As AA grows and its population changes, Bill feels the need to reinterpret the Twelve Steps in a way that is responsive to the new membership of AA, and more accurately reflects the program of the New York fellowship. Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions presents Bill’s new interpretation of the Twelve Steps. The new interpretation is both more social and more psychological than the Big Book.
| “Alcoholics Anonymous,” published when our membership was small, dealt with low bottom cases only. Many less desperate alcoholics tried A.A., but did not succeed…in the following years this changed.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions |
AA is now composed of a growing number of alcoholics who still have their health, families, and jobs. Some of these newcomers are also relatively young. Because they are less desperate, these newcomers are also less motivated to work the Steps.
| Few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom…the average alcoholic…doesn’t care for this prospect—unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions |
In order to address the needs of this population, Bill “widens the hoop” that members have to jump through in order to feel that they are actively working the AA program. He accomplishes this primarily by introducing the “method of substitution” in his Third Step instructions, and making major changes to the inventory process.
In speaking of the trouble that many AA’s have with turning their will and life over to the care of God, Bill says this:
| [Many people] begin to solve the problem by the method of substitution. You can, if you wish, make A.A. itself your “higher power”…many members…have crossed the threshold just this way…most of them began to talk of God.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions |
Bill clearly expects that alcoholics who use AA as their higher power will eventually adopt a more spiritual outlook. However, Bill’s method of substitution also makes it possible for AA members to feel that they are honestly working the Steps without ever turning their lives over to the care of God.
Bill’s new instructions for the Fourth Step are another significant development. The Big Book outlines an inventory process that sees selfishness as the root of the alcoholic’s problems. In Bill’s new version, however, the root of the alcoholic’s problems is not selfishness, but rather instincts that are out of balance.
| Nearly every serious emotional problem can be seen as a case of misdirected instinct. When that happens, our great natural assets, the instincts, have turned into physical and mental liabilities.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions |
Also, the 12&12 inventory is not focused strictly on defects of character:
| The sponsor probably points out that the newcomer has some assets which can be noted along with his liabilities.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions |
This new inventory is not meant to resemble a soul surgery, in which the Stepworker identifies and carves out the defects of character that are blocking his or her soul from God. Rather, this inventory is an open-ended process of introspection and reflection.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions is less hopeful than the Big Book about the results a person can expect from working the Twelve Steps. There is no promise of a life of freedom from selfishness, or a new life of intimacy with spiritual power. Instead, recovering alcoholics should be content with gradual progress over a long period of time.
| Having been granted a perfect release from alcoholism, why then shouldn’t we be able to achieve by the same means a perfect release from every other difficulty or defect? This is the riddle of our existence, the full answer to which may only be in the mind of God.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions |
The sentiment that alcoholics should expect sobriety to be marked by long periods of struggle with their personal shortcomings is a reflection of Bill’s own struggles with depression. His decreased expectations for the quality of his own sobriety lead him to lower his expectations for others as well. Bill’s experiences with seeking help from psychiatrist lead him to a new understanding of the inventory process that is more psychological in nature. Also, in Bill’s mind, the method of substitution is adequate because he does not have the same faith in the ability of spiritual experience to address all of the alcoholic’s troubles.
This new version of Stepwork is no longer insists on spiritual experience as the answer to the problems of the alcoholic. Instead, it offers a solution that is social and psychological in nature. Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and its brand of Stepwork effects the nature of the Twelve Steps within AA, and will also affect the practice of the Steps in all future Twelve Step fellowships.
17 Comments so far
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12and12 equals trashola
Comment by somedude November 6, 2009 @ 12:03 amHow Soon Do We Want To Get Well…???
I can see where the Oxford Group could be a turn off to many non-religious types… BUT herein, I see why the numbers for recovered individuals have diminished. Wow… Bill’s depression has hugely impacted the recovery rates!!! I am grateful that I’ve found my way back to the Big Book… In It’s essense, I’ve been able to find the Solution to All My Problems!!! Thank You
Comment by Eddie K. December 23, 2009 @ 11:16 pmI have read the living sober book and wondered why it was passed by us.Its seems to me its a self help book and not about being recovered.
Comment by RON MARTIN January 16, 2010 @ 2:04 amRON
Agreed. Living Sober is way off base. I don’t know who wrote that book, but I would have never guessed it was from AA had it not said so.
Comment by Steve February 12, 2010 @ 10:10 pmDid Bill write the 12 & 12 after taking LSD?
Comment by Steve May 9, 2010 @ 9:57 amNope. His LSD experiments began after the writing of the 12&12. Check out “Pass it On” for exact dates.
Comment by James R. May 9, 2010 @ 2:52 pmI thought the 12 and 12 was simply a more in depth presentation of the steps.After a number of years of sobriety a deeper understanding of the steps is only natural. I love the 12 and 12 and always use it along with the big book when sponsoring people.
Comment by Steve May 23, 2010 @ 7:26 pmWe see the same mechanisms at work in the “deification” of the Big Book that occurred with the Holy Bible. Man wants to control the God experience rather then being controlled by it. Bill’s home group objected to expanding the original absolutes to the 12 steps. But it is tempting to cleverly write off an entire piece of AA literature to avoid answering the 26 questions of step 4.
Comment by Colter K October 6, 2010 @ 1:00 pmI find a true spiritual scientist’s honesty at work in the 12 and 12. The “pet theory” that abandoning oneself to God, making confession and restitution, and moving on to other drunks would work for anybody just didn’t fit the facts as they emerged in those early years.
Comment by Frank M. November 17, 2010 @ 1:15 pmThat’s right…surrender, confession, restitution, amends, and service didn’t work for everyone in early AA and it doesn’t work for everyone now….but what do we mean by “work?” For many drunks, physical sobriety is as good as it gets. Only a minority of AA members reap the “new power, peace, happiness and sense of direction” described in the BB. The real question is whether the lowering of expectations one finds in the 12 x 12 a reflection of the limitations of alcoholics generally or could something have been done to preserve the integrity of the program as outlined in the BB. Over the last 16 yrs I have gradually moved from the latter position to the former. The dilution of the program is most likely a consequence of human nature; genuine spiritual experience inevitably “hardens” into cliches, slogans, and empty ritual. As Charles Peguy wrote, “All great things begin in mysticism and end in politics.”
Comment by Piers November 19, 2010 @ 9:05 pmBill Wilson once wrote that AA is a sort of spiritual kindergarten. My understanding is that most AA’s in the early days sought spiritual growth through vigorous religious practice outside of the fellowship. It was a fairly homogeneous group back then too. I imagine that when they spoke of God and the kind of direction that their devotion to Him represented, they were talking about a rather well understood set of principles. We don’t really have that sort of clarity now, and perhaps that is what makes for most of the differences between that time and this.
Not everyone is going to find a deep and expanding spiritual experience within the confines of AA as such. I’m not suggesting that religion is the answer here either. As Reinhold Niebuhr, the author of the serenity prayer, noted–”Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people.” We well get out of AA just what each of us puts into it.
Comment by Frank M. November 20, 2010 @ 12:52 amThis article puts into words what I have thought for many years and could not express effectively. The BB documents the “precise” experience of how arguably 40-70 people desperately “recovered” from a condition that was rapidly killing them. They didn’t have a map or a starting place. They did what they somehow mysteriously believed might work, and it did. The 12&12 is what one man thought of it all 17 years later when the novelty had worn off and he needed a man-made spiritual boost. Fours years later he was taking LSD as an artificial method of recreating the elusive spiritual experience that was no longer “firing his pistons”.
Comment by Randy P December 18, 2010 @ 9:25 amInformation we received when we researcjed at the Episcopal Church Archives in Austin, Texas revealed what Mary Darrah’s foreword by Father John C. Ford, S.J. had written: Ford edited the 12 x 12 as he did AA Comes of Age. Father Ed Dowing, S.J. also participated in the editing. According to Mel B.’s research, Bill was in the throes of a decade of deep depression. All these factors seem to explain some of the unusual language found in the 12 x 12. Not the least of which is the statement that the AA group can be your higher power.
Comment by Dick B. March 7, 2011 @ 11:47 amAfter his four-day slip, AA pioneer and atheist James Burwell (AA #4 in the NY group) took the group as his higher power. Two years later Jim switched over to “my own better self,” which he sought contact with through daily meditation. This practice served him well until the day he died in 1978 with thirty-six years of continuous sobriety. Jim wrote “The Vicious Cycle” in the first edition of the Big Book, started the first AA meetings in Baltimore and Philadelphia, and was instrumental in the development of AA in San Diego.
Bill W. was surely aware of Jim’s use of the group as his higher power. He must have known about it when the Big Book was written, but one can easily see why he wouldn’t have been inclined to complicate the message. So it’s fair to say Bill was referencing a proven practice for attaining and maintaining sobriety within the general framework of the Steps when he wrote about that approach in the 12 and 12. I’d be very surprised too, if Burwell had been the only man to go this route in those early years, after seeing that it did in fact work.
Old-timers will tell you that it’s either grow or go in recovery. The very program of AA itself could never have developed beyond the Oxford Groups without adherence to the same principle. I can see no good reason to abandon it now to the theory that at some halcyon moment in history some subset of AA had gotten it all exactly right, for everyone and for all time.
We know but a little…
Comment by Frank M. March 7, 2011 @ 2:42 pmCORRECTION: Jim B. died in 1974 not 1978. He sobered up for good on June 16, 1938.
Comment by Frank M. March 7, 2011 @ 2:57 pmI was reading this site due to my gratitude and ever growing interest in the spiritual principles which have literally saved my life. The “basic text” is meant to be suggest only and encourages the reader 2 likewise share what was freely given him, very simple. No debate required! it’s working for me, is it working for you? are you working it
Comment by James F May 27, 2011 @ 10:22 amThe BB offers “clear cut directions” for recovery. The directions allow for individual concepts of God or a Higher Power. The BB also clearly states in “How It Works”, that “no one….has been able to maintain…perfect adherence to these principles”, “we are not saints”,”the principles..set down are guides to progress”, “we claim spiritual progress…[not].. perfection”. These qualifications do not dilute the process, but rather state the reality of experience that perfection is not required. Willingness is of course a requirement for success and is often cited.
Comment by Rob B March 3, 2012 @ 9:43 pm