Demystifying the 12 Steps

A trio, three pairs, and another trio

What aggravates me about certain AA groups — or what I believed to be AA culture — before I was immersed in it is how nebulous AA people can make the 12 steps.

Like, here’s a person, who almost certainly does not want to be there, and people in certain meetings want to be elitist about having studied the 12 steps.

Even when I wanted more than anything in the world to be sober, I also didn’t want to be sober. Because this all looked like a lot of work, and slamming a 9% IPA minutes after walking in the door from work got me there a whole lot faster than all this work.

The first few AA groups I attended put me off, to be sure. I opened the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, read a chapter called To The Wives, and said, “Fuck this shit,” and walked away. I was extremely resistant to getting sober in AA (you can read more about that here in my piece Well, Shit, This Seems to Be Working) and it took me a long time to figure out how to read the Big Book.

But, much like all things that make you feel better but take a lot of work (like eating right or exercising), I see the 12 steps as a practice — as such, it is never perfect. Progress not perfection, as another AA slogan goes. A daily, ongoing practice.

Not the dreaded circle of chairs and the echo

And later, when I found an open-minded group of women on Zoom, and these women had PhDs and were lawyers and nurses and teachers and very functional, gentle members of society and they spoke with sincerity and kindness and they didn’t push the God stuff, and they all seemed very happy, and I wanted what they had.

Yes, it is a simple text that can require plenty of study (here’s how I learned to read the Big Book without throwing it across the room). There is a lot to learn. But it can also be broken down to be pretty simple. It goes like this:

The first trio: One, Two, and Three

Step One is perhaps the only other step as mocked as the amends steps. This step asks you to admit powerlessness and unmanageability. In non-AA recovery circles, most explicitly

Holly Whitaker

, argues that admitting powerlessness is antithetical to a feminist bent. And I can understand the argument that admitting powerlessness in a patriarchal culture is blah.

I’m a bit more pragmatic than that, and perhaps that is naive. But, I translated it this way : do I want to die of alcoholism today? Being powerless is less giving away my power than reclaiming it : I am going to take it upon myself to recognize how the brain and body I have in this lifetime responds to alcohol, and I am going to choose not to drink because I want to build a life I love. This is not all hypothetical or hyperbole — we are all only mortal. The liver, the kidneys, the brain, the body can only take so much. This is not an exaggeration : this is a life or death disease.

Step Two asks to offer the admission that there is something larger than yourself, but not to necessarily name it, and step Three asks to work in cooperation with that thing, whatever it is you understand it to be.

Three Pairs:

Four and Five ask you to make a searching and fearless moral inventory. This at first feels like writing down all the reasons you are a piece of shit and make a confession. What you are really doing is identifying patterns in your life and looking at the common denominator (you). Another oft missed piece of this inventory : an inventory is not just the liabilities. You need to remember to list your assets, too. You might be alarmed to find you don’t believe you have many assets — but they are there.

Six and Seven ask you to identify character defects and to ask for willingness to change those. More simply put: identify the ways you operate that cause problems in your everyday life. Six and Seven are, as one old timer puts it, the best kept secret of the program. That’s because it is a more subtle, nuanced step sandwiched between two pairs of very actionable items, both of which involve making a list and taking action.

Eight and Nine are the most culturally relevant/oft mocked steps because they involve going out into the world and making amends. So, for those not familiar with the program of AA or alcoholism in general, this is maybe the only step you would be familiar with (as my husband says, there’s a Seinfeld about that).

The Closing Trio: Ten, Eleven, and Twelve

Ten is essentially a “spot check” inventory. Most simply : was I kind of an asshole today? If I was, what should I do better? Why was I an asshole?

The same questions that are asked more gently in my favorite bedtime story of all time, Daniel Striped Tiger Gets Ready For Bed. I think about today, and I think about tomorrow, Daniel says.

Eleven suggests prayer and meditation, but I would say it is most simply to seek to cooperate with the will of the universe, whatever that is, and to work to be honest about what that might be.

And Twelve is to spread the message. That doesn’t mean to demonize anyone who drinks. What other people do is, again, none of our business. But I try to walk in the world in a way that if someone I know is struggling, they might reach out to me and ask what I did to quit drinking.

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That said, I am a huge advocate of take what works and leave the rest.

Another caveat I will add is this : I don’t bring religious baggage to this situation. I was not raised with a God to be feared, the Old Testament god. So it’s easy for me to substitute “the universe” or whatever else my religious-baggage-carrying husband tells me will make people believe I am most definitely going to hell.

And, all of this said, it is hard to ignore that the word “God” is splattered about in almost every single step.

But my aim here is this : I hope I have demystified, disarmed, or just simplified the twelve steps for someone.

The 12 steps are a pretty simple design for living, which is why they have been adapted to so many different types of 12-step programs. They are applicable to most any situation or problem — it’s a fairly simple identify the problem, examine the root causes, find ways to change.

That is of course also shrouded in cultural references to disgusting church basements, folding chairs, cigarettes and bad coffee, the dregs of the earth, brown-bag-fall-down-can’t-hold-a-job drinkers.

I also take issue with the idea that the word alcoholic is off-putting and a barrier to entry (you DO NOT have to actually say it, you can say anything you want or nothing at all — the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking), but that’s for another day.

What I found in the rooms of AA were kind, compassionate, open-hearted people with a desire to live honestly, without judgment,

That said, it is a group of sick people, so there are bound to be a few bad apples. My favorite thing (read: the thing with the most irony) that I do to step outside of my integrity is judge someone else’s’ program — which again, is none of my damn business.