Creating a Better Life

Unmanageability: Hacking the 12-Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

“1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.” - Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 5, Page 59

“Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of the world if only he manages well?” - Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 5, Page 61

After writing about powerlessness a couple of days ago, I thought I’d take a look at the second part of the first step, which mentions unmanageability.

GTD, the Four Quadrants, the ABC method, Simpleology - there are quite a few systems that people use to try to get some level of manageability into their lives today. Each of these methods has its strengths and weaknesses, and each is trying to do the same thing - to provide the user of the system with a method to “wrest satisfaction and happiness out of the world.”

But if we look at the second quote above, we see that Bill Wilson (the primary author of AA’s “Big Book”) is saying that it’s a delusion that managing well will bring us the satisfaction and happiness that we are looking for.

Step One is Step One. This step is simply a recognition of the problem that we have, and after we’ve recognized the problem it’s time to start working on solutions.

But to say that making life more manageable will not bring you happiness on any level is, in my opinion and experience, a mistake. Managing well may not be the end all and be all of happiness, but to say that bringing our lives back into our own conscious control and direction will bring no satisfaction is simply not true.

Control and direction. There’s only one thing in life that we can exercise direct control over, and that’s own conscious thoughts.

Whether you believe that your thoughts directly create our world, or that they are the cause our feelings and behavior and therefore allow us to have an influence on what happens to us, one of the basic truths of life is that when our thinking changes, our lives change.

In chapter four of “The Science of Getting Rich”, Wallace Wattles states that “There is no labor from which most people shrink as they do from that of sustained and consecutive thought; it is the hardest work in the world.”

But it’s also the most rewarding.

The rest of the 12 steps are a method that a person can use to change their thinking - and therefore change their life. They aren’t the only way - but they are a way.

Powerlessness: Hacking the 12-Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

Many of you know that I used to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous on a regular basis, but no longer do. After nearly 2 years of 3 times a week minimum, with some weeks hitting six or seven, it’s now been at least a year since I’ve been to one. I could probably fill a book with my reasons for no longer attending, and I’m the first to admit that some are legitimate, while some are not… but there is one that’s been on my mind lately.

Let me say up front that this is not an anti-AA post: some of the people that I met through the meetings I attended helped to literally save my life. Alcoholics Anonymous is a great organization, but like any other large organization it has issues that could use correction. I’ll let others point out it’s flaws - I’m only here to take what I learned from some wonderful people and hopefully pass on to others some tweaks that I’ve made that helped me when I couldn’t (or more accurately, wouldn’t) tow the fundamentalist recovery line.

One of the things that I heard around the meetings quite a bit was that “Alcohol is only mentioned in the first step.” This is because, as it says in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, “bottles are only symptoms.” The purpose of the steps is to produce what is called a “psychic change” that will remove the obsession to drink and make the sufferer “happily and usefully whole.” (See Appendix II - Spiritual Experience of the book Alcoholics Anonymous for more information on what is meant by this “psychic change.”)

Unfortunately, in the very first step of the Twelve Steps, there’s a dirty little word that many in the personal development community find distasteful:

Powerless

That one word stops many people dead in their tracks. They are either insulted and give the big “FU” to powerlessness, or they become stuck in it, and decide that “well, in that case, I’m just screwed.”

In my opinion, the first step (”We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable.”) is useless without the second and the third steps.

Step two reads “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

Step three reads “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.”

Whenever a person looks at their life and decides to change something that isn’t as easy as flipping a switch, they go through these three steps.

They recognize that there is a problem that they haven’t been able to solve on their own.

They hope that there is a solution.

They decide that they will follow the directions of people who have already solved their problem.

People who are involved in personal development of any kind do exactly these things. When it first starts, they recognize that they are powerless over their limitations.

This does not mean that there is nothing that can be done about the thing that they want to change. It simply means that, as things stand right now, they don’t have the necessary knowledge or ability to make the change that they want to.

But there’s always hope.

Whatever limitation you are currently powerless over, it’s always possible to find the necessary power if you follow the directions of those that have done what you want to do.