"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable"
Who cares to admit complete defeat? Practically no one, of course. Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that, glass in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only an act of Providence can remove it from us.
No other kind of bankruptcy is like this one. Alcohol, now become the rapacious creditor, bleeds us of all self-sufficiency and all will to resist its demands. Once this stark fact is accepted, our bankruptcy as going human concerns is complete.
But upon entering A.A. we soon take quite another view of this absolute humiliation. We perceive that only through utter defeat are we able to take our first steps toward liberation and strength. Our admissions of personal powerlessness finally turn out to be firm bedrock upon which happy and purposeful lives may be built.
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.
When first challenged to admit defeat, most of us
revolted. We had approached A.A. expecting to be taught self-confidence. Then
we had been told that so far as alcohol is concerned, self-confidence was no
good whatever; in fact, it was a total liability. Our sponsors declared that we
were the victims of a mental obsession so subtly powerful that no amount of
human willpower could break it. There was, they said, no such thing as the
personal conquest of this compulsion by the unaided will. Relentlessly
deepening our dilemma, our sponsors pointed out our increasing sensitivity to
alcohol--an allergy, they called it. The tyrant alcohol wielded a double-edged
sword over us: first we were smitten by an insane urge that condemned us to go
on drinking, and then by an allergy of the body that insured we would ultimately
destroy ourselves in the process. Few indeed were those who, so assailed, had
ever won through in single-handed combat. It was a statistical fact that
alcoholics almost never recovered on their own resources. And this had been
true, apparently, ever since man had first crushed grapes.
In
A.A.'s pioneering time, none but the most desperate cases could swallow and
digest this unpalatable truth. Even these "last-gaspers" often had
difficulty in realizing how hopeless they actually were. But a few did, and when
these laid hold of A.A. principles with all the fervor with which the drowning
seize life preservers, they almost invariably got well. That is why the first
edition of the book "Alcoholics Anonymous," published when our
membership was small, dealt with low-bottom cases only. Many less desperate
alcoholics tried A.A., but did not succeed because they could not make the
admission of hopelessness.
It
is a tremendous satisfaction to record that in the following years this
changed. Alcoholics who still had their health, their families, their jobs, and
even two cars in the garage, began to recognize their alcoholism. As this trend
grew, they were joined by young people who were scarcely more than potential
alcoholics. They were spared that last ten or fifteen years of literal hell the
rest of us had gone through. Since Step One requires an admission that our
lives have become unmanageable, how could people such as these take this Step?
It
was obviously necessary to raise the bottom the rest of us had hit to the point
where it would hit them. 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. To the doubters we could say, "Perhaps you're not an
alcoholic after all. Why don't you try some more controlled drinking, bearing
in mind meanwhile what we have told you about alcoholism?" This attitude
brought immediate and practical results. It was then discovered that when one
alcoholic had planted in the mind of another the true nature of his malady,
that person could never be the same again. Following every spree, he would say
to himself, "Maybe those A.A.'s were right..." After a few such experiences,
often years before the onset of extreme difficulties, he would return to us
convinced. He had hit bottom as truly as any of us. John Barleycorn himself had
become our best advocate.
Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit
bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the
A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.'s remaining
eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no
alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. Who wishes to be
rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess his faults to another and
make restitution for harm done? Who cares anything about a Higher Power, let
alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to
carry A.A.'s message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic,
self-centered in the extreme, doesn't
Under
the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A., and there we discover the fatal
nature of our situation. 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.