Step one

[Larrylive]

"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable."






Copyright
A.A. World Services, Inc.

[MajestyJo]

In order to work the steps we need a close working relationship with our indiviidual NA sponsors. Besides offer help and guidance on addiction issues in our personal lives, sponsors share their experience, hope and faith as they help guide us through the Twelve Steps of Narcotics Anonymous.

Working the steps also requires regular attendance at a weekly NA step meeting. This is an "I can't, we can" recovery program and we can lear a lot by listening to other recovering addicts share their experience working the Twelve Steps.

What follows are some suggestions for working the steps based on the experience of other recovering addicts. For most of us, working the steps involves writing on each one, sharing what we've written with our sponsor, and living each step to the best of our ability.

Keep in mind there are no right or wrong answers to be look up in the back of a textbook or teacher's guide. These are suggestions to help us understand how to work the Twleve Steps of Narcotics Anonymous.

I have also take this same format and substituted the words Cocaine Anonymous in place of Narcotics Anonymous. It is a good guideline to use, not matter what your drug of choice was (People, places and/or things).

Our ideas about the steps change as we work them. In living the steps, we seek progress, not perfection.

1) What is the dictionary definition of "powerless"?
2) How was myl ife powerless during active drug addiction?
3) How was I powerless over my drug use?
4) How did powerlessness extend into other areas like work, finances, relationships, family, etc.
5) What are three good examples of how my life was unmanageable?
6) How does powerlessness apply in those areas?
7) What are reservations and how are they dangerous to my recovery?
8) How is my life unmangeable in my recovery (physically, emotionally, and spiritually)?
9) What are the symptoms of my addiction?
10) What are the benefits of accepting my powerlessness over my addiction?
11) What are the benefits of surrendering the management of my life to Narcotics Anonymous?
12) Is willpower enough to stop using drugs? Explain.
13) How is surrender another word for victory in the NA program.
14) How do I try to control situations to prevent feeling powerless?
15) How is addiction a progressive and incurable disease?
16) How is being self-centered in conflict with spiritual growth?
17) How have denial, substitution, rationalization, justification, distrust of others, guilt, embarrassment, dereliction, isolation, and loss of control been a part of my life?
18) What does being responsible for my recovery mean?
19) Is drug use a symptom of my addiction? Are drugs the prime problem, or does the problem lie within me in the form of physical, mental and spiritual disease that makes me crave drugs? Explain.
20) What does the "we" mean? Define fellowship.
21) What does "I can't ever ge my life together" mean?

This was given to me prior to the new Twelve Step Working Book guide and I think there was just the one page. This isn't a very comprehensive and complete list by any means, but certainly a place to start. We do what we need to do for our own recovery. Everything is a suggestion, but much is a 'must' if you don't want to go back out and use. #1 being "Don't Pick Up!" What you have to do after that, is your decision.

This is a good guideline for finding the root of the problem whether your powerlessness is over people, places and things. Perhaps by checking this you can identify the part of your life that you need to surrender, and use the Steps to find a solution.

[MajestyJo]

Step One

"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 care for this prospect--unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself.

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.

[MajestyJo]

Step One: We admitted we were powerless over
alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
"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."

© 1952, AAWS, Inc.; Printed 2005;
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, pgs. 21-22

Step One wouldn't work for me until I could find full acceptance of my powerlessness. It wasn't until I put in the word control, that I could see it at work. All my life I had tried to control people, places and things, only to be hurt, time and again and control was an illusion. I could not change anyone else, all I could do was change me. I had to decide if I wanted to make that change and if my dis-ease was in need of changing. I had to get honest with me. I had to quit pointing the finger at others, I had to quit looking at every one else and take stock of me and where I was going and where I had come from.

I could see unmanageability to a certain extent, but didn't really look at the robbing peter to pay paul, the changing jobs, the changing relationships, the changing apartments, the changing friends, and the list went on and on.

I really hadn't done that much with my life. I had no sense of who I was because I had lived it through other people. I found my identity in others and had no concept of self. Every time I picked up, I had given a piece of me away and their was this big empty void and a sense of loss. Where had I gone? If it wasn't the alcoholic or the alcohol directing my life, who was?

Every morning, I have to do Step One. Today I am a recovering alcoholic/addict, who has a disease that took me to people, places and things outside of myself to make me happy and to cope with life, and it was hard to believe who I had become and needed to change and take responsibility for the direction of my life.

Something I posted on another site in 2009

When I was in my denial, I was blinded by the blanket I chose to pull over my head that prevented me from being honest. I didn't want to wear a label that I had put on my dad and my ex-husband. I always knew I was an addict, "Some is good, more is better," had been my motto for years. An alcoholic, no never! I had lots of excuses and I just didn't want to acknowledge that when I pointed a finger at each of them, that I had three coming back at me.

It was so much easier to play the blame game and it kept me sick for a very long time.

[honeydumplin]

For years I've searched for both confirmation that I was in fact an
alcoholic, or the denial that I ever was one, at times during the
course of the same day. It wasn't until after I had stopped
drinking for a time that I was told, when a person tries
to control the drinking, they've already lost control.

I used to get so mad when someone would say that I was the
one who had to figure out whether I was an alcoholic or not.
I wanted someone to tell me that I was, so I could feel more
comfortable going to Alcoholics Anonymous. Come to think
of it, it wouldn't have helped me figure it out anymore, had
they said that I was anyway.

I searched for excuses, or anything to solidify my reasons
for drinking. One of the big ones, was that it was legal.
As opposed to some of the other drugs, it was okay to continue
to kill myself with alcohol, simply because it was legal. Now,
there's some insanity. It was like I really didn't care if I died
while I was drinking, I just didn't want to end up dead doing
something illegal.

I also remember either reading or hearing something to the
effect years ago, that children of alcoholics had more of a
tolerance for alcohol than say, children of non-alcoholics.
This was another free pass, and another excuse I made
in my head to drink more. This is the type of chaos
that I needed to recognize, before I could ever accept the
whole concept of being powerless.

I digress, but this leads back to the first step.
It says, "Admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that our
lives had become unmanageable."

What I really thought it said, even (after) I had read it
numerous times was that when I take this very important
step, I cease to have any power over alcohol. As if to say
at one time or another, I really "did" have power over it,
which as now I know, couldn't be any further from the truth.
I've never had any power over it.

And there's still a part of me that wants to blame it.
I'll say things like, "it" made a wreck of my life, or "it"
did this, or "it" did that. Alcohol didn't make a wreck
of my life, I did a fine job of that without it.

I was the problem. I am the problem. And I will
continue to be the problem.

While I'm confessing I must also admit that at
one time I couldn't stand hearing someone
introduce themselves as a "real alcoholic".
I thought, Man...the audacity, the nerve.
I mean the very first thing that popped into
my mind was, gee whiz since I never made it
up to drinking a fifth a day, I guess that makes
me a half-ass alcoholic. There again, the comparison,
the ego-infested competition, and self-centeredness
took over and I was viewing the whole scene from
a standpoint of it being all about me, and it isn't.

Through meeting after meeting I still wasn't quite
getting it through my thick head how I could possibly
consider myself as a "real alcoholic". I was just a
garden variety drunk with a bunch of personal
problems. It really was not until I finally stopped
doing drugs altogether and began to work the
first step again, that I realized, that I was indeed
admitting that even though I may not have been
a real alcoholic, I was most definitely and really,
an alcoholic, which is what I need to do in the first
place.

I went to page 30 of the Big Book. More About Alcoholism.
And through the help of the book, I finally made this
grateful admission. And I'm "really" glad I did.

[MajestyJo]

DAILY OM

Awakening to Change

Being Aware is the First Step

Life is a journey comprised of many steps on our personal path that takes us down a winding road of constant evolution. And each day, we are provided with a myriad of opportunities that can allow us to transform into our next best selves. One moment we are presented with an opportunity to react differently when yet another someone in our life rubs us the wrong way; on another day we may find ourselves wanting to walk away from a particular circumstance but are not sure if we can. Eventually, we may find ourselves stuck in a rut that we can never seem to get out of. We may even make the same choices over and over again because we don't know how to choose otherwise. Rather than moving us forward, our personal paths may take us in a seemingly never-ending circle where our actions and choices lead us nowhere but to where we've already been. It is during these moments that awareness can be the first step to change.

Awareness is when we are able to realize what we are doing. We observe ourselves, noticing our reactions, actions, and choices as if we were a detached viewer. Awareness is the first step to change because we can't make a change unless we are aware that one needs to be made in the first place. We can then begin understanding why we are doing what we are doing. Afterward, it becomes difficult not to change because we are no longer asleep to the truth behind our behaviors. We also begin to realize that, just as much as we are the root source behind the causes for our behaviors, we are also the originator for any changes that we want to happen.

There is a freedom that comes with awareness. Rather than thinking that we are stuck in a repetitive cycle where there is no escape, we begin to see that we very much play a hand in creating our lives. Whether we are aware of them or not, our behaviors and choices are always ours to make. Our past and our present no longer have to dictate our future when we choose to be aware. We are then free to move beyond our old limits, make new choices, and take new actions. With awareness, our paths can't help but wind us forward in our lives while paving the way for new experiences and new ways of being. It is through awareness that we can continue to consciously evolve.

What do you think?

My sponsor use to say, "Don't call them problems, call them challenges. Challenges you can overcome, problems you can stay stuck in." I was told that almost 20 years ago and yet it still rings true in today. It is a one day at a time program.

[MajestyJo]

This reminds me of the teachings of the Medicine Wheel when I was in treatment and an Elder came in to share with us. I never forgot and has been a big part of my grown over the years. When I went to the volunteer banquet last week, an Elder spoke there on the four directions as it applied as a whole to us all. My version was more personal.

Every lesson in life, including my journey into recovery and my growth once I got here, started int he East. It is a time of illumination and clarity and for me new awareness and is represented by the colour Yellow. It is a time of rebirth .

Slowly we go to the South, which is a time I need to learn to crawl before I can walk. It is a tim of letting go of the past, healng the hirt and identifying thing that have caused me pain (situations, character defects, old tapes, grief, etc.) I have become a responsible adult. It is represented by the colour Red.

In the West, is a time of Introsepction and Goals, learning to apply my lesson to my life and learnng to walk my talk. It is the colour Black.

In the North, I have experienced a change, a new way of life and I pass this message onto others. I share my experience, strength and hope. It is the time of the Elder and is represented by the colour White.

Between the time of the Elder and the Babe is the "The State of Beingl" One of the hardest places to be in your life. You have put closure on your cycle and a new one has not yet appeared and you don't know what the next step will be. As a wise woman said many years ago,"It is okay to 'just be' and do what comes in front of you as it appears."

My life is unmanageable when managed by me. I had to take the first half of Step One 100% and admit my powerlessness, but the second part of the step, is something that I have to work on daily.

Not only aware that I had a disease, but the fact that ADDICTION is a disease. Self-honesty is one of the hardest things to get, we tend to sugar coat things, look through rose-coloured glasses, only see with tunnel vision, have selective hearing, and often just speak what we think others want us to say.

If there is only one voice, one thought, one perception, I am living out the ISMs - I, Self, and Me. No God, no partner, no friend, and I am living in my disease.