Step 01

Readings:

• Big Book - Doctor’s Opinion, pp. 20-25, 44-45, 52
• 12 Steps and 12 Traditions - pp. 21-24

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

1. Primary principle(s): honesty, willingness, open-mindedness, surrender
2. Other principles: acceptance

I was reading the Big Book with a sponsee a number of years ago when a graphic image came to me.  If we’d had a bottle of good whiskey (not that it would have had to have been “good” whiskey in the old days ), and put it in the middle of the floor between us, we probably could have successfully met and had a great time together.  Apart from it being sort of weird (I normally don’t have whiskey out in the room - or even in the house - when folks come over to talk about our program), that liquid in the bottle would not have forced itself down our throats and caused us to get drunk.  Yet clearly many of us seem to think that the powerlessness we experience in our disease has something to do with the liquid only - that, if we avoid it, we’ve solved our problems…

Instead, I think what’s indicated in our first step is that the powerlessness has something more to do with what goes on in my mind.  Why, in spite of the most convincing evidence that drinking, per se, is not a contribution to our lives do we still drink?

That is the age-old question posed by our Big Book and amongst many around our lives, in and out of the program: “…why Do we drink?”

Well, in our wonderful literature and amongst all the experience collected so far, it is agreed that, well, we just don’t know…

We are, 1st, last and only alcoholics - drinking ourselves to death (in one fashion or another) is what we do…

So, perhaps that is the ultimate surrender suggested in and through step 1:

1. The honest acceptance of the nature of the problem in which we were embroiled
2. The surrender: the admission that we couldn’t master this problem in our lives
3. That, as pertains to alcohol and it’s consequences in our lives, no amount of our efforts at management solved the problem
4. The willingness to accept that we were defeated
5. The honest observation of the manageability of our lives (are we really managing our lives all that well? do we like the results?)

A recent speaker in my home group referred to the “acceptance” that was required to admit his powerlessness and unmanageability.  This was a new principle for me to think about in the context of the 1st step.  Clearly, there is a relationship between acceptance and surrender - if I think I can still “win”, why would I surrender?  But it hadn’t occurred to me how important it is that I truly accept my inability to win as a part of the rational basis for accomplishing  a successful 1st step.  Perhaps that points to the role of grace in the 1st step process since it was clearly by grace that I got the willingness to surrender.