Step One. Surrender and Getting Honest.

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.