Alcoholics Anonymous

by Alcoholics Anonymous

witnessed our return to health.

hopeless.

he acquired certain ideas

to present his conceptions to other alcoholics, impressing upon them that they must do l...

This has become the basis of a rapidly growing fellowship of these men and their families. This man and over one hundre...

other methods had failed ...

alcoholic torture must believe—that the body of the alcoholic is quite as abnormal as his mind.

It did not satisfy us to be told that we could not control our drinking

just because we were maladjus...

that we were in full flight from reality, or were outright...

our bodies were sickened as well.

Though we work out our solution on the spiritual as well as an altruistic plane,

that a man’s brain be cleared before he is approached,

while here he acquired some ideas which he put into practical application at once.

Power which pulls chronic alcoholics back from the gates of death.

We believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy; that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found they cannot break it, once having lost their self-confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve.

In nearly all cases, their ideals must be grounded in a power greater than themselves, if they are to re-create their lives.

that we have found nothing which has contributed more to the rehabilitation of these men than the altruistic movement now growing up among them.

Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks—drinks which they see others taking with impunity. After they have succumbed to the desire again, as so many do, and the phenomenon of craving develops, they pass through the well-known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again. This is repeated over and over, and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of his recovery.

once a psychic change has occurred,

to follow a few simple rules.

human power is needed

They took a drink a day or so prior to the date, and then the phenomenon of craving at once became paramount

These men were not drinking to escape; they were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control.

which cause men to make the supreme sacrifice rather than continue to fight.

All these, and many others, have one symptom in common: they cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving. This phenomenon, as we have suggested, may be the manifestation of an allergy which differentiates these people, and sets them apart as a distinct entity. It has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated. The only relief we have to suggest is entire abstinence.

He accepted the plan outlined in this book.

A long time has passed with no return to alcohol.

Thus started one more journey to the asylum for Jim. Here was the threat of commitment, the loss of family and position, to say nothing of that intense mental and physical suffering which drinking always caused him. He had much knowledge about himself as an alcoholic. Yet all reasons for not drinking were easily pushed aside in favor of the foolish idea that he could take whiskey if only he mixed it with milk!

In some circumstances we have gone out deliberately to get drunk, feeling ourselves justified by nervousness, anger, worry, depression, jealousy or the like. But even in this type of beginning we are obliged to admit that our justification for a spree was insanely insufficient in the light of what always happened. We now see that when we began to drink deliberately, instead of casually, there was little serious or effective thought during the period of premeditation of what the terrific consequences might be.

fellowship

“I came into A.A. solely for the purpose of sobriety, but it has been through A.A. that I have found God.”

“Abandon yourself to God as you understand God. Admit your faults to Him and to your fellows. Clear away the wreckage of your past. Give freely of what you find and join us.” It is very simple—though not always easy. But it can be done.

One morning, however, I realized I had to get rid of it, for my reprieve was running out, and if I didn’t get rid of it I was going to get drunk—and I didn’t want to get drunk anymore. In my prayers that morning I asked God to point out to me some way to be free of this resentment.

He said, in effect: “If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing that you resent, you will be free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free. Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free. Even when you don’t really want it for them and your prayers are only words and you don’t mean it, go ahead and do it anyway. Do it every day for two weeks, and you will find you have come to mean it and to want it for them, and you will realize that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love.”

“The only real freedom a human being can ever know is doing what you ought to do because you want to do it.”

I get everything I need in Alcoholics Anonymous—and everything I need I get. And when I get what I need, I invariably find that it was just what I wanted all the time.