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A review by levininja
Alcoholics Anonymous by Alcoholics Anonymous
5.0
How does one rate a book which changed your life? You don’t “rate” it. Normal considerations—style, organization, even your personal opinions of its content—fall away in the face of life change.
When I came into recovery in 2012, the book Alcoholics Anonymous did not impress me. I was seeking help for a different addiction, not alcoholism. I learned that Alcoholics Anonymous was the first twelve step program from which all others sprung. Ok, fine, that’s nice historical information, I thought. But I failed to see why some meetings had us read so much from “The Big Book,” as people in recovery circles colloquially call the book titled Alcoholics Anonymous. I preferred the books which addressed my addiction specifically.
Time passed, I got sober, I worked the steps, my depression lifted, shame guilt and anxiety too became all much much less. My relations with other people got a lot better and I became able to see, whenever I got into self-pity, resentment, or control, how whenever I am disturbed, there is somewhere inside me that I have a part to play, that even when I truly am a victim of circumstance, that healing only comes about by focusing on my part, not other people’s. I could write a lot about my experiences finally getting free of resentment towards people I thought I could never forgive, or the various epiphanies I had on the road surrounding things like powerlessness, willingness, surrender, what the heck is up with this Higher Power thing, openmindedness, control, self pity, and forgiveness. But there are already so many written accounts of the life change people have experienced, and in fact, that’s what most of this book is.
The point is, after a few years of progress, I began to struggle quite a bit. I finally bit the bullet and asked someone to be my sponsor who really intimidated me—not because their personality was intimidating, mind you—but just because they had so much sobriety and wisdom, they were what people call “old timers.” I was always really afraid to ask a true old-timer to sponsor me (“sponsor” means “mentor”, essentially). But when I finally did ask one of them and he said yes, I started to work through the steps again in a much deeper, more meaningful way than with the 10 sponsors I had had prior. It was so good.
And one of the surprising things was, he taught me the 12 steps not through the texts that are specific to my (our) addiction, but instead through the text known as Alcoholics Anonymous. I had ignored it for years, thinking it didn’t apply to me. But when we really dug into it, I discovered just how deep and rich it is.
The first 20% of AA (the Alcoholics Anonymous book) is “the program,” explaining what addiction is (alcoholism specifically, but you can translate in your head to your own disease of choice), and explaining the solution, how to work the steps. There is a chapter called “We Agnostics,” specifically for those who really struggle with the whole Higher Power thing. The path toward believing in God is made as broad as possible to invite in even died-in-the-wool agnostics and atheists. It really is amazing how many people I have met in recovery rooms who were before totally shut off to the concept of God, and yet discovered in these rooms a faith they thought they would never have. How did they come there?
In short, it’s this: you come in desperate. “No one comes into their first meeting on a winning streak.” Not a person on the planet wants to admit to being an addict. All of us come in after some kind of bottoming out experience.
And that bottoming out doesn’t have to be going to prison or being divorced or having a near death experience. For some of us it’s being fired, or being found out by a spouse. For others, it’s seeing the consequences on children or other family members. For some of us, the event itself was not of such enormous dramatic significance, it was more of a last straw, it was more just that we were sick and tired of being sick and tired: filled with anxiety, depression, toxic shame, deep-seated guilt.
Or for me, it was finally getting the clarity that, despite all I had ever said to the contrary, that the reality was that my disease was in fact progressive, and realizing with dead certainty that it was going to get a lot worse if I didn’t get outside help, and quick, too. I got to what AA calls “the jumping off point,” that place where you can’t imagine life without alcohol (or whatever your drug is), and you also can’t imagine a life with it either. If you’ve never been there, it’s impossible to describe the utter despair that sets in. But thankfully, along with that despair comes the “gift of desperation.”
Through most of my life, I had been able to do anything I set my mind to. At school or with jobs or with personal relationships or other goals, I could do it! Just apply my willpower and creativity and intellect, and I could figure anything out.
But then I ran into this one area of my life where that didn’t work: my addiction. After dozens of ways of trying to not do it or to manage and control doing it, I finally came to that place of realizing with dead certainty that nothing I could do would make any difference. I was trapped.
I have to laugh at myself right now; I intended to review a book and instead this is turning into a memoir. Maybe that’s ok. But for the sake of getting on to the book, suffice it to say: I considered myself hopeless before walking into a twelve step program. I had tried a psychiatrist and drugs, legal and illegal, I had tried counseling and exorcisms and all manners of trying to outsmart myself and set boundaries and have accountability…none of that made a dent. The twelve steps is what got me free.
To clarify, when I got into recovery I also did some other things that helped. I did a lot of more targeted therapy as well, which I believe helped in a supplemental sort of way: it gave me clarity as to why I “needed” my drug. But in-and-of-itself, all that self knowledge did not get me sober. And without establishing sobriety, I was going nowhere fast.
What did get me sober was a moment a couple of years into the program where I finally got desperate, sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I prayed a prayer. I had had a great deal of difficulty with believing that even if there was a God, how could I ever know if I was being guided by God? I certainly couldn’t trust the voices in my head: I was extremely delusional! So I prayed: “God, you know I have trouble hearing your voice. So here’s what I’m going to do. I am just going to do whatever the hell my sponsor tells me to do, no matter what—short of jumping off a bridge—and trust that that is your will for me.”
I most certainly did NOT tell my sponsor that I had prayed that prayer. But here’s what happened. My sponsor told me to go to seven meetings a week and make five phone calls a day and work the steps regularly. I gasped with horror—“I don’t have enough time to do that!”—but I had said I would go to ANY lengths. So I committed to doing it. On top of that, he would give me random one-off assignments all the time, as if the meeting and five phone calls a day weren’t enough, the son of a bitch! But I did it.
And something miraculous happened. I had never been able to string two or three sober days together before, but finally I did. I got sober for a week before relapsing. Some more time passed, and I got sober for a month. And then longer and longer. For me it was a progressive victory thing, but eventually I got to where I was going years at a time. And even more important, recovering in a deeper sense than mere sobriety.
Why does the twelve steps work? Part of the explanation is pretty simple. There’s research to back up the idea that the opposite of addiction is connection. Going to all those meetings and making all those calls forced me to finally actually be known by others instead of isolating.
The other part was working the steps. That’s where, for me, the more lasting life change comes in so that I don’t relapse and get myself into worse trouble than before. That’s where the book Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) comes in.
What are the steps?
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.
The foundation of the program is steps one through three, which can be summarized as: “I can’t; God can; I think I’ll let Him.” The rest of the program can only be done meaningful if relying on God to help; because we addicts are in no position to be able to do the rest on our own.
But for most of us, the first three steps are insanely difficult. Admitting you’re completely powerless over your addiction is really hard, and admitting that you aren’t fit to manage your life at all is even harder. And then there’s the second step: so many people just can’t get down with the God business. And then the third step, also known as surrender? What does that even mean? I struggled with all of these.
People will have all kinds of arguments about these concepts and hate them for a variety of reasons, one of which being the reliance on God. All of these arguments, however, actually meant nothing in the face of death. If you are drowning in addiction, you no longer care about whether something “makes sense” to you: you get to a place where you realize that if there is a solution out there, it’s going to by definition be something that doesn’t make sense to you, because if it did make sense, you would have tried it already! And because I was drowning, I became willing to try anything, to go to any lengths.
So I turned to working these steps not out of logic but out of a necessity to try anything that might possibly work for me. It felt like the last house on the block—there was nothing else left but to kill myself. Yes I was in a dark place. But if you’re going to kill yourself anyways, what do you have to lose? So I threw myself into it.
The first part of this book (after the forewards) is a chapter titled “The Doctor’s Opinion.” I skipped this the first time, not realizing how critical that it is to getting me to understand the true nature of my disease. It’s an open letter from a leading doctor at a hospital for the treatment of alcoholism, someone who had seen thousands of cases and knew right off the bat which ones were helpless cases: it didn’t matter how many second chances they were given, they were helpless to stop themselves from drinking again. He admits frankly that everything science had thrown at cases like these had very little effect. And then he goes on to detail how now hundreds of such cases (the “hopeless variety” of alcoholic, as he calls them) have come to recover, and are changed men. The mere existence of this letter is incredible: you have a very prominent doctor putting his reputation on the line, putting it in print that he absolutely recommends a SPIRITUAL program as an actual treatment for something recognized by the medical profession as a disease (alcoholism).
After that we have Bill’s story, the founder of AA. He was a crazy SOB before recovery, not someone you would have wanted to know. His story is remarkable. Then we have chapters titled There Is a Solution and More About Alcoholism. These outline the problem in stark lines.
Then you have a chapter We Agnostics, that helps address those who are atheistic and agnostic and shares the stories of many people who began with that belief system but were then able to progress slowly into having faith. Everyone is free to define their Higher Power in whatever matter works for them. For many agnostics, the first evidence they have of God is the fact that they are hearing the stories of all the other alcoholics in meetings who have gotten sober, and watching some of those transformations happen before their very eyes. And so their first basic conception of a Higher Power is the group, or whatever power it is that is miraculously causing the alcoholics in their group to get sober.
That was my experience as well. As I got to know people in my program who had been really hopeless, who had done awful, terrible things, and yet here they were telling me they were sober—and the thing is, you can sniff out bullshit to a certain level, and these people did not smell like bullshit. And there is no way that the person who they are describing in the past is the same person that they are now, that I’m witnessing them being. Not everyone in recovery is a saint, but I zoned in on a handful of people whose lives had undoubtedly changed. Since then, I’ve gotten to witness firsthand some pretty incredible stories, too, been at someone’s first meeting and then seen them go from depressed, sure of impending divorce, a self-centered self-pitying wreck unable to go a few days sober, to becoming such a transformed person, a person that people go to for spiritual life advice—you can’t make this stuff up.
So anyways, that made me pay attention. That did something for my faith that no amount of logic or theology or philosophy could have ever touched a hair of.
Next are the chapters titled How It Works, Into Action, and Working With Others, which outline the whole program, all twelve steps, in just 45 pages. How It Works alone covers most of what the program is. It’s a really hard program, but it’s also a very simple program and in fact the only reason it’s 45 pages and not much less than that is that there are plenty of examples and time spent on objections. These chapters are where the meat is, the life change. I have underlined and annotated the mess out of this section and come back to it again and again; you start to know the page numbers by heart, and I find myself telling others “go read pages 60-62, that deals with exactly where you are, and let me tell you my experience with applying those pages to my life…” Yes, I have become one of THOSE people. But hopefully not in a bad way.
After that there are chapters To Wives, The Family Afterward, To Employers. Honestly these feel dated but they still have nuggets.
Then there’s A Vision for You, supremely helpful for vision-casting. This takes us up through page 164.
The remaining 400 pages of the book are the personal stories. One after another, alcoholics from every kind of walk of life share their stories. The first third of them are founders, the next third are people in the second wave, and the final third are people who came into AA after it was well established. The stories seem to have been picked for diversity of experiences: being a minority, being a woman, various careers and experiences like homelessness, co-addictions, codependence, divorce, prison, death of loved ones. All of them follow a general format of first sharing their story, letting you see just how bad it gets, then showing what changed, and then finally, sharing what wisdom or advice has helped them the most.
I love that some of these stories have so much meat on them. I have underlined and annotated many of these stories, some of them just as heavily as How It Works.
The style of writing is rather bare bones. It doesn’t always SEEM to be profound, and it’s written in a slightly different vernacular. Sometimes things seem common sense, or I didn’t understand why they were making a big deal about different points…but now I do, because when I’ve gotten stuck in recovery I’ve discovered that the old timers that I turn to for advice invariably point me back to the big book for the answers. In short, even with all the quibbles, it’s impossible to rate this book as anything other than five stars because it has helped me profoundly to change at the deepest levels of how I operate, of how I do life. And because all the other recovery books that I get a lot out of are derived from this book.
No one will ever convince me that the twelve steps “don’t work.” I’ve seen hundreds of people come into the recovery rooms. The vast majority flake out: either they never come back at all or they work a half-hearted program for a couple months and then quit. Some people come to meetings regularly but never actually work the steps. Of all the people I’ve seen come into these rooms, I have yet to see someone really roll up their sleeves and work the program and NOT see life-changing results.
This stuff works: it works too well for people to believe. I’ve heard some people criticize and say “it doesn’t work,” but as soon as you ask them some basic questions it invariably becomes obvious they have never worked it at all. And I was one of those for a while; I didn’t think I needed to work something like that because I was smart and it insulted my intelligence. I was too smart for my own good.
When I struggle it’s usually for that reason. It doesn’t make sense to me that the twelve steps have anything to do with establishing sobriety, much less any of the other advice that’s been given to me by sponsors throughout the years. But I realize that whatever the solution is, it has to be something that doesn’t make sense to me, otherwise I wouldn’t have the problem that I do.
I’m just grateful that this program exists because without it I’d still be deep in my delusion, or worse yet I’d probably be dead—for when I’m in my disease I get suicidal.
Thank God I’m not there today. This program gave me hope, gave me examples of people just as bad off as me who actually recovered, and gave me freedom from toxic guilt and shame. Those issues are molehills today compared to the mountains they used to be.
So yeah, I’m a believer. And I can’t apologize for it. Some things are worth believing in.
When I came into recovery in 2012, the book Alcoholics Anonymous did not impress me. I was seeking help for a different addiction, not alcoholism. I learned that Alcoholics Anonymous was the first twelve step program from which all others sprung. Ok, fine, that’s nice historical information, I thought. But I failed to see why some meetings had us read so much from “The Big Book,” as people in recovery circles colloquially call the book titled Alcoholics Anonymous. I preferred the books which addressed my addiction specifically.
Time passed, I got sober, I worked the steps, my depression lifted, shame guilt and anxiety too became all much much less. My relations with other people got a lot better and I became able to see, whenever I got into self-pity, resentment, or control, how whenever I am disturbed, there is somewhere inside me that I have a part to play, that even when I truly am a victim of circumstance, that healing only comes about by focusing on my part, not other people’s. I could write a lot about my experiences finally getting free of resentment towards people I thought I could never forgive, or the various epiphanies I had on the road surrounding things like powerlessness, willingness, surrender, what the heck is up with this Higher Power thing, openmindedness, control, self pity, and forgiveness. But there are already so many written accounts of the life change people have experienced, and in fact, that’s what most of this book is.
The point is, after a few years of progress, I began to struggle quite a bit. I finally bit the bullet and asked someone to be my sponsor who really intimidated me—not because their personality was intimidating, mind you—but just because they had so much sobriety and wisdom, they were what people call “old timers.” I was always really afraid to ask a true old-timer to sponsor me (“sponsor” means “mentor”, essentially). But when I finally did ask one of them and he said yes, I started to work through the steps again in a much deeper, more meaningful way than with the 10 sponsors I had had prior. It was so good.
And one of the surprising things was, he taught me the 12 steps not through the texts that are specific to my (our) addiction, but instead through the text known as Alcoholics Anonymous. I had ignored it for years, thinking it didn’t apply to me. But when we really dug into it, I discovered just how deep and rich it is.
The first 20% of AA (the Alcoholics Anonymous book) is “the program,” explaining what addiction is (alcoholism specifically, but you can translate in your head to your own disease of choice), and explaining the solution, how to work the steps. There is a chapter called “We Agnostics,” specifically for those who really struggle with the whole Higher Power thing. The path toward believing in God is made as broad as possible to invite in even died-in-the-wool agnostics and atheists. It really is amazing how many people I have met in recovery rooms who were before totally shut off to the concept of God, and yet discovered in these rooms a faith they thought they would never have. How did they come there?
In short, it’s this: you come in desperate. “No one comes into their first meeting on a winning streak.” Not a person on the planet wants to admit to being an addict. All of us come in after some kind of bottoming out experience.
And that bottoming out doesn’t have to be going to prison or being divorced or having a near death experience. For some of us it’s being fired, or being found out by a spouse. For others, it’s seeing the consequences on children or other family members. For some of us, the event itself was not of such enormous dramatic significance, it was more of a last straw, it was more just that we were sick and tired of being sick and tired: filled with anxiety, depression, toxic shame, deep-seated guilt.
Or for me, it was finally getting the clarity that, despite all I had ever said to the contrary, that the reality was that my disease was in fact progressive, and realizing with dead certainty that it was going to get a lot worse if I didn’t get outside help, and quick, too. I got to what AA calls “the jumping off point,” that place where you can’t imagine life without alcohol (or whatever your drug is), and you also can’t imagine a life with it either. If you’ve never been there, it’s impossible to describe the utter despair that sets in. But thankfully, along with that despair comes the “gift of desperation.”
Through most of my life, I had been able to do anything I set my mind to. At school or with jobs or with personal relationships or other goals, I could do it! Just apply my willpower and creativity and intellect, and I could figure anything out.
But then I ran into this one area of my life where that didn’t work: my addiction. After dozens of ways of trying to not do it or to manage and control doing it, I finally came to that place of realizing with dead certainty that nothing I could do would make any difference. I was trapped.
I have to laugh at myself right now; I intended to review a book and instead this is turning into a memoir. Maybe that’s ok. But for the sake of getting on to the book, suffice it to say: I considered myself hopeless before walking into a twelve step program. I had tried a psychiatrist and drugs, legal and illegal, I had tried counseling and exorcisms and all manners of trying to outsmart myself and set boundaries and have accountability…none of that made a dent. The twelve steps is what got me free.
To clarify, when I got into recovery I also did some other things that helped. I did a lot of more targeted therapy as well, which I believe helped in a supplemental sort of way: it gave me clarity as to why I “needed” my drug. But in-and-of-itself, all that self knowledge did not get me sober. And without establishing sobriety, I was going nowhere fast.
What did get me sober was a moment a couple of years into the program where I finally got desperate, sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I prayed a prayer. I had had a great deal of difficulty with believing that even if there was a God, how could I ever know if I was being guided by God? I certainly couldn’t trust the voices in my head: I was extremely delusional! So I prayed: “God, you know I have trouble hearing your voice. So here’s what I’m going to do. I am just going to do whatever the hell my sponsor tells me to do, no matter what—short of jumping off a bridge—and trust that that is your will for me.”
I most certainly did NOT tell my sponsor that I had prayed that prayer. But here’s what happened. My sponsor told me to go to seven meetings a week and make five phone calls a day and work the steps regularly. I gasped with horror—“I don’t have enough time to do that!”—but I had said I would go to ANY lengths. So I committed to doing it. On top of that, he would give me random one-off assignments all the time, as if the meeting and five phone calls a day weren’t enough, the son of a bitch! But I did it.
And something miraculous happened. I had never been able to string two or three sober days together before, but finally I did. I got sober for a week before relapsing. Some more time passed, and I got sober for a month. And then longer and longer. For me it was a progressive victory thing, but eventually I got to where I was going years at a time. And even more important, recovering in a deeper sense than mere sobriety.
Why does the twelve steps work? Part of the explanation is pretty simple. There’s research to back up the idea that the opposite of addiction is connection. Going to all those meetings and making all those calls forced me to finally actually be known by others instead of isolating.
The other part was working the steps. That’s where, for me, the more lasting life change comes in so that I don’t relapse and get myself into worse trouble than before. That’s where the book Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) comes in.
What are the steps?
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.
The foundation of the program is steps one through three, which can be summarized as: “I can’t; God can; I think I’ll let Him.” The rest of the program can only be done meaningful if relying on God to help; because we addicts are in no position to be able to do the rest on our own.
But for most of us, the first three steps are insanely difficult. Admitting you’re completely powerless over your addiction is really hard, and admitting that you aren’t fit to manage your life at all is even harder. And then there’s the second step: so many people just can’t get down with the God business. And then the third step, also known as surrender? What does that even mean? I struggled with all of these.
People will have all kinds of arguments about these concepts and hate them for a variety of reasons, one of which being the reliance on God. All of these arguments, however, actually meant nothing in the face of death. If you are drowning in addiction, you no longer care about whether something “makes sense” to you: you get to a place where you realize that if there is a solution out there, it’s going to by definition be something that doesn’t make sense to you, because if it did make sense, you would have tried it already! And because I was drowning, I became willing to try anything, to go to any lengths.
So I turned to working these steps not out of logic but out of a necessity to try anything that might possibly work for me. It felt like the last house on the block—there was nothing else left but to kill myself. Yes I was in a dark place. But if you’re going to kill yourself anyways, what do you have to lose? So I threw myself into it.
The first part of this book (after the forewards) is a chapter titled “The Doctor’s Opinion.” I skipped this the first time, not realizing how critical that it is to getting me to understand the true nature of my disease. It’s an open letter from a leading doctor at a hospital for the treatment of alcoholism, someone who had seen thousands of cases and knew right off the bat which ones were helpless cases: it didn’t matter how many second chances they were given, they were helpless to stop themselves from drinking again. He admits frankly that everything science had thrown at cases like these had very little effect. And then he goes on to detail how now hundreds of such cases (the “hopeless variety” of alcoholic, as he calls them) have come to recover, and are changed men. The mere existence of this letter is incredible: you have a very prominent doctor putting his reputation on the line, putting it in print that he absolutely recommends a SPIRITUAL program as an actual treatment for something recognized by the medical profession as a disease (alcoholism).
After that we have Bill’s story, the founder of AA. He was a crazy SOB before recovery, not someone you would have wanted to know. His story is remarkable. Then we have chapters titled There Is a Solution and More About Alcoholism. These outline the problem in stark lines.
Then you have a chapter We Agnostics, that helps address those who are atheistic and agnostic and shares the stories of many people who began with that belief system but were then able to progress slowly into having faith. Everyone is free to define their Higher Power in whatever matter works for them. For many agnostics, the first evidence they have of God is the fact that they are hearing the stories of all the other alcoholics in meetings who have gotten sober, and watching some of those transformations happen before their very eyes. And so their first basic conception of a Higher Power is the group, or whatever power it is that is miraculously causing the alcoholics in their group to get sober.
That was my experience as well. As I got to know people in my program who had been really hopeless, who had done awful, terrible things, and yet here they were telling me they were sober—and the thing is, you can sniff out bullshit to a certain level, and these people did not smell like bullshit. And there is no way that the person who they are describing in the past is the same person that they are now, that I’m witnessing them being. Not everyone in recovery is a saint, but I zoned in on a handful of people whose lives had undoubtedly changed. Since then, I’ve gotten to witness firsthand some pretty incredible stories, too, been at someone’s first meeting and then seen them go from depressed, sure of impending divorce, a self-centered self-pitying wreck unable to go a few days sober, to becoming such a transformed person, a person that people go to for spiritual life advice—you can’t make this stuff up.
So anyways, that made me pay attention. That did something for my faith that no amount of logic or theology or philosophy could have ever touched a hair of.
Next are the chapters titled How It Works, Into Action, and Working With Others, which outline the whole program, all twelve steps, in just 45 pages. How It Works alone covers most of what the program is. It’s a really hard program, but it’s also a very simple program and in fact the only reason it’s 45 pages and not much less than that is that there are plenty of examples and time spent on objections. These chapters are where the meat is, the life change. I have underlined and annotated the mess out of this section and come back to it again and again; you start to know the page numbers by heart, and I find myself telling others “go read pages 60-62, that deals with exactly where you are, and let me tell you my experience with applying those pages to my life…” Yes, I have become one of THOSE people. But hopefully not in a bad way.
After that there are chapters To Wives, The Family Afterward, To Employers. Honestly these feel dated but they still have nuggets.
Then there’s A Vision for You, supremely helpful for vision-casting. This takes us up through page 164.
The remaining 400 pages of the book are the personal stories. One after another, alcoholics from every kind of walk of life share their stories. The first third of them are founders, the next third are people in the second wave, and the final third are people who came into AA after it was well established. The stories seem to have been picked for diversity of experiences: being a minority, being a woman, various careers and experiences like homelessness, co-addictions, codependence, divorce, prison, death of loved ones. All of them follow a general format of first sharing their story, letting you see just how bad it gets, then showing what changed, and then finally, sharing what wisdom or advice has helped them the most.
I love that some of these stories have so much meat on them. I have underlined and annotated many of these stories, some of them just as heavily as How It Works.
The style of writing is rather bare bones. It doesn’t always SEEM to be profound, and it’s written in a slightly different vernacular. Sometimes things seem common sense, or I didn’t understand why they were making a big deal about different points…but now I do, because when I’ve gotten stuck in recovery I’ve discovered that the old timers that I turn to for advice invariably point me back to the big book for the answers. In short, even with all the quibbles, it’s impossible to rate this book as anything other than five stars because it has helped me profoundly to change at the deepest levels of how I operate, of how I do life. And because all the other recovery books that I get a lot out of are derived from this book.
No one will ever convince me that the twelve steps “don’t work.” I’ve seen hundreds of people come into the recovery rooms. The vast majority flake out: either they never come back at all or they work a half-hearted program for a couple months and then quit. Some people come to meetings regularly but never actually work the steps. Of all the people I’ve seen come into these rooms, I have yet to see someone really roll up their sleeves and work the program and NOT see life-changing results.
This stuff works: it works too well for people to believe. I’ve heard some people criticize and say “it doesn’t work,” but as soon as you ask them some basic questions it invariably becomes obvious they have never worked it at all. And I was one of those for a while; I didn’t think I needed to work something like that because I was smart and it insulted my intelligence. I was too smart for my own good.
When I struggle it’s usually for that reason. It doesn’t make sense to me that the twelve steps have anything to do with establishing sobriety, much less any of the other advice that’s been given to me by sponsors throughout the years. But I realize that whatever the solution is, it has to be something that doesn’t make sense to me, otherwise I wouldn’t have the problem that I do.
I’m just grateful that this program exists because without it I’d still be deep in my delusion, or worse yet I’d probably be dead—for when I’m in my disease I get suicidal.
Thank God I’m not there today. This program gave me hope, gave me examples of people just as bad off as me who actually recovered, and gave me freedom from toxic guilt and shame. Those issues are molehills today compared to the mountains they used to be.
So yeah, I’m a believer. And I can’t apologize for it. Some things are worth believing in.