The First Step
Starting from the very beginning is a very good place to start
I’m grateful for the beautiful sky this morning. I’m grateful for the sun shining on the pirate balcony. I’m grateful for a lot to do. I’m grateful for other alcoholics. I’m grateful for being myself. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, I’m trying to get more theme-y here. No, not pirate-themed.1 Since October is my anniversary month, last week I wrote about coming in and getting sober and there was a lot of focus on spirituality. I’m even trying to connect the podcast in a thematically consistent way. For some reason, the pretty discombobulated Sunday Gratitude Extravaganza, suggested that the next episode of the podcast (coming out later this week, fyi), would focus on the 4th and 5th Step.2
Then I did some serious thinking and realized that there were Steps before Four and Five.3 You know how I talk about “flipping bits” and how my alcoholic brain just produces wrong results sometimes.
So, we’re going to start at the very beginning, which, I am advised, is a very good place to start. That would be Step One:
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
That lawyer training and thinking is sticky, so that’s how I approach Step One. First, we should note the use of the word “We” and the fact that the Steps aren’t written in the imperative. “Admit you are powerless over alcohol” has a very different ring to it. From the very first word, the Steps are saying this is a “we” thing, not an “I” thing. Not to reinforce the alleged cult-y nature of AA, but that’s because the Big Book lays out a common cure for alcoholics and addicts. It’s a “we” thing even before the First Step. The Foreword to the very first edition of the Big Book starts:
We, of Alcoholics Anonymous, are more than one hundred men and women who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. To show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this Book.
Big Book, p. xiii
The theme established by the “We” in Step One sets the stage for Steps Two and Three, where the alcoholic comes to believe the Universe might contain a Higher Power capable of great and esoteric feats of magic and strength—like restoring alcoholics to sanity. The subtext here: No one recovers alone. I mean, one approach to recovery might be to lock myself in a bathroom forever, carefully avoiding any exposure to, or risk of contamination by, harmful foreign agents, like alcohol and civilian drinkers. Except that doesn’t sound too much like a life I’d want to recover.
Next, “we” admitted we were powerless over alcohol. While this seems like a pretty straightforward thing, it actually generates a lot of misguided stuff. First, the use of the word “admitted” is significant. The first verb of the Steps is “admitted,” because the primary symptom of alcoholism is dishonesty, specifically, self-dishonesty:
Marty Mann’s fabulous New Primer on Alcoholism (1950) pegs this. She lists the very first symptom of addiction as, “Making promises about drinking.” “Admitted” is the first verb in the First Step because overcoming that self-dishonesty is the threshold over which every alcoholic must pass if they wish to recover. Think of the Steps and AA as tools, not a life you have to adopt or a thing you have to become. Just a set of tools that can help the alcoholic see how they have been dishonest with themselves and how that dishonesty has impacted their lives.
The next phrase, “powerless over alcohol,” is where more problems start. It’s not “rendered powerless by alcohol,” or even just alcoholically “powerless.” The actual words are “powerless over alcohol.” Of course, the immense and immensely flawed alcoholic ego will make a grand entrance shortly, but the measures necessary to mortally wound that alcoholic ego do not require frequent self-flagellating admissions of powerlessness and surrender. The concept being conveyed here is that we alcoholics have no defense against the first drink, meaning, we lack the ability to control our drinking. We are not able to stop or control our drinking by ourselves. You might say, “we are powerless over alcohol.”
I think it’s unfortunate when the concept of “powerlessness” gets used in treatment as a leveler, the way recruits are broken down and then rebuilt in boot camp. Recovery is really not very much like boot camp, unless your Higher Power is more the drill sergeant type, in which case, have at it. The idea here is not general prostration, there’s a lot of hard work to do, get up out of the dust.
How does one know if one is powerless over alcohol? Have you been able to stop? Have you tried to stop and couldn’t? Marty Mann suggested a different test, establish a limit, say one drink a day. Can you stick to that? I found, in my many relapses, the thing that directly led me to drinking was self-dishonesty: Those limits I established? They don’t really mean anything. “My drinking is not a problem” is the bit of dishonesty at the bottom of every alcoholic’s glass. That’s why the word “admitted” is used in the very first Step.
As we proceed through the rest of Step One, there is some curious punctuation. I love using dashes—too much. Apparently, so did Bill W, because here they are:
—that our lives had become unmanageable.
This carries over the verb from the first clause, “admitted.” We admitted our lives had become unmanageable. Because this is another lie we told ourselves, that we were still “managing,” that things weren’t that bad, that everyone else is just over-reacting. Again, it’s that primary species of lie that Marty Mann identified, that we alcoholics drink like other people. We don’t. That’s what I noticed from the very start, I drank very differently than my friends. They were having fun, I was already at work.
That’s why Step One asks you to “admit your life has become unmanageable,” because of the whole lack of power over alcohol. Also, because of the whole lying to yourself about how bad things actually are. In treatment, the idea of powerlessness and unmanageability often take the form of “Consequences” exercises. This is where the alcoholic/addict is forced to consider the consequences of their addiction, how it impacted them and others. Often accompanied by sad music by REM or even “Desperado” by the Eagles.4
Make no mistake, coming to terms with the shitty stuff we did, how we hurt others and the stuff we did to ourselves, is very, very important. It’s the core work of the Steps. Showing people the consequences of their behavior is important to proving to the alcoholic how unmanageable life has become. But proving those consequences isn’t enough to keep anyone sober, they won’t even be a speed bump when that next drink becomes really necessary. You have to do all Twelve, I’m afraid.
I think these are the core concepts of Step One:
Powerlessness over alcohol
Unmanageability
Sustainability
Self-Honesty
Faith
I have inserted “sustainability” in this list, even though it is not the word used in the Steps. For me, the word “sustainable” was a better match for what was happening to my life. Maybe, I was still “managing,” I was employed, paid the mortgage, etc. What my life wasn’t was “sustainable.” It just couldn’t go on like this. I couldn’t go on like this. “Faith” is there not because it’s discussed in the Step, it’s because, for the alcoholic working Step One, there is already faith budding. There is already a very thin reed of belief, or maybe just a hope, that this could be the answer.
I’ve come to understand it’s the hard times that build faith. It’s when I’m doing things that I understand least, things that are new and different to me, things that I fear, that I find myself drawing on this mysterious reserve of something that helps me take the next step. I think that’s how faith works. Faith is the thing that gives me the strength to forge into the unknown. It almost starts to make sense that my Higher Power chose a locker room to instruct me to
“Do the thing you don’t know how to do.”
That’s how faith is built and faith undergirds all Twelve Steps. I mean, there’s a reason you’re making all of these admissions, right? It’s because you’re starting to believe there might be an answer. For now, that very first step is enough.
For those who think AA is a religion, I’m going to point out that real Higher Powers usually use that first proclamation as a way to establish their own divinity and set the order of things. The First Commandment, for example. The First Step of Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t require fealty to or worship of anyone or anything. Well, except ourselves.
There is no mention of God or a Higher Power in Step One. The point of Step One is to begin the process of re-connecting authentically and honestly to ourselves, a necessary precondition of a connection to a Higher Power. That process begins by understanding that it was the lies we told ourselves that got us here—that and a shit-ton of Sauvingnon Blanc (in my case). It’s definitely not about vilifying or humiliating the guy who told me all of those lies, he actually didn’t know they were lies a lot of the time.
Step One sets the destination in the recovery navigation app. It’s home, actually. It’s the first step back to find the guy who got so lost. For me, it was the first step back to the life I was meant to lead.
Our own
sent me a picture from Las Vegas of the outside of the Treasure Island Casino. Thanks, but the pirates are “inside.”Stuff was omitted and did you notice all of the typos???
Unless we occupy a “base-5” universe. Of all the things they taught us, that was perhaps the least useful, at least in the eyes of this 5th Grader.
I’ve done a lot of these and the music choices are always eerily similar.