Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

by Alcoholics Anonymous

this is one of the facts of A.A. life.

so far as alcohol is concerned, self-confidence was no good whatever; in fact, it was a total liability.

Our sponsors declared that we were the victims of a mental obsession so subtly powerful that no amount of human willpower could break it. There was, they said, no such thing as the personal conquest of this compulsion by the unaided will.

an insane urge that condemned us to go on drinking,

single-handed combat.

Many less desperate alcoholics tried A.A., but did not succeed because they could not make the admission of hopelessness.

Alcoholics who still had their health, their families, their jobs, and even two cars in the garage, began to recognize their alcoholism.

They were spared that last ten or fifteen years of literal hell the rest of us had gone through.

the beginning of a fatal progression.

To the doubters we could say, “Perhaps you’re not an alcoholic after all.

Why don’t you try some more control...

when one alcoholic had planted in the mind of another the true nature of his malady, that person could never be the same again.

Haha

He had hit bottom as truly as any of us.

Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first?

Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess his faults to another and make restitution for harm done? Who cares anything about a Higher Power,

the average alcoholic, self-centered in the extreme, doesn’t care for this prospect—unless

And taking the steps results in the very change that I could never have accomplished in my own.

Then, and only then, do we become as open-minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be.

see "insane urge" loc. 183 p. 22 belligerent, lost faith, intellectual, disgusted, Versus full of faith, serenity, and a lively hope.

Having reduced us to a state of absolute helplessness, you now declare that none but a Higher Power can remove our obsession.

the belligerent one.

This is the beginning of the end. And so it is: the beginning of the end of his old life, and the beginning of his emergence into a new one.

And immersion

sponsor

Easy does it.

The hoop you have to jump through is a lot wider...

a one-time vice-president of the American A...

Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything.

all you really need is a truly open mind.

Just resign from the debating society

the basic principle of all scientific progress: search and research, again and again,

always with the open mind.

The minute I stopped arguing, I could begin to see and feel.

I had only to stop fighting and practice the rest of A.A.’s program as enthusiastically as I could.

You can, if you wish, make A.A. itself your ‘higher power.’

Relieved of the alcohol obsession, their lives unaccountably transformed, they came to believe in a Higher Power, and most of them began to talk of God.”

those who once had faith, but have lost it.

self-sufficiency who have cut the...

both ways have proved bitterly disappointing,

The roadblocks of indifference, fancied self-sufficiency, prejudice, and defiance

often prove more solid and formidable for these people than any erected by the unconvinced agnostic ...

the drifter,

we had to look for our lost faith. It was in A.A. that we

rediscovered it.

the intellectually self-sufficient ...

Secretly, we felt we could float above the rest of the folks on our brainpower alone.

The god of intellect displaced the God of our fathers. But again John Barleycorn had other ideas. We who had won so handsomely in a walk turned into all-time losers.

reconsider or die.

get down to our ri...

humility and intellect could be compatible, provided we pla...

“We were plumb disgusted with religion