Contents
What are the Twelve Steps?
The Twelve Steps refer to a program of recovery from addiction that were developed by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) co-founders, William G. Wilson and Robert H. Smith, in the mid-1930s. Below are the Twelve Steps as they are currently expressed in the primary literature of AA:
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- 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.
- 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.
What is Twelve-Step Recovery?
Twelve-Step Recovery refers to the application of the Twelve Steps of Recovery – originally proposed by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) – to an addiction. Since their inception, the Twelve Steps of AA have been applied to everything from alcoholism to procrastination. While the core of the Steps tends to stay the same in their broader application to various “pathologies,” there does seem to be quite a bit of nuance in terms of how the first step is adapted and articulated. These are not unsubstantial differences, either. For example, the first portion of the first step of AA is: “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol [emphasis added],” whereas the first portion of the first step of Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA) is: “We admitted that we were powerless over sex and love addiction [emphasis added].” The subtle shift from a substance to a behavioral phenomenon represents a significant difference in terms of how the principle of powerlessness is being applied.
Beyond the first step, there is much more consistency in terms of how the steps are applied across the variety of Twelve-Step Fellowships. Steps Two through Twelve involve a certain measure of existential and moral introspection and re-interpretation of one’s self-in-the-world, such that one engages in the dismantling of his/her personal and meta-meaning systems.