Following the 12 steps of AA... it isn’t about admitting you’re powerless

It’s actually about taking BACK your power

Photo by Copper and Wild on Unsplash

By attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, you don’t have to admit defeat. It doesn’t mean you have to hand over your life to God, the Man or the Patriarchy by saying, “I’m an alcoholic.” 

No, coming to AA isn’t about stripping yourself of your power. It’s really quite the opposite, actually. 

One of the first things I saw when I attended a meeting was that everyone was there for the same reason. They came for support. For comfort. And because they were sick and tired of fighting something that kept knocking them down. Also, there was a common need to stop escaping and numbing. That is often the residual, uniting factor that brings most together in the rooms of AA, once alcohol is removed from the equation.

We are all tired of running. 

There’s more to AA than announcing yourself as an alcoholic, coming to meetings with other alcoholics and talking about your alcoholic life. Alcohol is clearly the binding agent that gets people in the rooms, yes.

But alcoholism isn’t all AA is about. 

For me, it has felt like a way to fix what is broken inside of me. It’s been a path to rediscover what’s been lost and in some ways what was never found. It’s allowed me to go back to my adolescent self and become reacquainted with that girl who began drinking at such a young age. It’s about relearning what it is that I was never able to grasp all those years ago, because I was too busy getting wasted.