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Thursday 19 March 2015

William James and Step One


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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