- Twelve Steps in twelve sentences…
- Overview of the literature…
- Outline of the Twelve Step work…
- Recovery for other addictions…
- The magic of the Twelve Steps…
Click each Step for an article and video…
Step 1: The one Step – the only Step – that must “be practiced with absolute perfection.”
“We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.”
Step 2: “Step Two is the rallying point for all of us,” where the run-away retreat from our addiction stops and we regroup around a power greater than ourselves to begin a victorious assault on our addiction enemy.
“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
Step 3: “Step Three opens the door” to all the other Steps, making possible our success in the practice of the Twelve Step program.
“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”
Step 4: Completing the Step Four inventory, you realize “you have swallowed and digested some big chunks of truth about yourself,” perhaps for the first time in your life.
“Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”
Step 5: Finding connection with others through our Step Five admissions, we come to “a resting place where we may prepare ourselves for the following Steps toward a full and meaningful sobriety.”
“Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”
Step 6: Step Six “separates the men from the boys,” as we let go of our “clinging” to our old addictive patterns of behavior.
“Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.”
Step 7: Step Seven is not really about removing shortcomings; rather, it’s all about gaining humility in the face of our shortcomings – the humility that becomes “the foundational principle of each of A.A.’s Twelve Steps.”
“Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.”
Step 8 and Step 9: Steps Eight and Nine seem to be about “trying to put our lives in order;” but the “real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us.”
“Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all”
“Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”
Step 10: Step Ten states the “acid test” to determine whether our recovery program is working: “can we stay sober, keep in emotional balance, and live to good purpose under all conditions?”
“Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”
Step 11: The easily over-spiritualized Step Eleven is actually “intensely practical,” improving our thought life and bringing emotional balance.
“Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
Step 12: Simply said, “the joy of good living is the theme of A.A.’s Twelfth Step.”
“Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”
The Twelve Steps were developed by the founders and early members of Alcoholics Anonymous as the codification of the methods of recovery from alcoholism that they had discovered and successfully applied in their own lives.
Subsequently, the 12 Step model has been picked up by countless other groups for use in recovery from various kinds of addiction, including narcotics, overeating, gambling, pornography, etc., and related co-dependence of those in relationship with the addict.
There are two basic A.A. texts that discuss the Twelve Step recovery program in detail: Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism, and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.
A.A. members refer to the first text as the Big Book, and the second as the Twelve and Twelve. The Big Book has been recently published in a fourth edition. The basic text has remained the same, but new stories have been added.
The Big Book was written and edited by Bill Wilson and the early members of A.A. and initially published in 1939, only four years after the beginning of A.A.. “To show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book.” It is the original documentation of the development and success of the Twelve Steps used as a program of recovery for alcoholism.
The Twelve and Twelve, initially published 14 years later, is based on the early experience of individual A.A. members and groups confronting issues that arose in working their way through the recovery program laid out in the Big Book. “This present volume proposes to broaden and deepen the understanding of the Twelve Steps as first written in the earlier work.”
As such, the Twelve and Twelve is more directly focused on the Steps in the recovery program initially presented in the Big Book and provides specific guidance for each of them.
The importance of a sponsor in your recovery:
When we start into recovery, it is strongly recommended that we ask someone of our choosing to “sponsor” us. The purpose of sponsoring is to provide the newcomer with someone who can introduce him to the meetings and the people, and get him started on the early issues of recovery.
He is a person with whom the newcomer can share his problems in more detail than may be appropriate at a meeting. Often, the sponsor provides more specific guidance that helps the newcomer grow in his sobriety. Most importantly, it is the sponsor that gets the newcomer started on his work with the Twelve Steps.
Growing in your understanding of the Twelve Steps…
The best way to grow in your understanding of the Steps is to read the literature and attend meetings where the Steps are discussed.
But understanding them conceptually will not bring sobriety… it is the actual working of the 12 Steps that will bring that result.
To begin, you may find it helpful to follow the brief outline of Twelve Step work provided in the Twelve and Twelve itself…
Step One showed us an amazing paradox: We found that we were totally unable to be rid of the alcohol obsession until we first admitted that we were powerless over it.
In Step Two we saw that since we could not restore ourselves to sanity, some Higher Power must necessarily do so if we were to survive.
Consequently, in Step Three we turned our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. For the time being, we who were atheist or agnostic discovered that our own group, or A.A. as a whole, would suffice as a higher power.
Beginning with Step Four, we commenced to search out the things in ourselves which had brought us to physical, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory.
Looking at Step Five, we decided that an inventory, taken alone, wouldn’t be enough. We knew we would have to quit the deadly business of living alone with our conflicts, and in honesty confide these to God and another human being.
At Step Six, many of us balked – for the practical reason that we did not wish to have all our defects of character removed, because we still loved some of them too much. Yet we knew we had to make a settlement with the fundamental principle of Step Six. So we decided that while we still had some flaws of character that we could not yet relinquish, we ought nevertheless to quit our stubborn, rebellious hanging on to them. We said to ourselves, “This I cannot do today, perhaps, but I can stop crying out, ‘no, never!’”
Then, in Step Seven, we humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings such as He could or would under the conditions of the day we asked.
In Step Eight, we continued our housecleaning, for we saw that we were not only in conflict with ourselves, but also with people and situations in the world in which we lived. We had to begin to make our peace, and so we listed the people we had harmed and became willing to set things right.
We followed this up in Step Nine by making direct amends to those concerned, except when it would injure them or other people.
By this time, at Step Ten, we had begun to get a basis for daily living, and we keenly realized that we would need to continue taking personal inventory, and that when we were wrong we ought to admit it promptly.
In Step Eleven we saw that if a Higher Power had restored us to sanity and had enabled us to live with some peace of mind in a sorely troubled world, then such a Higher Power was worth knowing better, by as direct contact as possible. The persistent use of meditation and prayer, we found, did open the channel so that where there had been a trickle, there now was a river which led to sure power and safe guidance from God as we were increasingly better able to understand Him.
And what about the Twelfth Step? The wonderful energy it releases and the eager action by which it carries our message to the next suffering alcoholic and which finally translates the Twelve Steps into action upon all our affairs is the payoff, the magnificent reality, of Alcoholics Anonymous.
- Twelve and Twelve, pp. 107-09.
4. Twelve Step Recovery for Other Addictions…
How come a program discovered or developed by a couple of alcoholics for staying sober and getting others sober also works for so many other unrelated addictions?
Twelve Step Programs Proliferate:
No longer limited to alcoholism, there are “Anonymous” programs for every sort of addiction today, all following the twelve step model worked out in Alcoholics Anonymous (“AA”). Following are some of those groups and their official websites for further information:
As you can see, there is a Twelve Step program for pretty much any addiction out there. While the substance or behavior each group deals with is different, the loss of control experienced by each addict is the same. And that’s why Twelve Step programs work for each of the different types of addictions.
“Detoxing and rehabing”
The medical and psychological protocols for detoxing obviously vary greatly depending upon the specific addiction. The medical protocol for working with severe cocaine addiction is different from working with a gambling addiction. But once the addict – any addict – has been “detoxed and rehabbed,” the path to life-long sobriety from the addiction looks quite similar regardless of the addiction.
Why the Twelve Steps work for all addicts:
Because the addict’s problem is not the drug, alcohol, or behavior. That’s the symptom. It’s the sense of powerlessness in the face of the addiction, and the mental twist that can take us back to our addiction that is the same in all addictions. And that is where the Twelve Step program begins its magic – at the admission of powerlessness made in Step One. The following work on the causes of the addiction through the heart of the Twelve Steps solves the underlying problem for all addictions.
And so we find Twelve Step programs available for most addictions diagnosed today.
We come into Twelve Step recovery recovery beaten by addiction and desperately seeking a solution to our obsession that has destroyed us physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, and spiritually.
We are instructed in the Twelve Steps, and begin to actually do the work suggested by this program. Time goes by and one day you find that you have had “a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps.”
Most of us did not come into recovery seeking a spiritual awakening, and we did not think we were taking on a religious practice to bring about a spiritual awakening.
We did not attend to the teachings or discipline of a spiritual master, or become inducted or initiated into any religious group or tradition.
We simply attended A.A. meetings, listened to a lot of other alcoholics, took guidance in working the Steps from others in the program, did the work, and managed to stay sober long enough for the compulsion to drink to lift. And then you have a spiritual awakening.
There is great irony in this!
Recovering alcoholics are not the only ones having spiritual awakenings in the world today. Many undergo a conversion experience at the hand of an evangelist, or receive direct transmission from a Hindu master.
Westerners have taken to yoga and forms of Buddhist meditation in great numbers seeking to achieve spiritual awakenings. People are studying chakras, Buddhist theology, and New Age esoteric metaphysics.
The mystical aspects of Christianity, Judaism and Islam all draw people hungering today for spiritual awakening. Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet, is one of the best selling poets in America today.
While everyone was busy with all this study and discipline seeking a spiritual awakening, what were we doing?
Drinking, drugging, pursuing your particular addiction to completely numb out to life, with the result of wrecking health, marriages and families, losing jobs, and possibly spending time in jail.
Whipped by alcoholism and addiction, we are introduced to recovery in some manner, and begin to follow the suggestions for how to get through a day without our addiction.
And the result? A spiritual awakening.
See the irony in this?
“Our Twelfth Step… says that as a result of practicing all the Steps, we have each found something called a spiritual awakening. To new A.A.’s, this often seems like a very dubious and improbable state of affairs.”
- Twelve and Twelve, at p. 106.
Yes, because you would think the Twelfth Step would have said that as the result of practicing all the steps, we have found sobriety. When you started into recovery, no doubt sobriety was your goal.
It may still seem that should be the goal. Yet the literature says the result of the alcoholic’s practice of Twelve Step recovery is a definite, conclusive spiritual awakening “about which finally there [is] no question.” Your own experience will confirm this.
At the same time, you will also remain sober and continue to do so. And then you begin to realize the spiritual awakening and on-going sobriety have become powerfully and wonderfully linked together.
As you work toward either one, the other also occurs, with profound synergy between the awakening and the sobriety.
