Book & Step Study

May 1979 By: C. W. | Huntington, West Virginia SERENITY WAS gone, and sobriety threatened to follow. After nearly three years of sobriety in AA, I recently became overwhelmed with physical and emotional problems. Luckily, I was attending a group formed to study the Twelve Steps. I had helped start this group and regarded myself …

September 1985 By: J. M. | Fife Lake, Michigan After sobering up and getting active in AA, I was going to do great things. I took a new member of the program into my home and was really going to keep him sober. At this point, I think God said to me, “Okay, go ahead …

We’re always changing, but who can predict the final result? ONE OF LIFE’S blessings for us in the program is the lack of continuity we are presented with in times of struggle, those times when we aren’t where we were but don’t yet know where experience will take us. In the past, these times produced …

July 1953 By: Anon. | New York, New York THESE words to me and for me are three of the most important and significant in the whole program of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the first place it was necessary for me to come to believe and accept the fact that I was and am an alcoholic. …

By: D. W. R. | Detroit, Michigan February 1973 New insight on the old parable, and how it applies to us – Around the Tables AROUND THE TABLES, I wondered how I was going to make it. What they had seemed so impossible to achieve. Yet I have obtained a lot of what they had, …

January 1945 By: J.W.T. | Manhattan, New York The purpose of this little piece is to pass along to you an experience. Believe me, it is not an effort to moralize. It is not an effort to push any beat-up platitudes down your throat. It is simply something that happened to me. If you have …

By: J.W. | New York, New York In these days of rapid growth and broader public enlightenment, a fair proportion of newcomers enter Alcoholics Anonymous unsponsored. This is especially true of the large cities, where a member is often lucky to know the man sitting next to him, let alone some suffering cave-dweller two miles …

By: L. E. M. | Royal Oak, Michigan “Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one rascal less in the world.” These words were said by Thomas Carlyle, English essayist, historian, biographer and philosopher. As I look back, I had been honest, but I had been honest only to …

WHEN I FIRST CAME into Alcoholics Anonymous, I was confused to hear speakers refer to alcoholism as a disease. My whole background offered only one summary for uncontrolled drinking. And that was the moral conclusion that drunkenness was a sin of gluttony. A thousand things could explain why I got drunk, but nothing could excuse …

August 1947 “Continued to take moral inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.” Notice that the word “continued” is a past participle. We take it to mean that this Step is an unvarying and unceasing thing. It is a part of the program that must be repeated day by day. It is also …

September 1948 The question of persons, who after two, three, even five or more years of continued sobriety in A.A., “having trouble,” came up in a discussion meeting recently. How to avoid the “trouble” is an important question. It seems to boil down to something like Jack Dempsey’s reply to a questioner, after Gene Tunney …

August 1945 Jim sank into a comfortable chair at the Club House. He had come all the way over, across town, to eat lunch here because he knew, instinctively, that today he needed to be surrounded by A.A. and the gang, but, now that he was here, he wondered why he had come. He was …

January 2023 I was 20 years old when I walked back into an AA meeting after a two-year absence. Before I went to that meeting, I had to call a person I had known during the few months I first attended AA meetings in 1972 but didn’t stay sober. Back then, when I cried for …

By: Richard D. | Shreveport, Louisiana August, 2012 Uncovering all the harm he caused in his drinking days restored his compassion for others STEP EIGHT: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Looking back, it is probably safe to say that I harmed many …

By: Ronald H. | Santa Ysabel, California August, 1999 We all take things for granted sometimes, loved ones in particular. My mother passed away one morning in April 1990. Since then, the feeling of loss is always with me whether I think about it or not. Being a single parent with five kids, Mom had …

Step Eight – Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all. By: B. B. | Longview, Washington August 1993 Almost three years ago I moved from a relatively large urban area to a smaller town. At the time, I had just celebrated my second AA …

By: H. V. | Kodiak, Alaska July 1984 THE SEVENTH is the shortest Step. It should be so simple to practice it and be granted true relief, leading to serenity. However, I have found this Step to be extremely painful and frightening. If I want a shortcoming removed, what price am I willing to pay …

By: Dan J. | Maryknoll, New York July 1991 Fresh from a Fifth Step session with my sponsor, I turned to the Sixth Step. Gradually, very gradually, I became ready to have God remove my character defects–and God knows there were a lot of them! That evening, I got home from a meeting and was …

Step Discussion > Step 7: Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings. December 1966 By: T. P. Jr. | Hankins, New York PEOPLE often think that the Eleventh Step is the only one which suggests prayer; but this isn’t so. The Seventh Step is a prayer Step. Although prayer is not mentioned as such in …

January 1966 “I AM the same person I was when I came into AA.” This statement, made recently at a meeting by a member with over three years’ sobriety, yielded a vigorous and quite unexpected reaction. “Whadya mean, you’re the same person?” most of the comments went. “You couldn’t possibly be the same person if …

July 1977 – A.H. from Naples, FL THE BIG BOOK says, “At some of these we balked,” and I did. Not at the first few Steps. Powerless over alcohol? Life unmanageable? Jolly correct. When you’ve lost an $800-per job with promise of unlimited advancement, plus one wife and one son, plus the last red cent …

I think that many oldsters who have put our AA “booze cure” to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA–the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, …

Fragments of AA History – Origin of the Twelve Steps I well remember the evening on which the Twelve Steps were written. I was lying in bed quite dejected and suffering from one of my imaginary ulcer attacks. Four chapters of the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, had been roughed out and read in meetings in Akron …