"But suppose that instinct still cries out, as it certainly will, 'Yes, respecting alcohol, I guess I have to be dependent upon AA, but in all other matters I...
"We have also seen men and women who go power-mad, who devote themselves to attempting to rule their fellows. These people often throw to the winds every...
"They will tell how they tried to carry the load alone; how much they suffered of irritability, anxiety, remorse, and depression; and how, unconsciously...
"But most of our other difficulties don't fall under such a category at all. Every normal person wants, for example, to eat, to reproduce, to be somebody in...
"In all these strivings, so many of them well-intentioned, our crippling handicap had been our lack of humility. We had lacked the perspective to see that...
"When listing the people we have harmed, most of us hit another solid obstacle. We got a pretty severe shock when we realized that we were preparing to make a...
"This atmosphere of approval and praise is apt to be so exhilarating as to put us off balance by creating an insatiable appetite for more of the same. Or we...
"Aren't these practices joy-killers as well as time-consumers? Must AA's spend most of their waking hours drearily rehashing their sins of omission or...
"Now and then we may be granted a glimpse of that ultimate reality which is God's kingdom. And we will be comforted and assured that our own destiny in that...
"Consequently, in Step Three we turned our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. For the time being, we who were atheist or agnostic...
"So at the outset, how best to live and work together as groups became the prime question. In the world about us we saw personalities destroying whole peoples....
"Growing pains now beset the group. Panhandlers panhandle. Lonely hearts pine. Problems descend like an avalanche. Still more important, murmurs are heard in...
"How could we then guess that all those fears were to prove groundless? How could we know that thousands of these sometimes frightening people were to make...
"When AA was still young, lots of eager groups were forming. In a town we'll call Middleton, a real crackerjack had started up. The townspeople were as hot as...
"'I was soon sitting beside a big hulk of a man. Decidedly unfriendly, he stared at me out of eyes which were slits in his red and swollen face. I had to agree...
"In consternation, we saw ourselves getting married to all kinds of enterprises, some good and some not so good. Watching alcoholics committed willy-nilly to...
"In this connection, Bill likes to tell the following pointed story. He explains that when Jack Alexander's Saturday Evening Post piece broke in 1941,...
"Take the case of the club janitor and cook. If a club is going to function, it has to be habitable and hospitable. We tried volunteers, who were quickly...
"At this juncture, we can hear a churchman exclaim, 'They are making disobedience a virtue!' He is joined by a psychiatrist who says, 'Defiant brats! They...
"The Washingtonian Society, a movement among alcoholics which started in Baltimore a century ago, almost discovered the answer to alcoholism. At first, the...
"In the beginning, the press could not understand our refusal of all personal publicity. They were genuinely baffled by our insistence upon anonymity. Then...
"This phenomenon of contrast really set us thinking. Squarely before us was the question 'How anonymous should an AA member be?' Our growth made it plain that...
"It is a tremendous satisfaction to record that in the following years this changed. Alcoholics who still had their health, their families, their jobs, and...
"Then I woke up. I had to admit that AA showed results, prodigious results. I saw that my attitude regarding these had been anything but scientific. It wasn't...
"The trouble is that this kind of thinking takes no real account of the facts. And the facts seem to be these: The more we become willing to depend upon a...
"But that is not all of the danger. Every time a person imposes his instincts unreasonably upon others, unhappiness follows. If the pursuit of wealth tramples...
"This practice of admitting one's defects to another person is, of course, very ancient. It has been validated in every century, and it characterizes the lives...
"It is nowhere evident, at least in this life, that our Creator expects us fully to eliminate our instinctual drives. So far as we know, it is nowhere on the...
"Some of us, though, tripped over a very different snag. We clung to the claim that when drinking we never hurt anybody but ourselves. Our families didn't...
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