THE TWELVE STEPS
of
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

Based on the experience of AA's earliest members,
the Twelve Steps are a record of the principles and practices
they developed to maintain sobriety (after many other approaches had failed).
They are suggested as a program of recovery.

1.  We admitted we were powerless over alcohol---
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.
 

"AA's Twelve Steps are a group of principles,
spiritual in their nature, which, if practiced as a way of life,
can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer
to become happily and usefully whole."

 ---From The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 15.
 

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