Alcoholics Anonymous -Step 1:
“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”
There are three sections to this step – the physical craving, the mental obsession and
unmanageability.
- Physical allergy/ craving.
This is written about in the Doctor’s Opinion (the section before Chapter 1). The doctor who
wrote it was called Dr Silkworth.
- Read the Doctors Opinion section.
- “In our belief, any picture of the alcoholic which leaves out this physical factor is incomplete. The doctor’s theory that we have an allergy to alcohol interests us. As laymen, our opinion as to its soundness may, of course, mean little. But as ex-problem drinkers, we can say that his explanation makes good sense. It explains many things for which we cannot otherwise account.”
- “We believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy; that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found they cannot break it, once having lost their self-confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve.”
- “After they have succumbed to the desire again, as so many do, and the phenomenon of craving develops, they pass through the well-known stages of a spree,”
- As alcoholics, we crave alcohol. After one or two drinks a physical craving develops which makes it virtually impossible to stop. One is too many, a thousand never enough.
- Alcoholism also seems to be a progressive illness- the longer we drink and the older we get, the more noticeable and more powerful the physical craving becomes.
- TASK: Write down 5 examples of when you took one or two drinks then couldn’t stop
despite wanting to or needing to. Be specific and include consequences