Should We Go Easy on the God Stuff? April 2002
Clean Slate February 2009
From Foxhole to Light March 2008
Finding My Way April 2009
Alcoholic's Meditation November 2010
Step Twelve
Carrying the Message April 1971
Practice the Principles June 1981
The Woman Who Had Everything December 1993
Got It? Give It. Forget It! December 1998
The Luck of the Draw June 2002
How to Give a Lead July 2005
E–Stepping: Carrying the Message Online December 2005
Memory Motel March 2007
Tattoo August 2007
The Twelve Steps
The Twelve Traditions
Welcome
“The joy of good living.”
This is the theme of AA's Twelfth Step, according to the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. But most AAs would probably agree that this is the theme of all of the Steps.
The Steps have been called inspired by God. “I doubt if the Twelve Steps that have changed the course of existence for so many thousands of lives could have been the mere product of human insight and observation. And they can and will bless anyone, alcoholic or not, who will follow them through and be obedient to them. They are morally and spiritually and psychologically and practically as sound as can be,” wrote Dr. Samuel Shoemaker, the Episcopal clergyman who helped in the founding of AA, in the Grapevine in 1964. “I often say and shall always say that the Twelve Steps are one of the very great summaries and organic collections of spiritual truth known to history. … Herein is spiritual wisdom and health. We have had to look deep within, probe, burrow, struggle, and in a sense this never stops.”
Initially, there were six Steps, which co-founder Bill W. expanded into 12 in the process of writing Chapter Five of the Big Book. He originally named God very liberally throughout the Steps, leading to heated discussion and the eventual compromise and the addition of “as we understand Him” and “Higher Power.”
“Those expressions, as we so well know today, have proved lifesavers for many an alcoholic,” Bill wrote in a 1953 Grapevine article. “They have enabled thousands of us to make a beginning where none could have been made had we left the steps just as I originally wrote them. … Little did we then guess that our Twelve Steps would soon be widely approved by clergymen of all denominations and even by our latter-day friends, the psychiatrists.”
Members sometimes view the Twelve Steps as therapy, perhaps the best therapy available for alcoholics. “Outward problems in our lives are produced by conditions within ourselves. Persistent use of the Steps removes the inward conditions that cause the problems,” a 1976 contributor to the Grapevine wrote. “As we experience changes in ourselves, we live our way into a new understanding, and we gradually stop creating difficulties in our lives. We find answers and solutions that we could never see before, and they all come from the program. It's so simple that it's sometimes tough to believe!
“Regardless of where we are in sobriety, you and I have a specific method of dealing with what happens to us each day—by simply renewing our work in the program. Unless I do this kind of continuing work, I'll never know what the AA message really is or how to help another person experience it.”
This book shows how AA members of all ages, from all lifestyles and from around the world, followers of mainstream religions and atheists, newcomers and old-timers, have recovered and found a new way of life by working the Twelve Steps. The Steps are a very popular submission topic, with a great deal of manuscripts on Step topics submitted each year. Every issue of the Grapevine since its redesign in 2007 has included a Step story. Here is a variety of experiences that AAs have written about the Steps and sent to the Grapevine over the course of its existence, from the 1940s to the present.
STEP ONE
“We admitted we were powerless
over alcohol—that our lives had
become unmanageable.”
Bill W.'s description of Step One in the “Twelve and Twelve” is rife with metaphors. There's “John Barleycorn,” the personification of the grain barley and the alcoholic beverages that are made from it—beer and whiskey. There's the image of the “lash of alcoholism” driving drunks into AA, and the “life preserver” that the dying seize with fervor.
Perhaps the most important metaphor is the image of the “taproot”: “The principle that we shall find no enduring strength until we first admit complete defeat is the main taproot from which our whole society has sprung and flowered.”
According to an online encyclopedia, a taproot is a large root that grows straight downward and forms a center from which other roots sprout laterally. “Plants with taproots are difficult to transplant … and uproot.”
Admitting defeat is the taproot of the rest of the program, the one Step that AAs must take 100 percent before continuing with the rest of the program. Some AAs realize their lives are unmanageable and that they can't handle alcohol years before entering the program. Others accept the first or the second half of the Step before taking it in its entirety.
“When I first came to AA I was told that I should not bother to try and find out why I became an alcoholic, but rather I should accept my alcoholism as a fact and begin to do something about it,” writes the author of a 1966 Grapevine story. An earlier piece in 1944, calls the admission of unmanageability and powerlessness the “first success on the road to well-being.”
On the following pages, AAs talk about Step One.
On the First Step
November 1944
The first of the 12 Steps in the creed or philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous is, “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” By such an admission any alcoholic, provided he is sincere, has achieved his first success on the road to well-being.
Such an admission is usually very difficult for the alcoholic to make. The very nature of his disease makes him shun the knowledge of his inability to cope with the problems of everyday life. Hence his desire for something that will rapidly create whatever he thinks he lacks as an individual. With a few drinks under his belt he can fashion the most wonderful dreams about himself. These dreams can become his real characteristics—but only when he recognizes that he must dominate alcohol rather than have alcohol dominate him.
The sincerity with which the newcomer takes the First Step is the gauge by which his recovery through AA can be measured.
