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alcoholics precisely how we have recovered
The program is BY THE BOOK....beginning to end!
The only requirement for membership is an honest desire to stop drinking.
A.A.’s had to hang together or die separately.
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.
Allergy dictionary
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 a...
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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.
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
Always!!!!!!!
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.
Our friends thought a lunacy commission should be appointed.
How many times....????
I made a host of fair-weather friends.
Then I went on a prodigious bender, and that chance vanished.
I constantly did this!
Was I crazy?
As the whisky rose to my head I told myself I would manage better next time, but I might as well get good and drunk then. And I did.
Me...over and over.
Should I kill myself?
The curve of my declining moral and bodily health fell off like a ski-jump.
No words can tell of the loneliness and despair I found in that bitter morass of self-pity. Quicksand stretched around me in all directions. I had met my match. I had been overwhelmed. Alcohol was my master.
Incomprehensible demoralization! Me!
I was soon to be catapulted into what I like to call the fourth dimension of existence. I was to know happiness, peace, and usefulness, in a way of life that is incredibly more wonderful as time passes.
Truth!
sober.
They had told of a simple religious idea
Step 2
practical program of action.
3 thru 12
I had to be, for I was hopeless.
How could there be so much of precise and immutable law, and no intelligence? I simply had to believe in a Spirit of the Universe, who knew neither time nor limitation. But that was as far as I had gone.
“Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?”
It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more
was required of me to make my beginning.
Would I have it? Of course I would!
We learned that we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we were alcoholics. This is the first step in recovery. The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, has to be smashed.
We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines.
We should be sensible, tactful, considerate and humble without being servile or scraping. As God’s people we stand on our feet; we don’t crawl before anyone.
Step Ten
It is better for him to feel fully responsible.
We all had to place recovery above everything, for without recovery we would have lost both home and business.
