Step One

WHO wants to admit total defeat? Almost nobody, obviously. Every natural instinct fights against the idea of being powerless. It's devastating to acknowledge that, drink in hand, we've rewired our brains into such an obsession with destructive drinking that only divine intervention can free us from it.

No other kind of failure compares to this one. Alcohol becomes like a ruthless loan shark, draining us of all self-reliance and willpower to fight back. Once we accept this harsh reality, our failure as functioning human beings is complete.

But when people enter AA, they often develop a completely different perspective on this total humiliation. AA members understand that only through complete defeat can they take their first steps toward freedom and strength. According to AA experience, admissions of powerlessness ultimately become the solid foundation upon which happy and meaningful lives can be built.

AA experience shows that little good can come to any alcoholic who joins the program unless they first accept their devastating weakness and all its consequences. Until they humble themselves this way, their sobriety—if any—will be shaky. True happiness will remain completely out of reach. This is one of the proven facts of AA life, confirmed by countless experiences.

The Foundation of Recovery

The principle that people find no lasting strength until they first admit complete defeat is the main root from which AA's entire fellowship has grown and flourished.

When first challenged to admit defeat, most newcomers rebel. They come to AA expecting to learn self-confidence. Then they're told that when it comes to alcohol, self-confidence is worthless—in fact, it's a complete liability. AA sponsors explain that alcoholics are victims of a mental obsession so powerfully subtle that no amount of human willpower could break it.

There was, they said, no such thing as personally conquering this compulsion through willpower alone. Making the situation even more desperate, AA sponsors point out alcoholics' increasing sensitivity to alcohol—an allergy, they call it. Alcohol holds a double-edged sword over alcoholics: first they're struck by an insane urge that forces them to keep drinking, and then by a physical allergy that guarantees they will ultimately destroy themselves in the process. Very few people who faced this double attack had ever won in single combat. It was a statistical fact that alcoholics almost never recovered on their own. And this had been true, apparently, since humans first fermented grapes.

In AA's early days, only the most desperate cases could swallow this bitter truth. Even these "last-chance" people often struggled to realize how hopeless they actually were. But a few did understand, and when they grabbed onto AA principles with the desperation of drowning people clutching life preservers, they almost always got well. That's why the first edition of "Alcoholics Anonymous," published when our membership was small, focused only on rock-bottom cases. Many less desperate alcoholics tried AA but didn't succeed because they couldn't admit their hopelessness.

Raising the Bottom

It's incredibly satisfying to record that in the following years this changed. Alcoholics who still had their health, families, 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 barely problem drinkers yet. They were spared those final ten or fifteen years of literal hell that others had endured. Since Step One requires admitting that lives have become unmanageable, how could people like these take this Step?

It was obviously necessary to raise the bottom others had hit to where it would meet them. By looking back at their own drinking histories, AA members could show that years before they realized it, they were out of control—that their drinking even then wasn't just a habit, but the beginning of a fatal progression. To the doubters they could say, "Perhaps you're not an alcoholic after all. Why don't you try some more controlled drinking, keeping in mind what we've told you about alcoholism?"

This approach brought immediate and practical results. AA members discovered that when one alcoholic had planted in another's mind the true nature of their illness, that person could never be the same again. After every drinking episode, they would think, "Maybe those AA people were right..." After several such experiences, often years before hitting extreme difficulties, they would return to AA convinced. They had hit bottom as surely as anyone else. Alcohol itself had become AA's best recruiter.

The Necessity of Hitting Bottom

Why all this insistence that every AA member must hit bottom first? The AA approach suggests that few people will sincerely try to practice the program unless they've hit bottom. Practicing AA's remaining eleven Steps means adopting attitudes and taking actions that almost no actively drinking alcoholic can imagine doing. Who wants to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess their faults to another person and make amends for harm done? Who cares about a Higher Power, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy trying to carry AA's message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic, extremely self-centered, doesn't want this prospect—unless they have to do these things to stay alive.

Under the pressure of alcoholism, people are driven to AA, and there they discover how serious their situation really is. Then, and only then, do they become as open-minded and willing to listen as someone facing death. They stand ready to do anything that will lift this merciless obsession from them.