The Twelve Steps were the first comprehensive guidelines for recovery that ever worked, and prior to this, recovery from addiction was pretty much a hit and miss. Getting clean without getting sober is sometimes referred to as “white-knuckling it.” That’s when someone doesn’t get the opportunity to discuss and get to route of the other problems associated with using. Most become just angry people who don’t use, or a “dry-drunk.”
What makes the 12 step program work? For me, Recovery Rob, it was that I had the desire to stop drinking and drugging. I didn’t want my life to continue the way it was. I realized that there had to be more than the craziness my life was becoming. So, I got help. I stopped with the help of many others in the Alcoholics Anonymous AND an outpatient alcohol and drug detox. The 12 Steps were imperative to me. They helped me keep this battle (it was war at the time I was getting clean and sober) in the day.
The 12 Steps of Narcotics Anonymous are similar to the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
- We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
- We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
- We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- We 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.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.