STEP ONE

We must be willing to take the advice that we give so freely to others. For this reasons, learning all we can, sharing with others to test our understanding, reading, studying, asking deeper questions, and doing anything we can to build-up the knowledge that our disease is real and that alone, we are doomed. While this may not apply to all who come to us for help, it definitely applies to all addicts seeking help in NA. Many people have other problems and what little help we have to offer may be more from the fact that we care and have learned something about living life on life's terms. In time, we have realized that we have to be about recovery from addiction and stay away from other matters.

Most of us said, "Tell me how it's done. Show me. I believe you can do it but I'm afraid to even try." We have discovered, in NA, people too much like us who are doing much better than seems possible. We wonder why, if we see ourselves in them, how can they do so well? We watch them take on some task and can barely hold back the negative comments because we expect them to fail. Sometimes, we don't hold back and give them all the reasons they shouldn't even try. They may look at us lovingly and resume what they were doing to successful completion. As our clean time grows, we become familiar with the fact that the rules and limitations that applied to us while loaded are out of date. We are no longer trying to function in a dazed condition. We have the stimulation of the meetings and the Fellowship. New ideas and positive values are replacing our negative expectations.

Until we identify with other addicts in recovery, all we can do is listen to the First Step. We can’t surrender until we understand this Step and we cannot understand until we cross the line into identification with other addicts. Once we are able to do this, we hear the First Step differently. No longer do we hear others only admit their helplessness and their inability to live happily. We begin to hear, see, and feel the ‘we’ of NA. We can honestly say, "We admitted we were powerless over our addiction and our lives had become unmanageable." We feel like one among the many because this is NA. We don't have to do this Step alone and we shouldn’t even try to do it alone. Our disability stems from our inability to recall our own experience accurately or to benefit from the experience of others. The resulting disorientation limits our ability to be accurate. From the beginning, we start catching up with what we've been missing. Our disability might be a blessing because it limits the harm we do as our lives begin to fall apart. There is no question that we are deliberate and destructive to ourselves as our addiction progresses. This isn’t be because we like the way that we become as the disease begins to exert its power over us.

Many of our members have experienced a curious fact: when we  felt our strongest, we created some of our worse problems. Many or these problems have almost killed us and have certainly ruined our lives. Were we under the illusion that we were powerful when we actually lacked the ability to do more than force things through? At other times, we felt weak and full of uncertainty. During these times when we had lost enough, we were able to admit our need for help and began to build up our energy again. Finally, putting the two realizations together, we have the First Step: "We admitted we were powerless over our addiction and our lives had become unmanageable." Then we were able to begin a recovery process that goes on forever unless we interrupt it by becoming ‘powerful’ and limiting our ability to receive help.

On the feeling level, we learn to catch ourselves  just before we reach the state of obsession. When we feel our minds click ‘off’ and we move forward quickly without knowing where we are going, we can do the mental equivalent of ‘sitting down’. It is likely that no one will be there to see us and won’t even know of our experience unless we tell them. We have learned that almost anything, even very important things, can wait five minutes. Cooling off and giving ourselves time to reconsider doesn't mean that we can't decide to continue with something. It just gives us a slight edge over our tenderness and sensitivity to life on life's terms. Very often, we find that there is no need to go any further. We can say, "I think I'll let God handle this one." Then new ideas, people to call, and all sorts of solution-directed things start happening. No one knows if these things would have eventually occurred if we not prayed but all of us can recall the times when we didn't pray and remember what followed.

We find ourselves surrounded by constant reminders from the past. Sometimes these reminders take forms that we don’t generally recognize. An physical anchor is something that replays past experiences in the present situation when activated by some form of personal contact. Key words or phrases, tones of voice, touches, and any other unique sensory input charged with emotional or automatic associations can activate these anchors. For instance, when someone touches the side of our neck while speaking to us, we generally listen differently. Loud or abrasive tones of voice may cause us not to hear the words spoken. The picture of a scolding parent or other authority figure may come to mind and the feelings of wanting to escape punishment may exclude all other thoughts in our minds. Many potentials for our personally improvement are restricted by these ‘anchors’. Learning more about our personal anchors and associations can help us step free of reflexive reactions that may no longer have a function in our lives. Intense fear, emotion or anger for no good reason are indications that you have anchors embedded below your field of view.

Surrender to our addiction must spread throughout our lives. Frequently, when we take away the uselessly expended energy, the so-called problem falls apart for lack of cohesiveness. We find that the pressure we have been supplying to correct something totally beyond our control provided the energy to power the problem. Without surrender, our recovery would quickly grow stale because we would find ourselves merely reciting yesterday’s lessons. Part of surrender is acknowledging our part in limiting our lives. We screwed-up because it was the only way that we knew to prevent the harm we would otherwise be doing. Like an old phono record with a bad scratch, we get stuck repeating the same line. The damage we do is real. Our perceptions are so confused and our appearances so misleading that we need each other in recovery to work our way out of the maze of active addiction. The old-timers just smile and say, "Take it easy." Don’t they know that ‘easy is so hard for us’? Remember that you are not unique because this uneasiness seems to come to most addicts frequently.

All our old habits need examination in recovery. We tend to allow the habitual behavior to form and can go for years without reconsidering our original sources of information. We may not recall the exact goals and concerns we had in mind when we developed this recovery habit. We fail to question how we might be capable of a better response now that we are older in recovery! This is part of our Eleventh Step. To begin anew in recovery, an addict must periodically go through and reconsider their ‘habits’. This is especially true when faced with those habits acquired or developed in active addiction. These ‘habits’ tend to produce or replicate the environment where they originated. For instance, ‘red or blue flashing lights’ may trigger evasive behavior if we have ever been on the run from the police, even when we have done nothing wrong. The wonder of recovery is that we no longer need to duck our heads and go the other way.

Like many of our other ideas, we may find our ideas about success changing. We had other values in our using days and much of the time we were just moving forward to our next spree or getting over our last one. While using, ‘success’ was a matter of staying out of jail but not out of drugs! Success may come to mean ‘just staying clean’ for many of us, at least in the beginning of recovery. Unfortunately, quite a few of us remain at this point for extremely long periods. Defining clean as ‘not using in one way or another’ allows ‘staying clean’ to remain the first measure of success. Other meaningful goals in life, such as accomplishments of the spirit, getting an academic degree, or completing a course of study or training may be measures of success. Maintaining our conscious contact with the God of our understanding, may be something like success to many of us. Working on our recovery with the Steps should most definitely be included on any list that we make of our successes.

Feeling a sense of loss over being unable to live up to some commitment or goal may give us new ideas about failure. Curiosity about what our real boundaries are may replace those all or nothing feelings that are so typical of addicts in active addiction. We may unconsciously grant ourselves the right to fail when we first take on a goal that may seem be too much for us. Clean, we have to learn how to appreciate the courage we show simply by attempting to go beyond any of our old restrictions. Unrealistic expectations are too often just another form of unmanageability for us. Reacting to the emotions and perceptions of others or how they think we are doing may seem to be a problem. This may be less a matter of reflexively triggered responses and more a matter of perception that allows us to think things over or consult others before we take any responsive action. The insight and ability to track our internal dialogues is part of a conscious contact with a Higher Power for many of us. What was merely a jumbled mix of raw emotions and prejudice settles down at some point into a coherent stream of awareness for almost every one of us. No longer are we at the mercy of our sensory impressions and perceptions. This may be the keynote of our practical brand of spirituality.

As long as we identify with our problems and fail to see that they are part of the disease, we will lack a healthy perspective. We acknowledge that we are overly sensitive to what is happening around us. Addicts seem to suffer from an inability to leave well enough alone. If you add our desire to know, understand, and take stands on things, even if we often fail to get our facts straight, and our funny/sad dance with life becomes clear. We somehow misplace the memory of the confusion that we felt when first we began using drugs in earnest. A noticeable loss of memory, disorientation, and an inability to perform certain tasks even if we excelled at them in the past is a common occurrence at the beginning of recovery. The lifting of the drug-induced fog is the beginning of our re-introduction to life. Our sight, hearing, and ability to feel are under the influence of our addiction when we first get clean. We hear the slogans: "Let go and let God." "Take it easy." "Don't take yourself too seriously." These and other sayings help us get out of the take charge role and allow us to learn ways to readjust to our environment.

The recovery environment supports life. It provides for all our needs. The dangers and troubles we get into mainly have to do with intruding on the freedoms and rights of others. Our disease limits or destroys our ability to see the connection of what we do to the results of our actions. Recovery is the realignment of our inner reality with our environment. Useless struggles fall away and the forces of life resume their movement toward an interesting and productive future. Finally, we can accept happiness because it is no longer an illusion. Illusions make us ill. Only admission and surrender grant us relief. As long as we hold back, make reservations, or avoid coming right out with the statement, "I am powerless and my life's unmanageable!" it’s certain that we are in denial. The only other explanation than denial is that we aren't addicts. If we have the kind of behavior that gets us to meetings, without being addicts, we better get help somewhere! If we are indeed addicts, we can benefit immediately from what has been learned about recovery and living clean in NA.

At first, it all seems so natural and our initial experiences are mostly positive. We entertain the idea that the people in the meetings really are addicts who have found a new way to live. Next, we may experience the doubt that addiction generates and feel that it is all too good to be true. Each one of us have gone through this cycle repeatedly in recovery. We remember where we came from and get on with the process of surrender and growth only to eventually resume some of our old ways. If our desire to be clean is sincere, we discover what we are doing in time to avoid relapse. If we lose our desire for a time, we may relapse and can only hope to find our way again to a path of hope and recovery. Amazingly, we forget that the disease will generate the attitudes of fault finding, hurt feelings, and tell us that we've grown as much as we can in NA. The disease of addiction has had millions of years to evolve and we are only the first generation of recovering addicts in history.

Our word choices and internal definitions directly dictate our conscious processes. One of the benefits of surrender that we can suspend having to act on those impulses to react that are rooted in associations that we made in active addiction. Going to plenty of meetings and spending a lot of time with other addicts in recovery allows us to debrief ourselves from active addiction. We can re-negotiate some of our labels to fit the reality of the clean life before us. In recovery, we seek a restoration to sanity. In the early days of recovery, we learn a definition of sanity as ‘my way didn't work so I've got to try someone else's way’. As time goes by, even more trust is required. We learn that working the program requires acceptance of other people. At some point in time, it has to go beyond that. We re-define insanity as ‘anything that limits us’. If we’re holding onto past bitterness, we have to come to a better definition and application of amends. We must separate the amends that we owe to ourselves from the amends that we owe others. We have to be able to come to some sort of inner peace about the past.

We know that ‘inner peace’ can't come from other people but we learn that it can come through them. We each act as instruments of God by showing concern for others. This is how we begin to feel that long lost ties are being re-established. We feel new possibilities arise as we see the Second Step unfold. We finally understand the sanity, it is our Higher Power doing for us what we can't do for ourselves. Running away, we only carry our problems with us. True escape requires active change. This change allows us to get new outcomes by discovering new ways to do things.

1. Write about whatever comes to your mind: about this step, write about what's going on in your life, and questions you have about it all.
2. Pray about what you wrote in question (1.) and for awareness to understand the Step and seeing how it applies to your life.
3. Look up in a dictionary and define in your own words what each of the words in the Step means. (Including we, had, a, the...)
4. Read the Step often and closely. Try to identify with every word in the text. (HINT: I wrote the following questions as I read the text, so they are almost in the same order as the text discusses the Step.)
5. What do I do to hurt myself? List everything.
6. Why do I do these things?
7. Why do I want to stop doing these things?
8. Why won't you do these things anymore?
9. Why can't I do these things, even once?
10. How have these things made my life unmanageable?
11. What is surrender? Is it an event? Define.
12. What is my responsibility in the Step? Define 'responsibility'.
13. Write about your addiction. Do not focus on what or how much you used but write about why and how you used. Get familiar with your addiction: Explain it thoroughly, but don't justify it. If there are symptoms other than drug use, write about those, too. (i.e., overeating, sexual activity, relationships, co-dependency, shopping, smoking, etc.)
14. Why did you decide to get clean? What brought you to this admission? Write about your bottom; describe the feelings.
15. Write about ‘control’ and ‘management’ in relation to ‘life’. Can life be controlled or manipulated? Do you want anyone, including you, to be ‘in charge’ of your life? Who will decide when and how much you can breath?
16. Write about ‘life’, ‘your life’, and ‘our lives’. Describe ‘life’. How do you feel that ‘your existence’ is limited (or unlimited)?
17. Write about ‘we’ and ‘our’. Describe belonging or being part of a group. Were you ever ‘part of’ before? How? Is NA different? How and why?
18. Often we use ‘powerless’ as a negative - as an excuse or as a way of saying, "I'm being bad because I want to be involved in (fill in the blank) situation." Likewise, ‘unmanageable’ indicates that a situation is negative and/or hopeless. Write about how these concepts are positive. (i.e., I drank to be ‘out of control’ and I believed that I had destroyed my life. With this Step, I learned that it's OK to let life run its course, that I can let it.)
19. Can you control yourself once your addiction takes over? Why or why not? Write about the denial. Write about how awareness, growth, grace, and spirituality can stem the power of your addiction.
20. Write about the substances and behaviors you used. Can you control a substance or behavior?
21. How do you have a choice? What did you tell yourself to justify your using? How do you eliminate those justifications? (Beware of scolding yourself!)
22. Write about the disease: Physical – compulsion; Mental – obsession; and Spiritual - self-centeredness. Write about "denial, substitution, rationalization, justification, distrust of others, guilt, embarrassment, dereliction, degradation, isolation, and loss of control..." (HINT: look all these words up!) How did these things manifest themselves in your life? Give at least one example (as recent or as embarrassing as possible - something that is clear in your mind and that is easy to remember.)
23. "We are not responsible for our disease, but we are responsible for our recovery." What does this mean? What is (that is, define) responsibility? What is (that is, define) recovery? (HINT - back in Chapter 5, "What Can I Do?" second paragraph after italics in Chapter 5.)
24. What is willpower? Does it work? What sort of "remedies" did you try? What sort of "nonsense" are you still using? How and why are these things not recovery? How can these things be part of recovery?
25. What are (define) "reservations"? Do you have any? What are they? (HINT: yes, you do have reservations. Sorry.)
26. What is (define) "surrender"? Have you surrendered to your disease? To the program of NA? (In other words, are you beaten?)
27. How do you plan to "work the Steps"? What is your understanding of how the Steps work to help us recover?
28. How does "life" feel without drugs? What are the "life problems" you're experiencing? How does this Step apply?
29. "Social acceptability does not equal recovery." What does this mean? What do you think is "socially acceptable"?
30. In "How it Works," it's written that "We believe that the sooner we face our problems within our society, in everyday living, just that much faster do we become acceptable, responsible, and productive members of that society..." What does this quote mean and how does it apply to this step? (The dictionary will be a big help!) Note "that" and explain why its in this quote. (HINT: pay close attention to "our" too.)
31. "We have found we had no choice except to completely change our old ways of thinking or go back to using." What does this mean? What is change? How will you change?
32. "Every clean day is a successful day." How? There's so much more to life isn't there? What is "clean"? What is "success"?
33. What have you had to "accept" about life and your addiction? What is "acceptance"? What is "willingness"? Are you willing to recover? What were you willing to do for drugs? Are you willing to go to those lengths for NA? For recovery?
34. Write about your fear, doubt, loneliness, alienation, confusion, and the sense of being lost. How did you and do you feel different?
35. "Step One means that we do not have to use, and this is a great freedom." What does this mean? Define ‘use’ and ‘freedom’. (Tradition Three and the last page of "Why are we here?" will help.)
36. Define ‘drug’. What are your ‘drugs of choice’? Why doesn't this Step read: "We were powerless over drugs . . .?"
37. "We do not just say the words of this Step; we learn to live them." How? How will you know when you're ‘living’ the Steps? What are the differences between understanding, knowing, experiencing, and living?
38. What is ‘hope’? How have you found "meaning and purpose in life"?
39. "It is not where we were that counts, but where we are going". Where are you going? List what you want, need, love, and have? How does this Step relate to those things? (Yes, sweet thing, make a list of the wants, needs, loves, and haves". That is, make a bunch of lists titled: thing I have, things I want, things I need, things I love...)
40. Look up (in a dictionary) and define in your own words each word in the Serenity Prayer.
41. Call your Sponsor.