Alcoholics Anonymous: The Official "Big Book" from Alcoholic Anonymous

by Alcoholics Anonymous

I go home. My wife is in the living room. She had looked for me last evening after I left the car and wandered off into the night. She had looked for me this morning. She has reached the end of her rope. There is no use trying any more, for there is nothing to try. “Don’t say anything,” I say to her. “I am going to do something.”

Our marriage lasted four years. At least three of those four years must have been a living hell for my wife, because she had to watch the man she loved disintegrate morally, mentally, and financially.

I could not expect to keep what I had gained unless I gave it away.

I found that I had a great deal of spare time and that a little drink in the morning helped. By 1932, I was going on two- or three-day benders. That same year, my wife became fed up with my drinking around the house and called my dad in Akron to come and pick me up. She asked him to do something about me because she couldn’t. She was thoroughly disgusted.

It’s surprising, how we think we fool everybody in our drinking.

I hope that I never forget to be grateful.

Mere cessation from drinking is not enough for an alcoholic while the need for that drink goes on.

On the inside, I was suicidal, bloodied, and beaten.

No one made me drink, and no one was going to make me stay sober. This program is for people who want it,

If asked what the two most important things in recovery are, I would have to say willingness and action.

When I am willing to do the right thing, I am rewarded with an inner peace no amount of liquor could ever provide.

I am no longer at the mercy of a disease that tells me the only answer is to drink.

I always felt as if everyone else knew what was going on and what they were supposed to be doing, and my life was the only one that was delivered without an instruction book.

I was so certain I had found the answer in alcohol. I could clearly see now that had been a lie. That is the description that fits alcohol best for me; it is a lie, an evil, insidious lie. And I chased that lie for a long time—even when it was obvious that I was going nowhere and killing myself while doing it.

I came to A.A. in order to stop drinking; what I received in return was my life.

DENIAL IS THE MOST cunning, baffling, and powerful part of my disease, the disease of alcoholism. When I look back now, it’s hard to imagine I didn’t see a problem with my drinking. But instead of seeing the truth when all of the “yets” (as in, that hasn’t happened to me—yet) started happening, I just kept lowering my standards.

At five months I realized that the world might never build a shrine to the fact that I was sober. I understood that it was not the world’s job to understand my disease; rather it was my job to work my program and not drink, no matter what.

A drink would not bring back the job, the house, or the man, so why bother?

Cunning, baffling, powerful—the gradual creeping up of the frequency and quantity of alcohol and what it does to a person is apparent to everyone but the person involved.

That is where we are really fooled. We think we can drink to excess without anyone’s knowing it. Everyone knows it. The only one we are fooling is ourselves. We rationalize and excuse our conduct beyond all reason.

Over a period of time he has built up self-pity and resentments toward anyone or anything that interferes with his drinking. Dishonest thinking, prejudice, ego, antagonism toward anyone and everyone who dares to cross him, vanity, and a critical attitude are character defects that gradually creep in and become a part of his life.

A spiritual awakening soon came to mean trying each day to be a little more thoughtful, more considerate, a little more courteous to those with whom I came in contact.

Just being sober will be making amends to many we have hurt by our drunken actions. Making amends is sometimes doing what we are capable of doing but failed to do because of alcohol—carrying

Yesterday is gone, and we don’t know whether we will be here tomorrow.

I have come to believe that hard times are not just meaningless suffering and that something good might turn up at any moment. That’s a big change for someone who used to come to in the morning feeling sentenced to another day of life.

not taking a drink is by far the most important thing I do each day.)

Finally, after seven months, I decided to try it. To this day, I am amazed at how many of my problems—most of which had nothing to do with drinking, I believed—have become manageable or have simply disappeared since I quit drinking.

Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.

And if I don’t know what’s good for me, then I don’t know what’s good or bad for you or for anyone. So I’m better off if I don’t give advice, don’t figure I know what’s best, and just accept life on life’s terms, as it is today—especially my own life, as it actually is. Before A.A. I judged myself by my intentions, while the world was judging me by my actions.

Prior to our marriage, when she was a shy, scrawny adolescent, I was able to see things in her that others couldn’t necessarily see—things like beauty, charm, gaiety, a gift for being easy to talk to, a sense of humor, and many other fine qualities. It was as if I had, rather than a Midas touch which turned everything to gold, a magnifying mind that magnified whatever it focused on. Over the years as I thought about Max, her good qualities grew and grew, and we married, and all these qualities became more and more apparent to me, and we were happier and happier. But then as I drank more and more, the alcohol seemed to affect my vision: Instead of continuing to see what was good about my wife, I began to see her defects. And the more I focused my mind on her defects, the more they grew and multiplied. Every defect I pointed out to her became greater and greater. Each time I told her she was a nothing, she receded a little more into nowhere. The more I drank, the more she wilted.

Then, one day in A.A., I was told that I had the lenses in my glasses backwards; “the courage to change” in the Serenity Prayer meant not that I should change my marriage, but rather that I should change myself and learn to accept my spouse as she was. A.A. has given me a new pair of glasses. I can again focus on my wife’s good qualities and watch them grow and grow and grow. I can do the same thing with an A.A. meeting. The more I focus my mind on its defects—late start, long drunkalogs, cigarette smoke—the worse the meeting becomes. But when I try to see what I can add to the meeting, rather than what I can get out of it, and when I focus my mind on what’s good about it, rather than what’s wrong with it, the meeting keeps getting better and better. When I focus on what’s good today, I have a good day, and when I focus on what’s bad, I have a bad day. If I focus on a problem, the problem increases; if I focus on the answer, the answer increases.

Eventually I had to redo each of the Twelve Steps specifically with Max in mind, from the First, saying, “I am powerless over alcohol, and my homelife is unmanageable by me,” to the Twelfth, in which I tried to think of her as a sick Al-Anon and treat her with the love I would give a sick A.A. newcomer. When I do this, we get along fine.

I have to discard my “rights,” as well as my expectations, by asking myself, How important is it, really? How important is it compared to my serenity, my emotional sobriety? And when I place more value on my serenity and sobriety than on anything else, I can maintain them at a higher level—at least for the time being.

As I look back on that period, I realize how true it is that one of the primary differences between alcoholics and nonalcoholics is that nonalcoholics change their behavior to meet their goals and alcoholics change their goals to meet their behavior.

One definition of a bottom is the point when the last thing you lost or the next thing you are about to lose is more important to you than booze.

“You don’t have to drink over it.” What an idea! I had thought that situations made me drink. If I was angry, I drank. If I was happy, I drank. Bored or excited, elated or depressed, I drank.

My resentments mounted at the realization that I had flushed a career down the drain, disgraced and alienated my family, and been relegated to the meanest of institutions, a skid row shelter.

the tides of life flow endlessly for better or worse, both good and bad, and I cannot allow my sobriety to become dependent on these ups and downs of living. Sobriety must live a life of its own.

Alcohol was only a symptom of much deeper problems of dishonesty and denial.

I didn’t feel bad about the kids because I was drunk all the time. I sent them presents. When I got sober, I felt bad about them, so I’d drink again. I couldn’t stand being sober because I couldn’t stand thinking about how I hadn’t taken care of my own kids.

While the guys around me were buying homes, raising families, and otherwise living responsibly, I was already having trouble keeping my utilities on and my car running. I saw to it that I paid my bar tab, however.

I was not about to give up. My pride and ego wouldn’t let me. Bosses, judges, co-workers, lawyers, car notes, bar tabs, loan sharks, utility payments, landlords, my girlfriend, people I had double-crossed—I looked to all these as the source of my problems, while overlooking the most basic problem: my drinking and myself.

I could not have that today if I had not experienced all the yesterdays.

Adversity truly introduces us to ourselves.

I am free to laugh all of my laughter, free to trust and be trusted, free to both give and receive help. I am free from shame and regret, free to learn and grow and work. I have left that lonely, frightening, painful express train through hell. I have accepted the gift of a safer, happier journey through life.

It was here that I realized for the first time that as a practicing alcoholic, I had no rights. Society can do anything it chooses to do with me when I am drunk, and I can’t lift a finger to stop it, for I forfeit my rights through the simple expedient of becoming a menace to myself and to the people around me. With deep shame came the knowledge too that I had lived with no sense of social obligation nor had I known the meaning of moral responsibility to my fellow men.

I would not only find a way to live without having a drink, but that I would find a way to live without wanting to drink,

“Rationalization is giving a socially acceptable reason for socially unacceptable behavior, and socially unacceptable behavior is a form of insanity.”

“A.A. does not teach us how to handle our drinking,” he said. “It teaches us how to handle sobriety.”

It’s no great trick to stop drinking; the trick is to stay stopped.