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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
singlehanded 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.