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Daily Reflections · January 3

Powerless

Before there were twelve Steps there were about six, and the first one was put differently by the people who passed it on.

Today’s reading

The reading for January 3 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 21: it is the First Step itself, at the head of Bill W.’s essay on it.

This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.

Read it at aa.org

Themes and asks

  1. What can’t be run

    The passage is the Step itself: the admission everything else in the program is built on.

    • What did you try hardest to manage before you admitted you couldn’t?
    • Where does that old effort to run things still show up?

  2. The short list

    The member who wrote the reflection lists everyday things outside anyone’s control, the kind that crowd a day, and sets them beside the few things that really are a person’s own.

    • What’s one thing today you’ve been treating as yours to fix that isn’t?
    • What’s one thing that is yours, and you’ve been leaving alone?

  3. Licked

    Read beside the history below: the first members’ word for it was licked, and one of them remembered the step as two words. This page’s thought is that the plainer the word, the easier it is to say out loud.

    • What’s your own word for the day you knew you were beaten?
    • Who did you first say it to?

Behind the words

We were licked

Today’s passage is the First Step, as Bill W. wrote it in December 1938 and as it heads his essay on it in the Twelve and Twelve. Before that there were no written Steps. From late 1934 the first members passed on what Bill called “the word-of-mouth program,” which by 1938 came to about six steps, put a little differently each time.

In 1957, writing AA’s history, Bill gave the first of the six as nearly as he could remember it: “We admitted that we were licked,” and the rest of his line named the powerlessness the Step would keep. Earl T. of Chicago, who got sober in Akron in 1937, heard them from Dr. Bob S. the day before he went home, in three or four hours in Dr. Bob’s office. As Earl told it in his story in the Big Book, the first of the six was two words: “Complete deflation.”

Bill had his own name for the idea. In the Grapevine of July 1953 he looked back at his first months of trying to sober up drunks in 1935, when nobody stayed sober. He had been preaching, he wrote, and “the need for deflation at depth so emphasized by William James had been neglected.” Dr. William D. Silkworth’s bad news about the illness was the hammer he had put down.

When Bill wrote the twelve in December 1938, the first of the six became the first of the twelve and gained its second half, about lives grown unmanageable. January 7 tells the night he wrote them.

More on the formula Ebby T. brought Bill in 1934: Ten cents, in My Sponsor, Ebby. On where each Step came from: Legacy, in What Not to Do.

From six to twelve

  1. 1934Ebby’s visitEbby T. brings Bill the ideas he had from the Oxford Group, in November.
  2. 1934–38The word-of-mouth programAbout six steps, passed on in talk and never written down the same way twice.
  3. 1937An afternoon in AkronDr. Bob takes Earl T. through the six. The first is two words.
  4. 1938The Twelve StepsIn December the first of six becomes the first of twelve, with a second half added. Today’s passage.
  5. 1953Bill looks backIn the Grapevine, and in the essay on Step One that the Step heads.
  6. 1955Earl’s story in printThe Big Book’s second edition carries his telling of the six.
  7. 1957Bill’s list in printAA Comes of Age gives the six as he remembered them.

Threads

Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.

Sources
  • Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. Step One. Page 21, which the reading cites.
  • Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Service: The Third Legacy” (the word-of-mouth program).
  • Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book). Fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001: “He Sold Himself Short,” Earl T.’s story, in the book since its second edition of 1955.
  • The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “A Fragment of History: Origin of the Twelve Steps,” July 1953.
  • Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. January 3 · aa.org

Something wrong here? A date, a name, a quotation? Let me know

Daily Reflections is AA’s book of readings for every day of the year, each written by a member about a favorite passage from AA’s literature. A Daily Reprieve gives each day questions to sit with and the story behind its words.

Printed from One Drunk to Another, an independent AA history · onedrunktoanother.org/today/january-3/