Step One

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Who cares to admit complete defeat? Admission of powerlessness is the first step in liberation. Relation of humility to sobriety. Mental obsession plus physical allergy. Why must every A.A. hit bottom? Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A. and there we discover the fatal nature of our situation. 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. 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.

Step Two

“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

An interesting point about Step Two in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions is it mentions “sanity” in the opening sentence and for the rest of the chapter it talks about “faith.” “Sanity” is only mentioned again in the third to the last paragraph. The chapter first deals with the person who refuses to believe—the belligerent one. The person who believes in science rather than a higher power is such a person. His sponsor says, “First, Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything. All of its Twelve Steps are but suggestions. Second, to get sober and to stay sober, you don’t have to swallow all of Step Two right now. Looking back, I find that I took it piecemeal myself. Third, all you really need is a truly open mind. 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. Again I say, all you need is the open mind.”

Sometimes A.A. comes harder to those who have lost or rejected faith than to those who never had any faith at all, for they think they have tried faith and found it wanting. Any number of A.A.’s can say to the drifter, “Yes, we were diverted from our childhood faith, too. The overconfidence of youth was too much for us…But then alcohol began to have its way with us. Finally, when all our score cards read ‘zero,’ and we saw that one more strike would put us out of the game forever, we had to look for our lost faith. It was in A.A. that we rediscovered it. And so can you.”

Now we come to another kind of problem: the intellectually self-sufficient man or woman. To these, many A.A.’s can say, “Yes, we were like you—far too smart for our own good. We found many in A.A. who once thought as we did. They helped us to get down to our right size. By their example they showed us that humility and intellect could be compatible, provided we place humility first. When we began to do that, we received the gift of faith, a faith which works. This faith is for you, too.”

Another crowd of A.A.’s says: “We were plumb disgusted with religion and its entire works.” We gloated over the hypocrisy, bigotry, and crushing self-righteousness that clung to so many ‘believers’ even in their Sunday best. After we came to A.A., we had to recognize that this trait had been an ego-feeding proposition. In belaboring the sins of some religious people, we could feel superior to all of them. Moreover, we could avoid looking at some of our own shortcomings. Self-righteousness, the very thing what we had contemptuously condemned in others, was our own besetting evil. This phony form of respectability was our undoing so far as faith was concerned. But finally, driven to A.A. we learned better.

As psychiatrists have often observed, defiance is the outstanding characteristic of many an alcoholic. So it’s not strange that lots of us have had our day at defying God Himself. When God didn’t give us what we wanted, we became drunkards, and asked God to stop that. But nothing happened. This was the unkindest cut of all. “Damn this faith business!” we said. When we encountered A.A., the fallacy of our defiance was revealed. At no time had we asked what God’s will was for us; instead we had been telling Him what it ought to be. No man, we saw, could believe in God and defy Him, too. Belief meant reliance, not defiance.