Chapter 5

HOW IT WORKS

(pp. 64-75)

It's very rare for someone to completely commit to the A.A. program and still fail. People who do not recover are the ones who can't or won't follow this simple program. They are usually people who simply cannot be honest with themselves. We don't meet a lot of people like this, but they do exist. It is not their fault. They seem to have been born that way. But because they cannot be honest with themselves, they are unlikely to succeed in their recovery.

There are also people who suffer from emotional and mental disorders, and join A.A. to address their alcoholism. Many of them do recover if they are able to be honest along their journey.

Many of the stories we share in this book describe experiences that we have had ourselves. We share stories about what we used to be like, what happened to us, and what our lives are like now. If you feel like we did and want to stop drinking, then you are ready to get started. You are ready to take these steps toward recovery.

When we started, some of those first steps scared us. We thought we could find an easier way. But we could not. Since we know this now from our own experiences, we're asking you to be fearless and thorough from the start. Some of us tried to keep our old ideas, and they just held us back. Until we let go of those ideas, we were unable to make progress.

Remember that we are dealing with a disease. Alcoholism is a confusing and powerful condition that is unlike anything else in the world. Alcohol is extremely complicated, tricky, and difficult. Without help, beating alcoholism is too much for one person to handle. We all need guidance from God, support from a Higher Power. And we need to ask for that support with full and open hearts. We stand at a turning point. We ask for God's protection and care with all the honesty we have.

The Twelve Steps

Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

If this is your first time reading through these steps, they may seem difficult … or even impossible. Do not be discouraged. No one has ever followed these principles perfectly. We are not saints. We are simply people who are trying to grow, both spiritually and personally. These ideas are here to guide our progress. And our goal is spiritual progress, not spiritual perfection.

In Chapter 4 we shared a description of alcoholics who do not believe in God. Combined with that, we believe the stories of our experiences as A.A. members all boil down to three simple ideas:

1. That we were alcoholics and could not manage our own lives.
2. That no human power could have stopped or changed our alcoholism.
3. That God could and would help us if we tried to find God.

The Twelve Steps were created so that we could help ourselves and others understand these three ideas—and then grow beyond them. We had already accepted our powerlessness over alcohol and already believed in a Higher Power. That meant we were at Step Three (deciding to turn our will and our lives over to God's guidance). But what did that mean? And how could we do it?

Stop playing God

The very first thing we needed to understand was this: that following our own self-centered plans would never work in the long run. Even if we had good intentions, we would eventually cause trouble for other people trying to live their own lives.

Since most people do whatever they want whenever they want, it can be hard to accept this change. The people around us usually believe they are completely in charge of their own lives. They think they control everything. They're like actors who want to run the whole show they're performing in. They try to arrange the spotlights and the scenery. They tell the other actors what to do to suit their own needs. They tell themselves that if people would just follow their directions, the show would be perfect. Everybody would be happy and life would be wonderful. And while they are trying their best to control all the parts and players, they may seem kind, patient, and generous. Other times they may seem mean, selfish, and dishonest. Since they're human beings, they probably show a mix of these traits.

What usually happens when people put themselves in charge of everything? The show doesn't go very well. Our controlling friends begin to think life is treating them unfairly. They become even more controlling in response. But even after making more changes, the play still disappoints them. They may see that these bad results are partially their own fault, but they believe other people are more to blame. They become angry, insulted, and self-pitying.

Things only get worse since what they want doesn't match up to what they do. People who run their lives in this way:

• Act kind to others, but only when it benefits them;
• Believe they can force themselves to be happy by controlling everything and every person in their lives;
• Make the people around them feel bullied, which causes those people to bully them back; and/or
• Create confusion instead of peace in their own lives, and in the lives of others.

These unfortunate people are driven by self-centeredness. They believe they know best about everything. They blame others for their troubles and struggles. If we're being truly honest, don't we all act like that sometimes? Don't we get all wrapped up with ourselves, our anger, or our self-pity?

How selfishness hurts us

We in A.A. believe that selfishness is the root of our troubles. We allow fear and self-pity to rule our lives, and we end up hurting or angering the people around us. And they react to that. Sometimes they hurt us back. While that is happening we may not understand why they're doing it. But if we think carefully about how we've acted, we always seem to find the reason. We remember that we did something selfish first, and that selfish action put us in a position to be hurt later on.

Basically, this means we are causing our own troubles. They come from ourselves, and are caused by our self-centeredness. Alcoholics are even more self-centered than most people, though we never seem to realize this. We alcoholics must work hard to get rid of this selfishness. Our Higher Power makes it possible for us to change this in ourselves. In fact, it may feel like there's no other way to make this change. We can't get rid of our self-centeredness by wishing or trying all by ourselves. We need God's help.

It took some time to understand that we had to quit playing God. Doing that just wasn't working for us. We decided that in this drama called “life,” God was going to be our director. God would be in charge. This decision changed everything for us.

Most good ideas are simple, and this one was simply beautiful. It became extremely important to our journey toward freedom.

When we truly accepted that God was in charge, all sorts of amazing things began to happen for us. We felt a new sense of purpose. Everything we needed came to us, so long as we continued to trust in our Higher Power. We became less interested in ourselves. We stopped worrying about our little plans and schemes. Instead, we were interested in seeing how we could contribute to life and how we could help other people. We felt a new kind of power flow in. We enjoyed peace of mind, and we discovered we could face life successfully. As we became aware of God's presence in our lives, we stopped feeling afraid of both the present and the future. We felt like we had been reborn.

Committing to Step Three has a similar effect on many alcoholics. When we reach this Step, many of us choose to say this prayer: “God, I offer myself to Thee—to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!”

This means, “God, I offer myself to You—to partner with me and guide me as You think best. Take away the prison of self that I have lived in, so I can do as you think best more easily. Take away my difficulties, so that when I feel I have been released from them, I can share my transformation to help others accept Your Power, Your Love, and Your Way of life. May I do Your will always!”

This prayer is a powerful one. Many A.A. members have found it helpful to take this spiritual step with an understanding person. This might be a spouse, best friend, or spiritual adviser. But if someone like that isn't a part of your life, it is better to meet your Higher Power alone. Connecting with your Higher Power with someone who might misunderstand will be more difficult than doing it alone.

The wording of the prayer that you see here is just a suggestion. When you are ready to take Step Three yourself, you can choose other words that express the same idea, as long as you can say them with all of your heart. Saying words of dedication is only the beginning. But if you say them honestly and humbly, the power of your new understanding will fill you from head to toe.

Taking inventory and responsibility

After we'd committed to Step Three through prayer, we started a personal house cleaning. We knew that putting ourselves in God's hands was an important first step, but also knew it needed to be followed by action. Our change of heart wouldn't permanently improve our lives unless we also dealt with the beliefs and actions that were harming us. Drinking was just a symptom of a larger disease. We had to understand its causes and conditions.

So we started our personal inventories—lists of all the things in our lives that held us back. This was Step Four. This step was inspired by the process of inventorying that businesses do: They count and write down every item that the business owns. A business that doesn't do this regularly doesn't understand itself, and may go broke. When people take inventory of a store or company, they find out the facts and face them. They are trying to discover the truth about the stock that is actually on the shelves. It helps business owners find damaged goods that can't be sold to customers, and to get rid of them immediately. If business owners want to be successful, they cannot fool themselves about what can be sold and what must be thrown away.

This is also true for people. We need to understand ourselves. We need to know what's inside of us (on our shelves), and be willing to throw out damaged goods (harmful ideas and behaviors).

So we did exactly the same thing with our lives. We took stock honestly. First, we searched out the flaws in our personalities that caused our struggles. Since we already believed that selfishness was what had hurt us most, we began there. We thought long and hard about the traits and actions related to selfishness.

We have come to believe that resentment is the worst offender. Resentment is feeling anger about being treated unfairly. It's the feeling of holding a grudge. It means staying angry at someone for a long period of time. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. We alcoholics are not only mentally and physically ill, we are spiritually ill. And we think resentment is the source of many forms of spiritual disease. To fully recover we need to cure our spiritual illness. Better mental and physical health will follow.

Dealing with resentment

We have discovered that the best way to deal with resentments is to write them down on paper. We did this ourselves by listing people, groups, or ideas at whom we were angry. Then we asked ourselves why we felt angry. In most cases, it turned out that we felt angry because our confidence, our bank accounts, our ambitions, or our personal relationships (including sexual relationships) were hurt or threatened. That made us feel upset. We felt like we had been wronged.

On our grudge lists, we wrote down names in one column. In the second column, we put down what the person did to make us angry. In the third column, we wrote what we felt was affected by this behavior. Was it our self-esteem, our security, our ambitions, our personal relationships, or our sexual relations?

We were as detailed as possible, as you'll see in this example:

As we went back through our lives to write these inventories, we focused on being both thorough and completely honest. When we were finished, we re-read the lists we'd written very carefully.

The first thing we noticed was that our lists were long. Clearly, we felt that the world and its people had treated us very badly. This was not a huge surprise. Most people spend their lives believing that others are wrong. They think that the world is unfair, and that nothing can be done about any of it. If they cling to this belief, people will continue to wrong them and they will continue to feel angry about it. Some of us try to find the source of our anger. When we do that, we realize we're actually feeling guilt or regret (instead of anger). Then we get angry at ourselves for being mistaken. But the more we fight and try to get our own way, the worse things become.

A life full of resentment can only create unhappiness. It's a feeling that sucks up our time and energy, preventing us from focusing on more important things. And for alcoholics, resentment is even more serious. In fact, holding on to our grudges can be fatal. As alcoholics, allowing these angry feelings to continue makes us want to live alone and in darkness. We are hiding ourselves from the warm sunlight that we can find in spirituality. The craving for alcohol returns and we drink again. And for alcoholics, drinking leads to death.

If we wanted to live, we knew we had to be free of anger.

So we turned back to our inventory list, believing it held the answers we needed. We decided to look at it from a different angle. We began to see that the world and its people weren't treating us as badly as we'd thought. But we also saw that our strong feelings about the world and its people were controlling us. Our feelings of anger and resentment were shaping our lives. Since we were alcoholics, feeling huge amounts of anger and resentment was dangerous. How could we escape? We saw that our resentments needed to be dealt with, but how? We could not wish them away, just as we couldn't wish away our drinking.

Eventually, we realized that the people who had wronged us might be spiritually sick, too. We might not like their symptoms or the way they treated us, but accepting they were ill helped us to feel less angry at them. We asked God to help us show them the same compassion and patience that we would show to sick friends. When a person was rude or selfish, we said to ourselves, “This is a sick person. How can I be helpful to them? God, please help me not feel angry at this person.”

We stopped ourselves from arguing or fighting back when we felt someone hurt us. After all, we wouldn't treat sick people that way. If we did, we would destroy our chance of being helpful! We cannot be helpful to all people, but with the help of our Higher Power we can learn to be kind to everyone we meet.

Then we returned to our inventory list again. Instead of looking for the wrongs others had done to us, we looked for our own mistakes. When were we selfish, self-seeking, dishonest, and afraid? Sometimes we found items on the list where we shared the blame with other people. When this happened, we tried to focus on how we had been wrong in those situations. Where were we to blame? What was our mistake? This inventory was ours, not the other person's. When we could understand and describe our faults, we listed them. We wrote them down in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly and felt willing to make them right.

Fear hides everywhere

If you look back at our example list, you'll see that the word “fear” sits in parentheses next to the complaints about Mr. Brown, Mrs. Jones, the employer, and the wife. As we did our own inventories, we saw that this one word somehow touched every aspect of our lives. It was like an evil and destructive thread that wove its way through the fabric of our existence. So often, our fears were the real cause of our resentments. Fear caused events in our lives that created pain we felt we didn't deserve. But had we really set the ball rolling ourselves? Could we admit to ourselves that our fears had caused that trouble in the first place?

We reviewed our fears thoroughly. We put them on paper, even if they weren't connected to feelings of resentment. We asked ourselves why we had these fears. Wasn't it because we believed we could do everything and know everything, and then found out we were wrong? Wasn't it because we couldn't accept that we needed help? Some of us had felt very confident at times, but our confidence never took away our fears. When it made us cocky, it was worse.

If we wanted to continue recovering, we needed to find a better way to deal with our fears. And we found it in trusting and relying on a Higher Power. We learned to trust God rather than trying to understand, manage, and do everything in our lives alone. And by putting that trust in God, we are able to get through our darkest, most difficult, and most fearful times.

And we are not ashamed of relying on God, or of needing God. We know that our faith and trust isn't a sign of weakness. It is a sign of strength. Faith is a kind of courage, just as trusting a Higher Power is a kind of courage. And when we ask God to remove our fears and help us focus on better, more important things, we can begin to outgrow our fears.

How to inventory your sex life

Now let's talk about sex. It seems to us that there are two strong opinions about sex, and most people have either one or the other.

Some people say that sex is part of our “lower” nature, but that it needs to be done sometimes to keep humanity alive. They are judgmental about sex.

Other people say that sex is wonderful and that people should be allowed to have as much of it as they want, with whomever they want. This second group of people tends to believe sex is part of everything that human beings do, from art to science to religion. They see it everywhere and in everything.

A.A. would like to stay out of this argument between two strong opinions. We do not want to judge anyone's sex life. We all have sex problems. We wouldn't be human if we didn't. What can we do about them?

To answer this question for ourselves, we reviewed our own actions over the years. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, or inconsiderate? Whom had we hurt? Did we make anyone feel jealous, suspicious, or bitter? If we were to blame, what could we have done instead? We got this all down on paper and looked at it.

Then we tried to imagine a smart and fair way to run our sex lives in the future. We looked at each sexual relationship and asked, “Did I act selfishly here, or not?” We asked God to help us create some ideals. Ideals are values and behaviors that we could work toward. We wanted ideals for our sex lives, and help living up to them. We remembered that sex is natural, which means it is basically good. That means we shouldn't be greedy about it or feel disgusted by it.

When you consider these questions and think about your own ideals, make sure you are willing to work toward them. Just like everything in A.A., making changes in your sex life takes work and effort. It means being willing to make amends whenever you're wrong (as long as you don't cause more harm by doing so). In other words, we treat sex as we would any other problem. We ask God what we should do, and the right answer comes if we want it.

What happens if we fail to live up to one of our ideals about sex and relationships? Does this mean we will get drunk to punish ourselves? Some people say yes. But this is only a half-truth. It depends on us and on our feelings. If we are sorry and truly want our Higher Power to point us toward better things, we know that we can be forgiven. We will learn the lesson, and move on. If we are not sorry and our choices continue to harm other people, we will drink. There's no “maybe” about it. These are facts that we have learned directly from our own experiences.

When it comes to the sex lives of alcoholics, we recommend focusing on creating ideals with God's help and then using them to guide you. Whenever a situation comes up and you aren't sure what to do, your ideals will give you a clear answer. They will help you know how to do the right thing. They will keep you sane and strong. If your relationships are messy and difficult, working on them directly might not help you. In this case, you can focus your energy on helping other people. Think about their needs and work for them. Doing this takes you out of yourself and allows you to pay attention to other things. It might even help you avoid a heartache.

Faith helps us when we cannot help ourselves

If you are thorough about your personal inventory, you will write a very long list. You will name and think about your resentments. When you're done, you'll start to see how pointless and dangerous—even deadly—your resentments are. You have begun to learn tolerance, patience, and good will toward all people. (This includes your enemies, since you now think of them as sick people who need and deserve your help.) You have listed the people you have hurt, and you are willing to straighten out the past if you can.

In this book you will read again and again that faith helped us when we couldn't help ourselves. We hope you are convinced now that a Higher Power can remove whatever barriers kept you from finding your faith in the past. If you have already made a decision and an inventory of your mistakes, you have taken important steps. You have swallowed and digested some big chunks of truth about yourself. You are on your way toward a better and brighter life already.