Alcoholics Anonymous recognizes groups of individuals who require help to stop drinking alcoholic drinks. Alcohol addiction can ruin lives, and groups like Alcoholics Anonymous are present in all towns and cities. This group offers safe spaces for those who need support and help to talk, come together and share their struggles.
There are sponsors who support alcoholics as individuals and at meetings, personal lessons are shared with conversations surrounding growth and the next steps a person can take to embrace sobriety and overcome alcoholism.
Each Al-Anon meeting offers the chance to repeat the Serenity Prayer, and they involve the 12 steps program. These 12 steps are set out to help alcoholics and their loved ones to admit their addiction, overcome their fear and embrace recovery.
The 12 steps are as follows:
- Admitting powerlessness over the alcohol, that their lives had become unmanageable and difficult. Admitting there is a problem is the very first step.
- Next, those in recovery come to believe that a Power greater than themselves can restore them to sanity.
- A decision is made to turn their lives and their will over to the care of God as they understand Him
- Making a searching, fearless moral inventory of themselves.
- Admit to themselves, to God and to others the nature of their wrongs
- Ready to have God remove those character defects
- Asking Him to remove those shortcomings.
- Make a list of all those who have been harmed as a result of addiction and begin to make amends.
- Make those amends to those who have been harmed unless that involves causing injury to others.
- Taking personal inventory and admitting to being wrong.
- Seeking prayer, meditation, and quiet thought to improve conscious contact with God
- Having a spiritual awakening as the 12th step as a result of all the other steps, and continue to practice those steps in all they do.
How The 12 Steps Help Families
Families are helped just as much as the individual throughout the 12 step program. Repairing relationships with family is a big part of the program and below, we've got a few ways that the 12 step program can work to help families.
- Together, you can learn about addiction, how it affects the brain and how it requires long-term continuous support and care. The 12 steps can help your family to understand that it's a disease - it cannot be controlled but it can be managed.
- Families will learn to support the step of making amends. A person working their steps is constantly acknowledging their own failings but requires support in how to fix them. They acknowledge how they hurt other people, and how they hurt themselves. They work to reconcile their relationships with their families, and family support is a must.
- With the support of family, an individual working the steps will feel much less alone.
- Together, family learns why recovery has to come first above all other things, and prioritizing that recovery will enable them to be a better person.
With the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, the steps work - why not try them?
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