John’s Recovery: Step Five
AA Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. My Step 5: To maintain my commitment to honesty and humility I’ll share my inventory...
Category: The 12 Steps
John’s Recovery: Step Four
AA Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. My Step 4: Conduct an honest evaluation of my past life in order to identify harms done, personal faults that need to...
John’s Recovery: Step Three
AA Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to God as we understood Him. My Step 3: Made a commitment to seek, seriously consider, and when appropriate, act...
John’s Recovery: Step Two
AA Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. My Step 2: Came to the realization I needed to accept guidance from others in order for...
John’s Recovery: Step One
AA Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable. My Step 1: Came to the realization that alcohol consumption had severely impeded my ability to accomplish every one...
Why Bill W. Wrote the 12 Steps Twice
By Susan Cheever Originally posted on April 16, 2012 on The Fix The AA founder penned two versions of the 12 Steps, separated by 15 years and a lifetime of troubles. Their differences will...
Turning It Over
Step 3 as published in 1939: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. By Bob F. I have never believed in...
Changing the 12 Steps of AA
Simply because we have convictions that work very well for us, it becomes quite easy to assume that we have all of the truth. Whenever this brand of arrogance develops we are sure to...
A 12 Step Agnostic
By Steve K. As a child I had the common experience of growing up in a home with an alcoholic parent. My stepfather was a daily drinker who was incapable of forming a loving relationship...
Rewriting the 12 Steps for Atheists
By Tracy Chabala One of the biggest concerns of many AA newbies is the “God thing.” I sympathize, because I still have an issue with the God thing after eight years in AA. I’ve...
The Therapeutic Effects of the 12 Steps
By Allen Berger, PhD The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous have been heralded as the most important spiritual development of the past 100 years. It is my opinion that they should also be considered...
A Skeptic’s Journey to a Higher Power
Originally published in TGIF at Renascent on February 27, 2015. TGIF Weekly Recovery News is an e-newsletter published on Fridays by Renascent, one of Canada’s leading abstinence-based treatment centre, and features articles and lived experience essays...
The Steps Cafeteria-Style
“The 12 Steps are so formed and presented that an alcoholic can either ignore them completely, take them cafeteria-style, or embrace them wholeheartedly.” (from the Conference-approved pamphlet, A Member’s Eye View of Alcoholics Anonymous)...
A power greater than ourselves
By Mykel P. The second step of AA reads as follows: “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”. Perhaps a sensible approach would be to break down...
