No one checks themselves into rehab because they’re on a winning streak.
At least I didn’t.
By the time I stumbled into treatment for my addiction to prescription drugs, I wanted nothing more to do with me. As my dear friend Mary says, “You know you’ve hit bottom when you break your own heart.” Trust me, by the end of my last pharmaceutical jag, my heart was shattered.
When I first arrived at the treatment center nestled in the mountains of Utah, where I would spend the next thirty days working to recover the person I had lost, I’d hardly removed my coat before one of the staff people handed me a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous (a.k.a. The Big Book — the name I’ll use from here on out) in which the Twelve Steps are laid out.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Twelve Steps but don’t really know what they are. The coauthor of the Twelve Steps was a hopeless alcoholic named Bill Wilson who found recovery as the result of a Damascus Road–like spiritual experience in a hospital room where he was dying from alcoholism. From that day forward, Bill never drank again.
The Twelve Steps derived from the teachings of a Christian organization called the Oxford Group, but Wilson rewrote them in such a way that people, regardless of their religious background or spiritual orientation, could benefit from them. What Bill Wilson came to understand was that
- the addict’s problem was principally spiritual, not psychological or moral, and therefore required a spiritual solution.
Thus, the purpose of the Twelve Steps was to enable alcoholics (or anyone else who wanted fixing and a better life) to have a spiritual awakening. Here’s an amended version of the Twelve Steps. I’ve left the word alcohol out of the first Step so you can insert your chemical or behavioral “fixes of choice.”
- We admitted we were powerless over __________ — that our lives had become unmanageable.
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- 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 the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics [our fellow sufferers], and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Don’t worry if your first read of the Twelve Steps makes you think, This is the fix? It seems too simple. Well, thank Almighty God for that! The Twelve Steps were written in such a way that anyone, regardless of their social or educational background, could understand and work them.
People in recovery often say, “It’s a simple program for complicated people.” This Enneagram Four wouldn’t be sober today if this weren’t the case.
More importantly, the Twelve Steps aren’t snake oil. Lord forbid they become another wellness hack that those preternaturally attractive people wearing wide-brimmed hats blather about on TikTok. The Twelve Steps is a proven program that has literally saved millions of lives since these Steps were first published in 1939. All to say, there’s oodles of evidence that they can deliver on their promise to profoundly transform the human heart.
According to Bill Wilson, if you committedly “work the Steps,” you will eventually have a vital spiritual experience that will give you an entirely new and radically beautiful orientation toward life. When practiced as a way of life, they can expel your addictions and recurrent self-defeating behaviors and give you a “new pair of glasses” through which you will see yourself, others, and the world in a startlingly fresh way. The Twelve Steps will displace the broken old ideas that were once the guiding force of your life and replace them with a whole “new set of conceptions and motives.”1
This renewed relationship with God or a “Power greater than ourselves” will reconfigure your personality (your all too predictable and habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, acting, and interpreting your experience of the world) and render your addictions unnecessary.
The Steps don’t just help a person abstain from a substance or habitual self-limiting behavior, though that’s obviously the first order of business. More importantly, they address the underlying emotional, spiritual, and psychological issues that caused the addiction in the first place.
The aim of the Twelve Steps is to draw us as close to God, ourselves, and others in this lifetime as possible. They teach us how to live joyfully in a riven world where we will never feel quite at home. They work.
Furthermore, the Steps are not abstract concepts, but straightforward and practical. They are not liberal, conservative, Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, New Age, or Zoroastrian. You can be a Christian, a Jew, a Zen Buddhist, or an agnostic flat-earther and benefit enormously from working the Twelve Steps.
I’m a “Jesus guy,” but some aspects of my tradition make my teeth hurt. Christianity is often long on “the what” but short on “the how.” For instance, contemporary Christianity is often primarily a belief-based religion in which salvation is found merely by offering assent to a set of theological propositions.
The genius of the Twelve Steps is that it’s predominantly a practice-based program that brings about the profound psycho- logical and spiritual shift that mere intellectual belief in God cannot. Moreover, the Twelve Steps are completely consistent with the gospel. They put wheels on the teachings of Jesus. They transform faith from a belief system into a lifestyle.
- For me, the Twelve Steps have made me a better follower of Jesus.
They have complemented and illuminated my understanding of the gospel; I know scores of Christians in recovery who would say the same thing. Given how helpful they are for the Christian, I’m amazed at how long the church has overlooked them as a design for living.
I have a pal named Gene (not his real name) who was fired from his role as senior pastor of a large, theologically conservative, nondenominational congregation for showing up drunk to church one Sunday. (I would have paid a hundred bucks for a front seat to that show.) He was only a minute or two into his slurred sermon when the elders realized he was completely potted and escorted him out of the sanctuary. There were no altar calls that week. Sadly, rather than help Gene find help, his church showed him the door.
One night after a meeting, he said to me, “Isn’t it ironic that I have found more grace, forgiveness, acceptance, and healing in the basement of churches where Twelve-Step recovery groups meet than I ever did upstairs in the sanctuary where so-called ‘normies’ gather to worship? I wish they knew what they’re missing!”
Now, here’s the good news. Bill Wilson said that the Twelve Steps offered a spiritual solution for not only the alcoholics and addicts meeting downstairs in the church basement but also for everyone upstairs in the sanctuary and beyond who is searching for “home” — a solution to the Big Ache — which is all of us. I have seen the Twelve Steps unscrew countless people’s screwed-up lives. And, yes, you can be one of them.
- Bill W., Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism, 4th ed. (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001), 27.
Excerpted with permission from The Fix: How the Twelve Steps Offer a Surprising Path of Transformation for the Well-Adjusted, the Down-and-Out, and Everyone In Between by Ian Morgan Cron, copyright Ian Morgan Cron.
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Your Turn
The Twelve Steps are for everyone, addict and those free from addiction. They put wheels on the teachings of Jesus. If we work the steps leaning on Jesus, we become more like Him. ~ Devotionals Daily