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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.
6.
Just resign from the debating society and quit bothering yourself with such deep questions as whether it was the hen or the egg that came first.
7.
By their example they showed us that humility and
intellect could be compatible, provided we
placed humility first.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
The stories added to this edition represent a membership whose characteristics -- of age, gender, race, and culture -- have widened and have deepened to
encompass virtually everyone the first 100 members could have hoped to reach.
13.
14.
As long as we placed self-reliance first, a genuine reliance upon a Higher Power was out of the question.
15.
When the broker returned
to New York in the fall of 1935, the first A.A. group
had actually been formed,
though no one realized it at the time.
16.
The spark that was to flare
into the first A.A. group was struck at Akron, Ohio, in June 1935, during a talk between a New York stockbroker and an Akron physician.
17.
We know that little good can come to any alcoholic who joins A.A. unless he has first accepted his devastating
weakness and all its consequences.
18.
The real tests of the situation are your own willingness to confide
and your full confidence
in the one with whom you share
your first accurate self-survey.
19.
He now returned home, leaving behind his first acquaintance, the lawyer
and the devil-may-care chap.
20.
Many an A.A., once agnostic or atheistic, tells us that it
was during this stage of Step Five that he first actually felt the presence of God.
21.
22.
The principle that we shall find no
enduring strength until we first admit complete defeat is the main taproot from which our whole Society has sprung and flowered.
23.
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.
24.
When we see a man sinking into the mire that is alcoholism, we give him first aid and place what we have at his disposal.
25.
26.
Very soon, though, his assumed authority to run everything begins to be shared with the first alcoholics he has helped.
27.
Had they fired me first, and
had they then taken steps to
see that I was presented
with the solution contained in this book, I
might have returned to them six months later, a well man.
28.
29.
We had lacked the perspective to see that character-building and spiritual values had to come first, and that material satisfactions
were not the purpose of living.
30.
To some people we need not,
and probably should not emphasize the spiritual
feature on our first approach.
31.
The family will be affected also, pleasantly at first, as they
feel their money troubles are about to be solved, then not so pleasantly as they find themselves neglected.
32.
After three years of trial and error in selecting the most
workable tenets upon which the Society could be
based, and after a large amount of failure in getting alcoholics to recover, three successful groups emerged -- the first at Akron, the second at New York, and the third at Cleveland.
33.
34.
This much could be a fragment of what is called meditation, perhaps our very first attempt at a mood, a flier into the realm of spirit, if you like.
35.
36.
Every A.A. has found that he can make little headway in this new adventure of living until he first backtracks and really makes an accurate and unsparing survey of the human wreckage he has left in his wake.
37.
Though we may at first be startled to realize that God knows all about us, we are apt to get used to that quite quickly.
38.
So we of A.A. do obey spiritual principles,
first because we must, and ultimately because we love the kind of life such obedience brings.
39.
I drank with moderation
at first, but it took me only a
relatively short time to drift back into the old habits which had wound up so disastrously before.
40.
Only a few knew of it at first but, within a short time, it was billboarded throughout
the entire company.
41.
42.
43.
No doubt the universe had a "first cause" of some sort, the God of the Atom, maybe, hot and cold by turns.
44.
45.
War fever ran high in the New England town to which we new, young officers from Plattsburg were assigned,
and we were flattered when the first citizens took us to their homes, making us feel heroic.
46.
47.
At the start, this was all we needed to commence spiritual growth, to effect our first conscious relation with God as we understood Him.
48.
49.
50.
51.
During those first days of convalescence, this will
do more to insure his sobriety than anything else.
52.
53.
54.
But out of this frightening and at first disrupting experience
the conviction grew that
A.A.'s had to hang together or die separately.
55.
56.
What sort of thinking dominates an alcoholic
who repeats time after time the desperate experiment of
the first drink?
57.
But there was always the curious mental phenomenon that parallel
with our sound reasoning
there inevitably ran some
insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
Our behavior is as absurd
and incomprehensible with respect to the first drink as that of an individual with a passion,
say, for jay-walking.
64.
I rather appreciated
your ideas about the subtle
insanity which precedes
the first drink, but I was confident it could not happen to me after what I had learned.
65.
Compared to this prospect, the ten thousand dollars under consideration
wasn't much, but like the alcoholic's first drink it would, if taken, inevitably set up a disastrous chain reaction.
66.
67.
Show him, from your own experience, how the queer mental condition surrounding that first drink prevents normal functioning of the
will power.
68.
And the truth, strange to say, is usually that he has no more idea
why he took that first drink than you have.
69.
These observations would be academic and pointless if
our friend never took the first drink, thereby setting the terrible cycle in motion.
70.
71.
The second printing of the
first edition added the appendix "Spiritual Experience";
in the second edition, the
appendices on A.A. Tradition, the "medical view" and "religious view" of A.A., the Lasker Award and information on how to contact A.A. were added, and the appendix on the
Alcoholic Foundation
was discontinued.
72.
The first edition appeared in April 1939, and in the following sixteen years, more than 300,000 copies went into circulation.
73.
74.
That is why the first edition of the book "Alcoholics Anonymous,"
published when our membership was small, dealt with low-bottom cases only.
75.
"Bill's Story," "Doctor Bob's Nightmare," and one other personal history from the first edition were retained intact; three were edited and one of these was retitled; new versions of two stories were written, with new titles; thirty completely new stories were added; and the story section was divided into three parts, under the same headings that are used now.
76.
... first endorsement
of Alcoholics Anonymous, medical societies ...
BB
Appendix III, The Medical View on A.A., p.569
Since Dr. Silkworth's first endorsement of Alcoholics Anonymous, medical societies and physicians throughout
the world have set their approval upon us.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
Often it was while working on this Step with our sponsors or spiritual advisers that we first felt truly able to forgive others, no matter how deeply we felt they had wronged us.
82.
83.
84.
Carefully reading the
first five proposals we ask if we have omitted anything, for we are
building an arch through which we shall walk a free man at last.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
(*) This refers to Bill's and
Dr. Bob's first visit to A.A. Number Three. See the Pioneer Section. This resulted in A.A.'s first group, at Akron, Ohio, in 1935.
90.
91.
Since Step Four is but the beginning of a lifetime practice, it can be suggested that he first have a
look at those personal flaws which are acutely troublesome and
fairly obvious.
92.
At first he goes along because he must, but later he discovers a way of life he really wants to live.
93.
Tradition One -- "Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity." Without unity, A.A. dies. Individual liberty, yet great unity. Key to paradox: each A.A.'s life depends on obedience to spiritual principles.
The group must survive or the individual
will not. Common welfare comes first. How best to live and work together as groups.
94.
95.
96.
97.
Though none of these principles had the force of
rules or laws, they had become so widely accepted by 1950 that they were
confirmed by our first International Conference held at Cleveland.
98.
It was out of this vast welter of explosive experience that A.A.'s Twelve Traditions took form and were first published in 1946 and later confirmed at A.A.'s First International Convention, held at Cleveland in 1950.
99.
100.
This being so, we think it logically follows that sobriety -- first, last, and all the time -- is the
only thing we need to work for.
101.
102.
103.
Of far more importance was the fact that
he was the first living human with whom I had ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience.
104.
This reopening of emotional wounds, some old, some perhaps forgotten, and some still painfully festering, will at first look like a purposeless and pointless piece of surgery.
105.
106.
107.
108.
At first many of these feel lonely, hurt, and left out as they witness so much domestic happiness about them.
109.
To be sure, we feel it is something that might help us
to meet an occasional emergency, but at first many of us are apt to regard it as a somewhat mysterious skill of clergymen, from which we may hope to get a secondhand benefit.
110.
After coming from our first meeting, or perhaps after we have finished reading the book "Alcoholics Anonymous," we usually want to sit down with some member of the family and readily admit the damage we have done by our drinking.
111.
One of the first members of A.A., entirely contrary to his own desires, was obliged to conform to group opinion.
112.
Then we learn, often to our consternation, that this is only the first milestone on the new road we are walking.
113.
114.
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.
115.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
First of all, we had to admit
that we had many of these defects, even though such disclosures were painful
and humiliating.
121.
122.
123.
First off, they can be told that
the majority of A.A. members have suffered severely from self-justification during
their drinking days.
124.
If that is so, this step may be postponed, only, however, if we hold ourselves in complete readiness to go through with it at the first opportunity.
125.
126.
Tradition One -- "Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity." Without unity, A.A. dies. Individual liberty, yet great unity. Key to paradox: each A.A.'s life depends on obedience to spiritual principles.
The group must survive or the individual
will not. Common welfare comes first. How best to live and work together as groups.
127.
128.
129.
Still goaded by sheer necessity, we reluctantly come to grips with those serious character flaws that made problem drinkers of us in
the first place, flaws which must be dealt with to prevent a retreat into alcoholism once again.
130.
If the Creator gave us our lives in the first place, then He must know in every detail where we have since gone
wrong.
131.
Therefore, the first portion of this volume, describing the A.A. recovery program, has been
left largely untouched in the course of
revisions made for the second, third, and fourth editions.
132.
133.
134.
135.
Yet it is true that our first printing gave many readers the impression
that these personality changes, or religious experiences, must be in the
nature of sudden and spectacular upheavals.
136.
137.
Sixteen years have elapsed between our first printing of this book and the presentation
in 1955 of our second edition.
138.
Since this book was first published, A.A. has released thousands of alcoholics from asylums
and hospitals of every kind.
139.
(*) True when this book was
first published. But a 2014 U.S./Canada membership survey showed about eleven percent of A.A.'s were thirty and under.
140.
It was out of this vast welter of explosive experience that A.A.'s Twelve Traditions took form and were first published in 1946 and later confirmed at A.A.'s First International Convention, held at Cleveland in 1950.
141.
When A.A.'s Traditions were
first published, in 1946, we had become sure that an A.A. group could stand almost any amount of battering.
142.
143.
In later life he finds that real happiness is not to be found
in just trying to be a number one man, or even a first-rater in the heartbreaking struggle
for money, romance, or self-importance.
144.
The first requirement is
that we be convinced that any life run
on self-will can hardly be a success.
145.
146.
147.
We first saw Fred about a year ago in a hospital where he had
gone to recover from a bad case of jitters.
148.
149.
They comfort the melancholy one by first showing him that his case is not strange or different, that his character defects are probably not more numerous or worse than those of anyone else in A.A.
150.
Though Tradition Nine at first sight seems to deal with a purely practical matter, in its actual operation it discloses a
society without organization, animated
only by the spirit of service -- a true fellowship.
151.
It is only where "boy meets girl on A.A. campus," and love follows at first sight, that difficulties
may develop.
152.
153.
154.
155.
Maybe we are doing fine on only two of them, the First Step and that part of the Twelfth where we "carry the message."
156.
157.
158.
159.
160.
Next we launched out on a course of vigorous action, the first step of which is a personal housecleaning, which many
of us had never attempted.
161.
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.
162.
We perceive that only through utter defeat are we able to take our first steps toward liberation and strength.
163.
Even in the present century, American newspapers were afraid to
print an account of the Wright brothers' first successful flight at Kitty Hawk.
164.
Should his own image in the mirror be too awful to contemplate (and it usually is), he might first take a look at the results normal people are getting from self-sufficiency.
165.
166.
167.
168.
169.
170.
But when we are willing to place spiritual growth first -- then and only
then do we have a real chance.
171.
In country after country where the A.A. seed was planted, it has taken root, slowly at first, then growing by leaps and bounds when literature has
become available.
172.
173.
174.
175.
176.
We A.A.'s are active folk, enjoying the satisfactions of dealing with the realities
of life, usually for the
first time in our lives, and strenuously trying to help the next alcoholic who comes along.
177.
When we reached A.A., and for
the first time in our lives stood among people who seemed to understand, the
sense of belonging was tremendously exciting.
178.
In it alcoholism was described from the alcoholic's point of view, the spiritual ideas of the Society were codified for the first time in the Twelve Steps, and the application
of these Steps to the alcoholic's dilemma was made clear.
179.
180.
181.
182.
Your husband will be the
first to say it was your devotion and care which brought him to the point where
he could have a spiritual experience.
183.
Even our severest and most
justified critics will frequently meet us more than halfway on the first trial.
184.
So intense, though, is our
fear and reluctance to do
this, that many A.A.'s at first try to bypass Step Five.
185.
Unlike most of our crowd, I
did not get over my craving for liquor much during the first two and one-half years of abstinence.
186.
187.
188.
189.
190.
(*) This refers to Bill's and
Dr. Bob's first visit to A.A. Number Three. See the Pioneer Section. This resulted in A.A.'s first group, at Akron, Ohio, in 1935.
191.
(*) This refers to Bill's
first visit with Dr. Bob. These men later became co-founders of A.A. Bill's story opens the text of this book; Dr. Bob's
heads the Story Section.
192.
193.
194.
If we place instincts
first, we have got the cart before the horse; we shall be pulled backward into disillusionment.
195.
196.
First, we take a look backward and try to discover where we have
been at fault; next we make a vigorous attempt to repair the damage we have done; and third, having thus cleaned away the debris of the past, we consider how, with our newfound knowledge of ourselves, we may develop
the best possible relations with every human being we know.
197.
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.
198.
199.
"How," they ask, "can such a crowd of anarchists function at all? How can they possibly place their common welfare first? What in Heaven's name holds them together?"
200.
201.
202.
This present volume proposes to broaden and deepen the understanding
of the Twelve Steps as first written in the earlier work.
203.
When Tradition Nine was
first written, it said that "Alcoholics Anonymous needs the least possible organization."
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