Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

by Alcoholics Anonymous

I can’t say upon what occasion or upon what day I came to believe in a Power greater than myself, but I certainly have that belief now. To acquire it, I had only to stop fighting and practice the rest of A.A.’s program as enthusiastically as I could.

instincts

So these desires—for the sex relation, for material and emotional security, and for companionship—are perfectly necessary and right, and surely God-given.

natural desires

the instincts, have turned into physical and mental liabilities. Step Four is our vigorous and painstaking effort to discover what these liabilities in each of us have been, and are.

Alcoholics especially should be able to see that instinct run wild in themselves is the underlying cause of their destructive drinking.

We have drunk to escape the guilt of passions, and then have drunk again to make more passions possible.

We learned that if we were seriously disturbed, our first need was to quiet that disturbance, regardless of who or what we thought caused it.

When the satisfaction of our instincts for sex, security, and society becomes the sole object of our lives, then pride steps in to justify our excesses.

Then fear, in turn, generates more character defects. Unreasonable fear that our instincts will not be satisfied drives us to covet the possessions of others, to lust for sex and power, to become angry when our instinctive demands are threatened, to be envious when the ambitions of others seem to be realized while ours are not.

By now the newcomer has probably arrived at the following conclusions: that his character defects, representing instincts gone astray, have been the primary cause of his drinking and his failure at life; that unless he is now willing to work hard at the elimination of the worst of these defects, both sobriety and peace of mind will still elude him; that all the faulty foundation of his life will have to be torn out and built anew on bedrock.

sex relation

emotional security.

The most common symptoms of emotional insecurity are worry, anger, self-pity, and depression.

financial insecurity

relations with family, friends, and society at large

This does not mean that we expect all our character defects to be lifted out of us as the drive to drink was.

proud

greedy

a...

lu...

glutt...

envy

s...

Self-righteous anger also can be very enjoyable. In a perverse way we can actually take satisfaction from the fact that many people annoy us, for it brings a comfortable feeling of superiority. Gossip barbed with our anger, a polite form of murder by character assassination, has its satisfactions for us, too. Here we are not trying to help those we criticize; we are trying to proclaim our own righteousness.

Above all, we should try to be absolutely sure that we are not delaying because we are afraid.

For the readiness to take the full consequences of our past acts, and to take responsibility for the well-being of others at the same time, is the very spirit of Step Nine.

That is the emotional hangover, the direct result of yesterday’s and sometimes today’s excesses of negative emotion—anger, fear, jealousy, and the like. If we would live serenely today and tomorrow, we certainly need to eliminate these hangovers.

It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us. If somebody hurts us and we are sore, we are in the wrong also.

Spiritual Axiom

At first he goes along because he must, but later he discovers a way of life he really wants to live. Moreover, he finds he cannot keep this priceless gift unless he gives it away.

Neither he nor anybody else can survive unless he carries the A.A. message. The moment this Twelfth Step work forms a group, another discovery is made—that most individuals cannot recover unless there is a group.

It becomes plain that the group must survive or the individual will not.