Understanding Why Alcoholics Must Accept Their Powerlessness in AA

08 Jul Understanding Why Alcoholics Must Accept Their Powerlessness in AA

But most of the time, once my lips touched whiskey, I’d drink like a thirsty dolphin. Acknowledging powerlessness therefore means that we stop trying to do the impossible. We in recovery are accustomed to living at the extremes of all or nothing. Many of us prove our worth by managing everything and everyone but not ourselves. Even in sobriety, many of us tend not to respect our limitations and we pay too high a price accordingly.

The Importance Of Support In Overcoming Powerlessness

In Step Three, I decide to turn my will and life over to the care of that God; God cares. Already that’s enough to make me feel better and I can get on with my day. The second part of Step 1 is the idea of unmanageability. When I first contemplated 12-Step recovery, I thought it was a crutch and I should be able to do this on my own. If your life is broken, you need a crutch, but first you have to admit that your life is broken.

Step 1 of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)

Feeling powerless makes us believe that there is nothing we can do. We don’t have the power over the obsession to drink, nor do we have the power to control how much we drink once we start. What we can do is turn to a Power greater than ourselves for help. We let this Power do what we are unable to do for ourselves. The original references to God were quickly challenged in the early days of AA, and Bill W. Addressed those challenges by explaining that every member was welcome to interpret God to mean whatever higher power they chose how am i powerless over alcohol to believe in while working the steps.

Feeling Powerless Is A Major Factor In Addiction

Without Step One, I’d have nowhere to go with the madness that litters my brain and it would go unchecked. Now when I wake up I bring the morass of fears and resentments to Step One. If I can just get my head to Step One, I’ll be ok because once there, I lay down the frustrations like so many ugly suitcases and I go to Step Two where I remember that God, a Higher Power, exists.

When you recognize you are out of control, you can regain control. You can’t quit if you don’t believe you have a problem. But by believing you have a problem, you can begin to overcome it. The Big Book talks about alcoholics as being maladjusted to life. Relief washed over me when I heard those works spoken aloud. My life was unmanageable in so many ways, even though it didn’t always look that way from the outside.

• Defining that source of power is less important than accepting its ability to move you beyond your powerlessness.
• Without admitting powerlessness, the rest of the program cannot be fully embraced.
• They decided to record a description of the path to recovery that had worked for them.
• Admitting to being powerless over alcohol will help a person to recognize that he or she does not have control over their drinking.
• And join us in one of our free online or in-person SAL 12-Step meetings.

When you are 2 or 10 or 20 years sober, you are still going to be powerless over alcohol. For most people, logic is enough to avoid harmful behaviors. But for those of us struggling with alcohol addiction or other substance use disorders, logic fails to break the cycle.

By relinquishing control over your addiction, you are now free to get help and support from others. The obsessive nature pertains to the overwhelming desire to pick up a drink or a drug and the lengths that the addict goes through in order to getting their next fix. The compulsive nature–where the unmanageability comes into play–is the continued use of substances despite the consequences. We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable. It is through these experiences that an addict can finally get a sense that they are powerless over their addiction.

The Role of Acceptance in Recovery

There are many ways to overcome powerlessness over addiction. One step is to understand that addiction is a disease. Once you realize that addiction is a disease, you can start to see yourself as someone who is sick, rather than someone who is weak or morally flawed. For many people, simply getting to the first step of AA is harder than any other part of the recovery process. In fact, you might need to experience a personal crisis before you feel ready to go to an AA meeting.

Building a New Life Through the Twelve Steps

• Drunk people also end up in psychiatric wards and jails.
• The power of fellowship lies in its ability to create a safe space where we don’t feel judged but understood.
• 10; I’ve neglected the well-being of my best friend’s health because of the drugs.
• I finally understood what an alcoholic and addict really is.
• But we are getting off track, step one actually has two different parts that I needed to realize.

To acknowledge the way these substances have impacted your life is to admit that alcohol and drugs have made your life unmanageable and you can’t fix it on your own. This could mean God, a general belief system or the recovery community itself. Addiction treatment centers often talk about “powerless” as a way to describe the feeling of being unable to control one’s life. This is different from the inability to manage one’s life, which is what most people think of when they hear the word unmanageable. In fact, many people who struggle with addiction feel like they have Twelve-step program little power over their disease but still want to change.