All passages
below are taken from the 12 & 12
Alcohol, now become the
rapacious creditor,
bleeds us of all
self-sufficiency and all
will to resist its
demands.
Our sponsors declared that we
were the victims of a mental obsession so
subtly powerful that no amount of human
willpower could break it.
There was, they said, no such
thing as the personal conquest of this
compulsion by the unaided
will.
you now declare that none but a
Higher Power
can remove our obsession.
"Made a decision to turn our
will and our lives over
to the care of
God
as we understood Him"
There is only one key, and it is
called willingness.
for it is only by action that we
can cut away the self-will
which has always
blocked the entry of
God
Though self-will
may slam it shut again, as it frequently does, it will always
respond the moment we again pick up the key of willingness.
The more we become
willing to depend
upon a Higher Power,
the more
independent we actually are.
We are certain that our
intelligence, backed by
willpower,
can rightly control our inner lives and guarantee us
success in the world we live in.
Each of us has had his own
near-fatal encounter with the
juggernaut of self-will,
And how shall he ever straighten
out that awful jam that cost him the
affection of his family and separated him from them? His lone
courage
and unaided will cannot do it.
All of the Twelve Steps
require sustained and personal exertion to conform
to their principles and so, we trust, to
God's
will.
We saw that we were powerless
over alcohol
