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Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous is an organization founded in 1935 by alcoholics who had given up trying to solve their problem through medical means. The 12-step program they developed has become very successful as a way to help all kinds of addictions. AA is an international organization that has no bureaucracy and is entirely organized on a local level. There are meetings in almost every city throughout the Western World.

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About Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is an informal society for recovering alcoholics. The members meet in local groups that vary in size from a few people to many hundreds of individuals.

The stated purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. AA teaches that an alcoholic, in order to recover, should abstain completely from alcohol on a daily basis. In turn, AA offers a community of recovering people who support each other by sharing experience, strength and hope and by working the suggested Twelve Steps together. These involve putting your life in the hands of a higher power.

The 12 Steps are sometimes summarized as Trust God, clean house, and help others. AA members are encouraged to work the Steps, usually under the guidance of a voluntary sponsor (a member who has experience working the program). The Steps are designed to help the alcoholic achieve a spiritual, emotional, and mental state conducive to lasting sobriety.

The Working the program might involve the following activities:

Above all, avoiding the first drink. One is too many and a thousand never enough.
Regular attendance at meetings, and participation by talking or listening.
Regular contact with a sponsor for the support in staying and living sober and in working the program.
Service work, which can range from making coffee at meetings to attending national AA conferences.

Working the Twelve Steps. The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

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Alcoholics Anonymous