“Suggested” Steps

Today’s two sentences come from Bill W.’s essay on Step Twelve in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. They open the essay’s second paragraph. The dots between them skip a question newcomers ask: what is a spiritual awakening? They also skip Bill’s answer. Right after the passage, Bill goes back over Steps One to Eleven in one long paragraph.

The word in today’s title isn’t in the passage, but the book uses it elsewhere. On Step Two, Bill imagines a sponsor telling a newcomer who won’t believe that AA demands no belief at all: “All of its Twelve Steps are but suggestions.” On Tradition Nine he says what rides on them. Unless a member follows “our suggested Twelve Steps to recovery” as best he can, he wrote, “he almost certainly signs his own death warrant.”

The word had been there since AA’s first book, of 1939, in the line that leads into the Steps: they were “suggested as a Program of Recovery.” As Bill remembered it, that line was one of the “concessions to those of little or no faith,” made in Hank P.’s office in Newark after Hank argued that the Steps would scare off alcoholics by the thousands. Eight years later, writing in the Grapevine on whether anyone would ever govern AA, Bill said that nothing obliged members to follow its principles. Most followed the Steps anyway, he wrote, from choice: “We prefer recovery to death.”

AA’s General Service Conference, which has met every year since 1951, kept coming back to the word. In 1954 it asked that the first business session of each Conference open with a reading from the Big Book’s fifth chapter, with “the Twelve Suggested Steps” and the Traditions. In 1976 it found the word used the same way across AA’s literature, and said that usage “should remain as is.” In 1983 it recommended that the word, in the title of the Twelve Steps, “not be reinstated”; the record doesn’t say which title had dropped it.

In 1990 the Conference approved the manuscript of Daily Reflections, asking among other changes that the members’ reflections say “I” where they had said “we.” The same year it approved a sentence for its pamphlet The A.A. Group about helping alcoholics recover through AA’s “suggested Twelve Steps of recovery”. And in 2019 it changed a phrase in its flyer A.A. at a Glance, “the suggested Twelve Steps”, to the Big Book’s own words: the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, “which are suggested as a program of recovery”. That is how the flyer reads today.

More on the compromise of 1938–39, and the “you must” that became “we”: How It Works, in Keep Coming Back. On what the Twelve and Twelve says an awakening is: Not conscious of ever having had one, in The Educational Variety. On Bill’s “suggestions only,” from his talk at St. Louis in 1955, and the monk who suggested “good”: Good for God, in Suggestions Only.