We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.
1.Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness (defects of the thinking mind.)
2.We perceive that only through utter defeat are we able to take our first step toward liberation and strength (making the admission we are unmanageable by us.)
3.Until we humble ourselves (accept the devastating weakness and all its consequences), our sobriety, if any, will be precarious.
4.The Principle: We shall find no enduring strength until we first admit complete defeat (that probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism.)
5.We are victims of a mental obsession - thinking (drinking is only a symptom) so subtly powerful that no amount of human will power could break it.
6.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.
7.Few people will sincerely try to practice the AA program until they have hit their bottom through utter defeat.
8.In order to practice AAs remaining eleven steps we must adopt new attitudes and take new actions.
9.We must become as open minded to conviction and as willing to listen as the dying can be.
They talk about honesty a lot in How It Works.....How you can't recover without it.
We learned that we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we were alcoholics. This is the first step in recovery. The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, has to be smashed.
BB pg 30
If you can't get honest with yourself about this.....You ain't gonna make it.
