Twelve Steps for The Rest Of Us

The first AA Big Book was written in 1939 by Bill Wilson, four years after Alcoholics Anonymous grew to about 100 members.  Bill was a real alcoholic, who likely would have drunk himself to death if a miracle hadn’t happened. That miracle came through his old drinking buddy, Ebby Thatcher. Ebby came to see Bill after he sobered up with the help of the Oxford Group.  He brought Bill to hope with their four principles of recovery, “absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love” and also a public confession. Bill came to realize he could stay sober by practicing those principles and by sharing his story with other alcoholics.

I had lived with alcoholism and drug addiction around me for several years. It can be an experience of chaos, abuse, helplessness, and humiliation. I initially sought help through Al-Anon, the support group for the families of alcoholics, back in 1990. I thought if they’d just show me how to get my husband to stop drinking everything would be OK. They lovingly let me know that’s not what Al-Anon was for.  I had my own work to do so I could get better. He was on his own path and would have to seek help when he was ready.

For situations like this, working in a Twelve Step program is crucial to one’s survival. For everyone else, it may not be a life-or-death situation, but it can mean the difference between living a wonderfully fulfilling life, or not. Co-dependency is rampant in our society. We look outside of ourselves for validation by attention or approval seeking, comparing ourselves to others, controlling others, or filling ourselves up by acquiring material things. These behaviors become addictions for many of us. The worst addiction of all, and most pervasive, is negative thinking.

So, where did this come from?  As very young children we are often taught fear-based thinking by well-meaning adults. During the first six or seven years of life, we’re thinking in concrete terms. We don’t have the life experience to filter or process information. So, when our parents speak something to us like we don’t deserve, or that we’re bad, or not good enough, we accept that information as factual. It becomes the psychological program from which we live the rest of our lives. Children in our western culture today often are either ignored, abandoned to video or TV, or expected to over-achieve or identify their worth through competitive sports, and many parents seek their own validation through the perceived worth of their children.

After we receive our early programming, we spend the rest of our lives reacting to everything around us based on our interpretation of things. We create and attract negative thoughts and emotions, and we become addicted to those emotions. Some of them are so deeply rooted, that we aren’t even aware we are doing it; but our life experience is empty and superficial. We’re angry, stressed, and powerless. We get caught up in other people’s drama, the woes of the world, and are bombarded by media and marketers that know how to activate our emotional triggers. Ideally, we wouldn’t react to anything, we would respond with emotional intelligence and choose what we allow into our experience.  This can be hard to do at times, but it’s not impossible.

There are several ways to heal from the emotional addiction that many of us experience. At the core of any programs I’ve seen, recovery involves acknowledging the things that hurt us and then letting them go. The process can assume the journey of the Dark Knight of the Soul, the Hero’s Journey; overcoming the inner darkness and bringing us into the light with the guidance and wisdom of something greater than ourselves. With the Twelve Steps, we embrace the idea of a higher power, and we make a relationship with that our priority as we do the inner work to change. The Twelve Step program is indoctrination into that higher journey and a life of joy and understanding as we apply the principles. Below are the steps as provided by Alcoholics Anonymous. Countless groups have adopted these steps for their own recovery programs, whether it’s over-eating, emotions, co-dependency, sex, gambling, etc. I’ll go into more of the details of each step in future posts.     

The 12 Steps of AA…

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol (drugs, emotions, relationships, etc.) and that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for the knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps we tried to carry this message to other alcoholics (emotional addicts, etc.), and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Next Post – Step One – Admission to Powerlessness

Here are some other links below if you would like more information on AA or Al-Anon. I am not directly affiliated with AA or Al-Anon, or any other recovery program.

*Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous | Hazelden Betty Ford

Alcoholics Anonymous (aa.org)

Al-Anon Family Groups (al-anon.org)