I am in need of some guidance on actions that can be done to work on the first step.
Phil said
Oct 18, 2005
Hey Buddy. Good to see you here.
The step board will likely help you with a lot of this stuff on a daily basis.
The first step with me, has to do with "I cannot pickup a drink Today. Acceptance that I am completely powerless over alcohol, and Surrendering completely to that fact.If I pick up a drink, I cannot predict outcomes, and life will go to hell in a handbasket. I have to surrender and accept this stuff one day at a time, each and every day.
Im going to post you the first step here as follows from the 12 and 12. Its the only one we can really get perfect. For a number of days itll likely be the one, two, three step for you. Appreciate your emails, and keep sharing my freind. Step 2 will be posted above.
Step One "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable."
Who cares to admit complete defeat? Practically no one, of course. Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that, glass in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only an act of Providence can remove it from us.
No other kind of bankruptcy is like this one. Alcohol, now become the rapacious creditor, bleeds us of all self-sufficiency and all will to resist its demands. Once this stark fact is accepted, our bankruptcy as going human concerns is complete.
But upon entering A.A. we soon take quite another view of this absolute humiliation. We perceive that only through utter defeat are we able to take our first steps toward liberation and strength. Our admissions of personal powerlessness finally turn out to be firm bedrock upon which happy and purposeful lives may be built.
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. Until he so humbles himself, his sobriety--if any--will be precarious. Of real happiness he will find none at all. Proved beyond doubt by an immense experience, this is one of the facts of A.A. life. 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.
When first challenged to admit defeat, most of us revolted. We had approached A.A. expecting to be taught self-confidence. 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. 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. Relentlessly deepening our dilemma, our sponsors pointed out our increasing sensitivity to alcohol--an allergy, they called it. 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. Few indeed were those who, so assailed, had ever won through in single-handed combat. It was a statistical fact that alcoholics almost never recovered on their own resources. And this had been true, apparently, ever since man had first crushed grapes.
In A.A.'s pioneering time, none but the most desperate cases could swallow and digest this unpalatable truth. Even these "last-gaspers" often had difficulty in realizing how hopeless they actually were. But a few did, and when these laid hold of A.A. principles with all the fervor with which the drowning seize life preservers, they almost invariably got well. That is why the first edition of the book "Alcoholics Anonymous," published when our membership was small, dealt with low-bottom cases only. Many less desperate alcoholics tried A.A., but did not succeed because they could not make the admission of hopelessness.
It is a tremendous satisfaction to record that in the following years this changed. Alcoholics who still had their health, their families, their jobs, and even two cars in the garage, began to recognize their alcoholism. As this trend grew, they were joined by young people who were scarcely more than potential alcoholics. They were spared that last ten or fifteen years of literal hell the rest of us had gone through. Since Step One requires an admission that our lives have become unmanageable, how could people such as these take this Step?
It was obviously necessary to raise the bottom the rest of us had hit to the point where it would hit them. By going back in our own drinking histories, we could show that years before we realized it we were out of control, that our drinking even then was no mere habit, that it was indeed 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 controlled drinking, bearing in mind meanwhile what we have told you about alcoholism?" This attitude brought immediate and practical results. It was then discovered that when one alcoholic had planted in the mind of another the true nature of his malady, that person could never be the same again. Following every spree, he would say to himself, "Maybe those A.A.'s were right..." After a few such experiences, often years before the onset of extreme difficulties, he would return to us convinced. He had hit bottom as truly as any of us. John Barleycorn himself had become our best advocate.
Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.'s remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. 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, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry A.A.'s message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic, self-centered in the extreme, doesn't care for this prospect--unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself.
Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A., and there we discover the fatal nature of our situation. Then, and only then, do we become as open-minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be. We stand ready to do anything which will lift the merciless obsession from us.
leejosepho said
Oct 19, 2005
"I cannot pickup a drink today ... I am completely powerless over alcohol ..."
Without regard for who said it -- principles over personalities, folks -- can anybody explain the obvious conflict either or both within the above and between its implication and the following:
"... glass in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only an act of Providence can remove it from us."
"... the victims of a mental obsession so subtly powerful that no amount of human willpower could break it ..."
"... an insane urge that condemned us to go on drinking [by taking the first one again], and then by an allergy of the body that insured we would ultimately destroy ourselves in the process ..."
(12 & 12, copyrighted)
??
rosie light shines said
Oct 19, 2005
hi choe....i call the first THREE steps, the *give up/ give in/ give over* steps........step one i liken to the DETACHMENT step...its like *i am powerless over alcohol/ or whatever addiction i am struggling with, so i detach...i am giving it UP*
when i was ready to do step one i just threw up my hands, and said "i quit...i give up...i can't DO this anymore".....that basically is step one.........and also ACCEPTANCE that i am powerless.....not just saying it but KNOWING it/ or accepting it.....in a short take??? its the *I GIVE UP* step.......that doesn't mean i am helpless, becuz i have a power within that negates that....it means i am powerless....but my God or Christ within is NOT powerless and so its time for ME to *give it up*......let go......detach.........hope that helps you on step one.....peace and welcome to group.....rosie
leejosepho said
Oct 19, 2005
choempi wrote:
I am in need of some guidance on actions that can be done to work on the first step.
Greetings to you, choempi.
In my own case, coming to grips with Step One amounted to first taking a look at some facts about the alcoholic I was alleged to be. To explain ...
Following what has since turned out to be my last drunk, I went to see an old acquaintance (my former therapist, actually) who had asked someone else to let me know he was “sober” – I had never even known he ever drank – and when in the course of our conversation I eventually asked why I could not stop drinking (after he had asked me if I had a desire to stop), he answered, “Because you are an alcoholic.”
My first “feeling” when he said that was like a wave of relief sweeping over me. “Finally,” I thought, “oh, *finally* somebody seems to actually know what is wrong with me!” That feeling yet to this very day remains with me, but quite a while actually passed before I came to know and understand what is meant when at least certain folks say they/we are alcoholics ...
So then, and to hopefully spare you some of the suffering I experienced during my first year in AA, maybe we can together consider “an explanation of alcoholism, as we understand it” (Basic Text, page 28). And, by the way, and as we can read from the first page of Step Three in the 12&12, the conclusions of Steps One and Two do not require action – they require only acceptance (of certain facts needed within those conclusions).
Your question: What actions can be done to work on Step One?
Here is one “action” – trying some controlled drinking – you might have already done:
“... try some controlled drinking. Try to drink and stop abruptly. Try it more than once.” (Big Book, pages 31-32).
And, here is the insight “Silky” (Dr. Silkworth in “The Doctor’s Opinion”) offers along that line:
“We [doctors] believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics [causing them to drink without control once they again (chronically) get started] is a manifestation of an allergy; that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all ... [for] they cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving.”
That is part of what we mean by “powerless over alcohol”, choempi. As explained to me, our systems are hyper-sensitive to a certain alkaloid that forms and remains within our brains whenever we drink, and:
“This phenomenon ... has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated” (Silky).
Hence, we are powerless over alcohol when drinking.
Now, that is not the entire story just yet, but for many of us, that is a key factor – a “certain fact about ourselves” (page 18) – behind a desire to stop drinking forever ... lest we die drunk. And in my own case, the idea of my two, then-young daughters having to bury a drunken daddy they never really knew because I had abandoned them even outside of my drunkenness was completely unbearable.
...
We cannot control our drinking once we get started again, and, “The only relief [for that phenomenon doctors such as Silkworth] have to suggest is entire abstinence” (“The Doctor’s Opinion”).
Now, here is the place where eyes begin to roll and the room gets a little noisy and the chairperson looks at the clock and wonders how long I plan to keep talking ...
If “Don’t drink one day at a time” had been the essence or “key factor” of the original A.A. experience and message, then our Basic Text could have ended with “Don’t drink one day at a time” immediately following what Silkworth had just said. But in fact, or instead, the doctor continued ... speaking of something that is no different today than it was way back then:
“This immediately precipitates us into a seething caldron of debate. Much has been written pro and con, but among physicians, the general opinion seems to be that most chronic alcoholics are doomed.”
How so? Here is the common, shared experience of the earliest of A.A. members, people who quite clearly and surely could *not* stay away from the first drink:
“As we look back, we feel we had gone on drinking many years beyond the point where we *could* quit [even just one day at a time] ... There was a tremendous urge to cease forever. Yet we found it impossible. This is the baffling feature of alcoholism as we know it - this utter inability to leave it alone, no matter how great the necessity or the wish” (page 34, emphasis added).
And there you have it – that is the rest of what we mean by “powerless over alcohol”:
We cannot control our drinking once we get started again, and we cannot stay sober once we get stopped again.
Pretty simple, eh?! In fact, and quite fortunately for people like us, Step One is pretty much a no-brainer!
We have tried to control our drinking and we have failed – we have tried to remain abstinent and we have failed.
And, all the “action” required to later be able to admit those facts about ourselves likely took place before we ever even heard of the first Step on a road to permanent recovery from the hopelessness of our alcoholic condition!
However, not everyone who comes to A.A. has already tried to stop drinking for good and all. Personally, I even tried that impossible-for-me “one day at a time” thing before I had ever even heard of A.A., but for those who are not yet convinced something far beyond anything so simplistic is going to be required, here is some more Step-One “action” some folks need to do:
“If anyone questions whether he has entered this dangerous area [where s/he cannot quit (even if only for just one day at a time) on will power, let him try leaving liquor alone for one year ...” (page 34).
... and if you like, you can even “cheat” a little by attending meetings where so many folks seem to believe that is how it is supposed to be done with everybody encouraging one another.
But if, and as it was for me and as it is for so many today: If you end up drinking another time or two, I recommend an admission of complete defeat.
...
You might have already noticed and considered the complete wording of Step One:
“1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.”
For the moment, never mind the second part of that overview of our alcoholic-human condition. You will hear people talk about taking Step One “perfectly” or “100%”, but in the 12&12, Bill actually only speaks of “100% admission of our powerlessness over alcohol”, and our coming to fully understand and admit that we “could not manage our own lives” (page 60) is something that is actually “completed” later on in our *taking* - "Here are the steps we *took*" (page 59, emphasis added) - the Steps.
In other words, the “our lives had become unmanageable” part of Step One is simply a reflection of the fact that in all of our past attempts to quit drinking, we could not find “a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life ... sufficient to overcome alcoholism” (page 44), and the depth of that is something we eventually come to see even after Step One's absolute or "100%" admission of powerlessness over alcohol.
Hey Buddy. Good to see you here.
The step board will likely help you with a lot of this stuff on a daily basis.
The first step with me, has to do with "I cannot pickup a drink Today. Acceptance that I am completely powerless over alcohol, and Surrendering completely to that fact.If I pick up a drink, I cannot predict outcomes, and life will go to hell in a handbasket. I have to surrender and accept this stuff one day at a time, each and every day.
Im going to post you the first step here as follows from the 12 and 12. Its the only one we can really get perfect. For a number of days itll likely be the one, two, three step for you. Appreciate your emails, and keep sharing my freind. Step 2 will be posted above.
Step One "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable."
Who cares to admit complete defeat? Practically no one, of course. Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that, glass in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only an act of Providence can remove it from us.
No other kind of bankruptcy is like this one. Alcohol, now become the rapacious creditor, bleeds us of all self-sufficiency and all will to resist its demands. Once this stark fact is accepted, our bankruptcy as going human concerns is complete. But upon entering A.A. we soon take quite another view of this absolute humiliation. We perceive that only through utter defeat are we able to take our first steps toward liberation and strength. Our admissions of personal powerlessness finally turn out to be firm bedrock upon which happy and purposeful lives may be built. 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. Until he so humbles himself, his sobriety--if any--will be precarious. Of real happiness he will find none at all. Proved beyond doubt by an immense experience, this is one of the facts of A.A. life. 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. When first challenged to admit defeat, most of us revolted. We had approached A.A. expecting to be taught self-confidence. 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. 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. Relentlessly deepening our dilemma, our sponsors pointed out our increasing sensitivity to alcohol--an allergy, they called it. 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. Few indeed were those who, so assailed, had ever won through in single-handed combat. It was a statistical fact that alcoholics almost never recovered on their own resources. And this had been true, apparently, ever since man had first crushed grapes. In A.A.'s pioneering time, none but the most desperate cases could swallow and digest this unpalatable truth. Even these "last-gaspers" often had difficulty in realizing how hopeless they actually were. But a few did, and when these laid hold of A.A. principles with all the fervor with which the drowning seize life preservers, they almost invariably got well. That is why the first edition of the book "Alcoholics Anonymous," published when our membership was small, dealt with low-bottom cases only. Many less desperate alcoholics tried A.A., but did not succeed because they could not make the admission of hopelessness. It is a tremendous satisfaction to record that in the following years this changed. Alcoholics who still had their health, their families, their jobs, and even two cars in the garage, began to recognize their alcoholism. As this trend grew, they were joined by young people who were scarcely more than potential alcoholics. They were spared that last ten or fifteen years of literal hell the rest of us had gone through. Since Step One requires an admission that our lives have become unmanageable, how could people such as these take this Step? It was obviously necessary to raise the bottom the rest of us had hit to the point where it would hit them. By going back in our own drinking histories, we could show that years before we realized it we were out of control, that our drinking even then was no mere habit, that it was indeed 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 controlled drinking, bearing in mind meanwhile what we have told you about alcoholism?" This attitude brought immediate and practical results. It was then discovered that when one alcoholic had planted in the mind of another the true nature of his malady, that person could never be the same again. Following every spree, he would say to himself, "Maybe those A.A.'s were right..." After a few such experiences, often years before the onset of extreme difficulties, he would return to us convinced. He had hit bottom as truly as any of us. John Barleycorn himself had become our best advocate. Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.'s remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. 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, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry A.A.'s message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic, self-centered in the extreme, doesn't care for this prospect--unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself. Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A., and there we discover the fatal nature of our situation. Then, and only then, do we become as open-minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be. We stand ready to do anything which will lift the merciless obsession from us.
Without regard for who said it -- principles over personalities, folks -- can anybody explain the obvious conflict either or both within the above and between its implication and the following:
hi choe....i call the first THREE steps, the *give up/ give in/ give over* steps........step one i liken to the DETACHMENT step...its like *i am powerless over alcohol/ or whatever addiction i am struggling with, so i detach...i am giving it UP*
when i was ready to do step one i just threw up my hands, and said "i quit...i give up...i can't DO this anymore".....that basically is step one.........and also ACCEPTANCE that i am powerless.....not just saying it but KNOWING it/ or accepting it.....in a short take??? its the *I GIVE UP* step.......that doesn't mean i am helpless, becuz i have a power within that negates that....it means i am powerless....but my God or Christ within is NOT powerless and so its time for ME to *give it up*......let go......detach.........hope that helps you on step one.....peace and welcome to group.....rosie
choempi wrote:
I am in need of some guidance on actions that can be done to work on the first step.
Greetings to you, choempi.
In my own case, coming to grips with Step One amounted to first taking a look at some facts about the alcoholic I was alleged to be. To explain ...
Following what has since turned out to be my last drunk, I went to see an old acquaintance (my former therapist, actually) who had asked someone else to let me know he was “sober” – I had never even known he ever drank – and when in the course of our conversation I eventually asked why I could not stop drinking (after he had asked me if I had a desire to stop), he answered, “Because you are an alcoholic.”
My first “feeling” when he said that was like a wave of relief sweeping over me. “Finally,” I thought, “oh, *finally* somebody seems to actually know what is wrong with me!” That feeling yet to this very day remains with me, but quite a while actually passed before I came to know and understand what is meant when at least certain folks say they/we are alcoholics ...
So then, and to hopefully spare you some of the suffering I experienced during my first year in AA, maybe we can together consider “an explanation of alcoholism, as we understand it” (Basic Text, page 28). And, by the way, and as we can read from the first page of Step Three in the 12&12, the conclusions of Steps One and Two do not require action – they require only acceptance (of certain facts needed within those conclusions).
Your question: What actions can be done to work on Step One?
Here is one “action” – trying some controlled drinking – you might have already done:
“... try some controlled drinking. Try to drink and stop abruptly. Try it more than once.” (Big Book, pages 31-32).
And, here is the insight “Silky” (Dr. Silkworth in “The Doctor’s Opinion”) offers along that line:
“We [doctors] believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics [causing them to drink without control once they again (chronically) get started] is a manifestation of an allergy; that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all ... [for] they cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving.”
That is part of what we mean by “powerless over alcohol”, choempi. As explained to me, our systems are hyper-sensitive to a certain alkaloid that forms and remains within our brains whenever we drink, and:
“This phenomenon ... has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated” (Silky).
Hence, we are powerless over alcohol when drinking.
Now, that is not the entire story just yet, but for many of us, that is a key factor – a “certain fact about ourselves” (page 18) – behind a desire to stop drinking forever ... lest we die drunk. And in my own case, the idea of my two, then-young daughters having to bury a drunken daddy they never really knew because I had abandoned them even outside of my drunkenness was completely unbearable.
...
We cannot control our drinking once we get started again, and, “The only relief [for that phenomenon doctors such as Silkworth] have to suggest is entire abstinence” (“The Doctor’s Opinion”).
Now, here is the place where eyes begin to roll and the room gets a little noisy and the chairperson looks at the clock and wonders how long I plan to keep talking ...
If “Don’t drink one day at a time” had been the essence or “key factor” of the original A.A. experience and message, then our Basic Text could have ended with “Don’t drink one day at a time” immediately following what Silkworth had just said. But in fact, or instead, the doctor continued ... speaking of something that is no different today than it was way back then:
“This immediately precipitates us into a seething caldron of debate. Much has been written pro and con, but among physicians, the general opinion seems to be that most chronic alcoholics are doomed.”
How so? Here is the common, shared experience of the earliest of A.A. members, people who quite clearly and surely could *not* stay away from the first drink:
“As we look back, we feel we had gone on drinking many years beyond the point where we *could* quit [even just one day at a time] ... There was a tremendous urge to cease forever. Yet we found it impossible. This is the baffling feature of alcoholism as we know it - this utter inability to leave it alone, no matter how great the necessity or the wish” (page 34, emphasis added).
And there you have it – that is the rest of what we mean by “powerless over alcohol”:
We cannot control our drinking once we get started again, and we cannot stay sober once we get stopped again.
Pretty simple, eh?! In fact, and quite fortunately for people like us, Step One is pretty much a no-brainer!
We have tried to control our drinking and we have failed – we have tried to remain abstinent and we have failed.
And, all the “action” required to later be able to admit those facts about ourselves likely took place before we ever even heard of the first Step on a road to permanent recovery from the hopelessness of our alcoholic condition!
However, not everyone who comes to A.A. has already tried to stop drinking for good and all. Personally, I even tried that impossible-for-me “one day at a time” thing before I had ever even heard of A.A., but for those who are not yet convinced something far beyond anything so simplistic is going to be required, here is some more Step-One “action” some folks need to do:
“If anyone questions whether he has entered this dangerous area [where s/he cannot quit (even if only for just one day at a time) on will power, let him try leaving liquor alone for one year ...” (page 34).
... and if you like, you can even “cheat” a little by attending meetings where so many folks seem to believe that is how it is supposed to be done with everybody encouraging one another.
But if, and as it was for me and as it is for so many today: If you end up drinking another time or two, I recommend an admission of complete defeat.
...
You might have already noticed and considered the complete wording of Step One:
“1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.”
For the moment, never mind the second part of that overview of our alcoholic-human condition. You will hear people talk about taking Step One “perfectly” or “100%”, but in the 12&12, Bill actually only speaks of “100% admission of our powerlessness over alcohol”, and our coming to fully understand and admit that we “could not manage our own lives” (page 60) is something that is actually “completed” later on in our *taking* - "Here are the steps we *took*" (page 59, emphasis added) - the Steps.
In other words, the “our lives had become unmanageable” part of Step One is simply a reflection of the fact that in all of our past attempts to quit drinking, we could not find “a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life ... sufficient to overcome alcoholism” (page 44), and the depth of that is something we eventually come to see even after Step One's absolute or "100%" admission of powerlessness over alcohol.
Blessings to you ...
-- Edited by leejosepho at 21:36, 2005-10-19