Although there are some recovery models that advocate reduced drinking or drinking in moderation; this is not a tenant of 12 steps program. clearly knows and teaches that believes that alcohol and other drugs cannot be moderated in alcoholism and drugs need to be stopped altogether for good and for the recovery to take shape. It also thereby validates the disease concept of addiction and alcoholism. It also believes that alcoholism is never cured. Once it is there alcoholism or the inability to use the mood-altering substances aka drugs can never be used safely and recovery and sobriety are the only ways of living and normal life. Many members who subscribe to this program remain in recovery for many many years and they do so by regularly working the 12 step program and attending 12 step meetings and groups.
12 Steps Programs
Alcoholics Anonymous
12 steps Program is the core intellectual and spiritual content of AA fellowship (Alcoholics Anonymous) that outlines the program. These twelve steps are in spiritual fact principles. When these principles are accepted and new routines and behaviors flow out of them; they lead to calm the obsessions relating to drinking and drugging thereby resulting in a happy and useful life.
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its 12 steps program has been here for more than 80 years now, as a fellowship that has changed the lives of a multitude. Although it is not a ‘treatment’ per se and doesn’t claim itself to be, several studies and repeated accounts of successful recovering patients have shown that working on 12 steps results in reduced drinking and drugging leading to abstinence.
The principles of AA are embodied in the 12 steps and AA literature. Moreover, sponsors play an important role as well. They have established members, enjoying sobriety for a substantial period, and have applied the 12 steps to their own lives. Mentor other members, give advice and support thereby helping in completing the 12 steps. They also guide in terms of the mindset, paradigms, and tasks needed to achieve this goal. Sponsors help both new and other established members of AA, but ‘newcomers’ are given special importance when it comes to support and help.
The backbone of 12 step program is that alcoholics need to find a higher power, an entity other than their own selves to help them. This is due to the mindset in active addiction that I can do anything and must do everything on my own and even when my loved ones try to help me, I must not let them come into the way of drugs. The mindset needed for recovery comes from a firm belief; those in recovery need to access a power greater and other than them in order to achieve sobriety.
12 Steps Procedures
We admitted that wer are powerless over our addiction and that this addiction has made our life unmanageable.
we have came to believe that a power greater than us can restore us to sanity.
We made a decision to turn our will and our lives to the care of God as we understood him.
We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
We admitted to God, to ourselves, to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
We were entirely ready to have God remove all our defects of character.
We humbly request God to remove our short comings.
We made a list of all persons we had harmed and become willing to make ammend to them all.
We made direct ammends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
We 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.
