Extract
from the aacultwatch forum (old)
“Step
One:
“Our
recovery Step Number One reads thus: "We admitted we were
powerless over alcohol. . .that our lives had become unmanageable."
This simply means that all of us have to hit bottom and hit it hard
and lastingly. But we can seldom make this sweeping admission of
personal hopelessness until we fully realize that alcoholism is a
grievous and often fatal malady of the mind and body--an obsession
that condemns us to drink joined to a physical allergy that condemns
us to madness or death.
So,
then, how did we first learn that alcoholism is such a fearful
sickness as this? Who gave us this priceless piece of information on
which the effectiveness of Step One of our program so much depends?
Well, it came from my own doctor, "the little doctor who loved
drunks," William Duncan Silkworth. More than twenty-five years
ago at Towns Hospital, New York, he told Lois and me what the disease
of alcoholism actually is.
Of
course we have since found that these awful conditions of mind and
body invariably bring on the third phase of our malady. This is the
sickness of the spirit; a sickness for which there must necessarily
be a spiritual remedy. We AAs recognize this in the first five words
of Step Twelve of the recovery program. Those words are: "Having
had a spiritual awakening . . ." Here we name the remedy for our
three-fold sickness of body, mind and soul. Here we declare the
necessity for that all-important spiritual awakening.
Who,
then, first told us about the utter necessity for such an awakening,
for an experience that not only expels the alcohol obsession, but
which also makes effective and truly real the practice of spiritual
principles "in all our affairs"?
Well,
this life-giving idea came to us of AA through William James, the
father of modern psychology. It came through his famous
book, Varieties of Religious Experience, when my
friend Ebby handed me that volume at Towns Hospital immediately
following my own remarkable spiritual experience of December, 1934.
William
James also heavily emphasized the need for hitting bottom. Thus did
he reinforce AA's Step One and so did he supply us with the spiritual
essence of today's Step Twelve.”
Bill
W. (Extract, After Twenty-Five Years, The Language of the Heart p
297)”
Cheers
The
Fellas (Friends of Alcoholics Anonymous)
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