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From the books ... Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book) and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (12 & 12)
Click the page number or the book cover icon
to view that page in the literature.1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
If we are planning to stop
drinking, there must be no reservation of any kind, nor
any lurking notion that someday we will be immune to alcohol.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
It then occurred to me that after one was all smelled up with beer nobody could tell what had been drunk, so I began to fortify my beer with straight alcohol.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
After three years of this, I wound up in the local hospital where they attempted to help me, but I
would get my friends to smuggle me a quart, or I would
steal the alcohol about the building, so that I got rapidly worse.
17.
Relentlessly deepening our dilemma, our
sponsors pointed out our increasing sensitivity to alcohol -- an
allergy, they called it.
18.
It is really saying to us
that we now ought to be willing to try humility in seeking the removal of our other shortcomings just as we did
when we admitted that we were powerless over alcohol, and came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves
could restore us to sanity.
19.
By now, though, the chances are that he has become
convinced that he has more
problems than alcohol, and
that some of these refuse to be solved by all the sheer personal determination
and courage he can muster.
20.
21.
People have said we must not go where liquor is served; we must not have it in our homes; we
must shun friends who drink; we must avoid moving pictures which show drinking scenes; we must not go into bars; our friends must hide their bottles if we go to their houses; we mustn't think or be reminded about alcohol at all.
22.
23.
24.
Alcohol being no respecter of persons, we are an accurate
cross section of America, and in distant lands, the same democratic evening-up process is now going on.
25.
His financial insecurity worries him sick, and panic takes over when he thinks of all the bridges to
safety that alcohol burned behind him.
26.
He did not design man to destroy himself by alcohol, but He did give man instincts to help him to stay alive.
27.
We saw that we were powerless over alcohol, but we also perceived that faith of some
kind, if only in A.A. itself, is possible to anyone.
28.
We would not even do the cause
of temperate drinking
any good, for not one drinker in a thousand likes to be told anything about alcohol by one who hates it.
29.
Only Step One, where we made the 100 percent admission we were
powerless over alcohol, can be practiced with absolute perfection.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
Now about health: A body badly burned by alcohol does not often recover overnight nor do twisted thinking and depression vanish in a twinkling.
35.
Isn't it true that in all matters touching upon alcohol, each of them has decided to turn his or her life over to the care, protection, and guidance
of Alcoholics Anonymous?
36.
37.
Even greater furors were provoked when A.A. members began to run rest homes and farms for alcoholics, when
some hired out to corporations as personnel men in charge of the alcoholic problem in industry, when
some became nurses on alcoholic wards, when others entered the field of alcohol education.
38.
39.
There is the type who always
believes that after being entirely free from alcohol for a period of time he can take a drink without danger.
40.
41.
So in a very complete and literal way, all A.A.'s have "become entirely ready" to have God remove the mania for alcohol from their lives.
42.
However intelligent we may have been in other respects, where alcohol has been involved, we have
been strangely insane.
43.
44.
45.
Being somewhat weakened, and faced with physical and mental readjustment to a life
which knows no alcohol, he may overdo.
46.
But suppose that instinct
still cries out, as it certainly will, "Yes, respecting alcohol, I guess I have to be dependent
upon A.A., but in all other matters I must still maintain my independence.
47.
48.
I used to put eight or twelve ounce bottles of alcohol in a fur lined glove and toss it onto the back airing porch when winter days got dark
enough.
49.
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.
50.
51.
52.
When men and women pour so much alcohol into themselves that
they destroy their lives,
they commit a most unnatural act.
53.
54.
Then we had been told that so far
as alcohol is concerned, self-confidence was no good whatever; in fact, it was a total liability.
55.
Every newcomer in Alcoholics Anonymous is
told, and soon realizes for himself, that
his humble admission of
powerlessness over
alcohol is his first step toward liberation from its paralyzing grip.
56.
After all, your family is reunited, alcohol is no longer a problem and you and your husband are working together toward an undreamed-of future.
57.
58.
Alcohol, now become the rapacious creditor, bleeds us of all self-sufficiency and all will to resist its demands.
59.
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."
60.
Step One showed us an amazing paradox: We found that we were
totally unable to be rid of the alcohol obsession until we first admitted that we were powerless over it.
61.
Can it be appreciated that he has been a victim of crooked thinking, directly caused by the action of alcohol on his brain?
62.
But these scrapes can generally be charged, no matter how bad, to the abnormal action of alcohol on his mind.
63.
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.
64.
65.
Ask any woman who has sent her husband to distant places on the theory he would
escape the alcohol problem.
66.
67.
He made a beginning, we
have seen, when he commenced to rely upon A.A. for the solution of his alcohol problem.
68.
He shouts that if his partner would treat him better, and his wife would leave him alone, he'd soon solve his alcohol problem.
69.
No individuals have been more buffeted by such emotional gusts than those A.A.'s bold enough to accept employment with outside agencies dealing with the
alcohol problem.
70.
In all probability, we shall never be able to touch more than a fair fraction of the alcohol problem in all its ramifications.
71.
Already a willingness
has been achieved to cast out one's own
will and one's own ideas about the alcohol problem in favor of those suggested by A.A.
72.
10. No A.A. group or member should ever, in such a way as to implicate A.A., express any opinion on outside controversial
issues -- particularly
those of politics, alcohol reform, or sectarian religion.
73.
Ten -- No A.A.
group or member should ever, in such a way as to implicate A.A., express any opinion on outside controversial
issues -- particularly
those of politics, alcohol reform, or sectarian religion.
74.
75.
As we became subjects of
King Alcohol, shivering denizens of his
mad realm, the chilling vapor that is loneliness settled down.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
As they are humbled by the terrific beating administered by alcohol,
the grace of God can enter them and expel their obsession.
81.
On the other hand -- and strange as this may seem to those who do not understand
-- once a psychic change has occurred, the very same person who seemed doomed, who had so many problems he despaired of
ever solving them, suddenly finds himself easily able to control his desire for alcohol, the only effort necessary being that required to follow a few simple rules.
82.
83.
He relies upon the assurance that his many troubles, now made more acute because he cannot use alcohol to kill the pain, can be solved, too.
84.
85.
He clamors for this or that, claiming he cannot master
alcohol until his material needs are cared for.
86.
87.
Alcohol was my master.
88.
When we have finally admitted without reservation that we are powerless over alcohol, we are apt to breathe a great sigh of relief, saying, "Well, thank God that's over!
89.
If we would gain any real advantage in the use of this Step on problems other than alcohol, we shall need to make a brand new venture into open-mindedness.
90.
We are equally positive
that once he takes any alcohol whatever into his system, something happens, both in the bodily and mental sense, which makes it virtually impossible for him to stop.
91.
The tyrant alcohol wielded a double-edged sword over us: first we were smitten by an insane urge that condemned us to go on drinking, and then by an allergy of the body that insured we would ultimately destroy ourselves in the process.
92.
They have become persuaded, and rightly so,
that many problems besides alcohol will not yield to a headlong assault powered by the individual
alone.
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are all CONCORDANCES which display passages from the Big Book
Alcoholics Anonymous, the
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164 and More concordance does not in any way imply
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Grapevine Inc. have no objection to the use of this material in the
164 and More concordance.
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