Step One “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”
Who wants to fully admit defeat? No one. Every instinct goes against the idea that we’re personally powerless. It’s truly difficult to accept that alcohol has warped our minds into such an intense obsession that only some kind of miracle can remove it from us.
No other type of personal failure is like this one. Alcohol, which is now an aggressive bully, drains us of any self-reliance and any desire to resist its control. Once we accept this harsh truth, our failure as functioning human beings is complete.
But when we join AA, we soon start to see this total humiliation in a very different light. We realize that only through absolute defeat can we take our first steps toward freedom and strength. Our admissions of personal powerlessness end up being the solid foundation on which happy and purposeful lives can be built.
We know that an alcoholic who joins AA will see little benefit unless they have first accepted their severe weakness and all its consequences. Unless someone humbles themselves in this way, any sobriety they achieve—if any—will be unstable. They won’t find any real happiness either. Proven without a doubt by extensive experience, this is one of the facts of life in AA.
The idea that we won’t find lasting strength until we fully admit total defeat is the main idea from which our whole Society has grown.
When first faced with admitting defeat, most of us rebelled. We had come to AA expecting to be taught self-confidence. But then we were told that when it comes to alcohol, self-confidence does no good at all; in fact, it makes things even worse. We were told that we had become victims of an obsession so subtle yet so powerful that no amount of willpower could break it. Our sponsors said there was no such thing as personally conquering this compulsion through willpower alone. They kept emphasizing how alcohol had made us increasingly sensitive to alcohol—they called it an allergy.
The tyrant alcohol held a double-edged sword over us: first, we were struck by a crazy urge that made us keep drinking, and then by a bodily allergy that ensured we would ultimately destroy ourselves by drinking. Very few people had ever won this battle singlehandedly when under such an assault. It was a statistical fact that alcoholics rarely recovered on their own. And this has been true ever since humans first made wine.
In AA’s early days, only the most desperate cases could accept and grasp this unpalatable truth. Even these “last gaspers” often had trouble fully realizing how hopeless they truly were. But a few did understand, and when they fiercely embraced AA’s principles as if they were grabbing onto life preservers, they almost always recovered. That’s why the first edition of the book “Alcoholics Anonymous,” published when our membership was still small, only dealt with severe low-bottom cases. Many less desperate alcoholics tried AA but didn’t succeed because they couldn’t make that admission of powerlessness or hopelessness.
It’s tremendously encouraging to report that this changed over the following years. Alcoholics who still had their health, families, 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 barely more than potential alcoholics. These folks were spared those last ten or fifteen nightmarish years that the rest of us had endured. Since Step One requires admitting that our lives have become unmanageable, how could people like them take this step?
Clearly, we needed to lower the bottom that the rest of us had hit to a point where it would hit them too. By revisiting our drinking histories, we could show that years before we had realized it, we were already out of control—that even back then, our drinking was no harmless habit, but the beginning of a progression that would end fatally. To any doubters, we could say, “Maybe you’re not an alcoholic after all. Why not try some more controlled drinking, while keeping in mind what we’ve told you about alcoholism?” This attitude brought immediate practical results. We discovered that once one alcoholic had planted in another person’s mind the true nature of his problem, that person could never be the same again. After every drinking binge, he would say to himself, “Maybe those AA people were right…” After a few such experiences, often years before major difficulties arose, he would come back to us convinced. He had hit bottom just as truly as any of us had.
Why insist that every AA member must hit bottom first? Because very few people will sincerely try to follow the AA program unless they have hit bottom. A bottom can be best described as a point in your drinking where the pain created outweighs any feeling of peace alcohol might bring. Alcohol stops working.
Practicing AA’s remaining eleven Steps means adopting attitudes and actions that almost no practicing alcoholic can even dream of adopting. Who wants to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who is eager to confess their faults to others and make amends for harm done? Who cares about a Higher Power, let alone practices meditation and prayer? Who happily volunteers their time and energy to try and help other suffering alcoholics? No, most self-centered alcoholics aren’t interested in any of this—not unless they have to do these things to stay alive themselves.
Under alcoholism’s whip, we are driven to AA. And there we discover the fatal nature of our situation. Only then, at the point of desperation, do we become as open-minded and willing to listen as a dying person can be. We stand ready to do anything that will lift this relentless obsession from us.