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12 Steps


The Twelve Steps are a suggested spiritual program for people addicted to a substance or behavior. The Twelve Steps were initially created for Alcoholics – referred to as AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) by Bill W.  and Dr. Bob in 1935. The book Alcoholics Anonymous,  lovingly referred to as “The Big Book,”  was published shortly thereafter and explains these 12 steps and the suggested program of recovery for the people who were finding relief from what others had called “a seemingly hopeless condition of body, mind and spirit.”  The Twelve Steps have been transferred over the last 73 years into a recovery model for all addictive behavior. When reading the Big Book or reading AA literature, those of us with other substance or behavioral addictions, substitute the addiction specific to us for the word “alcohol.” We find the steps fit for us as well; we identify absolutely.

This site is an offering of deeper support for all people suffering from addiction to a specific substance or behavior and those affected indirectly from someone else’s substance or behavioral abuse. While we are all addicted to our stressful thinking, those of us in recovery and doing The Work felt the need to create this site for those of us who may have or still are working their 12 step program of recovery and want to support themselves with the tools of The Work as a complement to their step work.
Currently there are 12 steps fellowships for:

AA – Alcoholics Anonymous
Al-Anon – for those directly affected by the substance abuse of a family member, friend, etc
CA – Cocaine
MA – Marajana
OA – Overeater’s Anonymous (for Compulsive Overeating, anorexia and bulimia, compulsive exercising, body obsession)
NA – Drugs and Narcotics
DA – Debtor’s Anonymous
SLAA – Sex and Love Addiction.
Other fellowships exist for gambling, marijuana and the list goes on. Most fellowships have websites with meeting info and directories to find support locally in your area.

These are the 12 Steps as published by Alcoholics Anonymous:

  1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
  2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
  3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
  4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
  5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
  6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
  7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
  8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
  9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
  10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
  11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

In some cases, where other twelve-step groups have adapted the AA steps as guiding principles, they have been altered to emphasize principles important to those particular fellowships, to remove gender-biased or specific religious language.