronic tardiness, dressing inappropriately and being tactless.

Four people attended the first meeting, held Sept. 20, 1989, in an Encino coffee shop of the sort that wouldn’t last a year without the prodigious need for caffeine of the clean and sober. There the first FOSA members began applying the principles of AA in hopes of improving lives that continued to dissatisfy despite their success in battling their addictions.

If you are sufficiently wicked, you can imagine the grave discussion that led to choosing the name Fear of Success Anonymous over such alternatives as Screwups Anonymous. You wonder, before your Inner Nun takes out her ruler and whacks you on the knuckles, just how unusual the ties were at that first meeting and if anyone succumbed to the self-sabotaging temptation to thumb his or her nose at the co-founders.

But it is impossible to be unkind once you are actually at a meeting. The room is full of people who are dealing with real pain and whose response, at least here, is not anger or despair but the simple courage of taking a first step, then a second, one day at a time.

OK, the phrase is a cliche. That doesn’t make the people who practice it any less heroic.

Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, every member has a particular hell and is coping with it in his or her own way. FOSA must fill a need. In six years, the group has grown from four to 80 members, with six groups that meet regularly in Southern California.

“I’m Don, and I’m recovering from fear of life, let alone fear of success,” says Don (not his real name), who used to be a successful songwriter but says he has forgotten how.

“Hi, Don!” the Reseda group chants in response.

This is Don’s first meeting, and he shyly reveals that he is also struggling with a midlife crisis and writer’s block. (“A song a week, that’s all I ask,” he quips.) Twenty years ago, he had a Top 40 hit. But his music has recently been re-released on CD, and instead of making him happy, that fortuitous event has filled him with anxiety.

He was the person who did the talking for his band, Don says, amazed. “I can’t believe I ever did that.” Now he is nervous addressing a dozen supportive strangers.

Don knows in his bones that success is within his grasp. “It’s right there waiting for me,” he says. When the timer signals someone else’s turn to speak, Don says his story is “to be continued.”

The group’s common language is that of AA. A man we’ll call Dale paraphrases the Big Book--the AA Bible--when he says: “This disease never ceases to amaze me. How cunning, baffling and powerful it is.” There’s no cure for self-sabotage, he says, “only a daily reprieve based on our spiritual condition.”

Like most other 12-steppers, FOSA members acknowledge “a Power greater than ourselves” and decide to turn “our will and our lives over to God as we understand Him.”

The group nods in recognition when Dale talks about normies , people who haven’t a clue as to how paralyzing fear of success can be or how showing up on time for a business meeting can be a triumph. Just as Dale begins to sound like something cross-stitched on an AA sampler (“Inch by inch, everything’s a cinch. Yard by yard, it’s hard”), he goes and tears a listener’s heart out.

“We hung on to the house,” he reports matter-of-factly to his self-help family, who have apparently heard the dreaded word “foreclosure” at an earlier meeting.

Dale’s is not the only testimony that hints at how heavy some members’ burdens are. One man has tears in his eyes as he slowly reads from a FOSA text. He is dyslexic, and his completing the halting recitation is akin to completing a marathon.

Some of the younger members don’t seem troubled by anything more Earth-shattering than getting to the gym regularly, but others are clearly dealing with awful problems. Some are recovering alcoholics, some pack rats, some have lost jobs and loved ones. One member gets up each day with the knowledge that otherworldly voices may whisper in his ear. His decision to describe his problem as fear of success is greeted with the group’s unconditional support.

FOSA expects its members to walk the walk. That means they have to do something about their problems, not just lament them. Members share their action plans for the coming week, the baby steps they will take toward whatever goal they choose.

An hour and a half after they came together, the Reseda FOSA members are ready to retire to a nearby Carrow’s for coffee and unstructured socializing. In unison, they sing out the words they hope will see them through another week:

“Remember, the road to success is always under construction!”

It only sounds like a prayer if you’ve been there.