The 12 steps
Addiction and AA Gill's Pour Me
from https://www.verywellmind.com/the-twelve-steps-63284
The steps and their principles are:
Honesty: After many years of denial, recovery can begin with one simple admission of being powerless over alcohol or any other drug a person is addicted to. Their friends and family may also use this step to admit their loved one has an addiction.
Faith: Before a higher power can begin to operate, you must first believe that it can. Someone with an addiction accepts that there is a higher power to help them heal.
Surrender: You can change your self-destructive decisions by recognizing that you alone cannot recover; with help from your higher power, you can.
Soul searching: The person in recovery must identify their problems and get a clear picture of how their behavior affected themselves and others around them.
Integrity: Step 5 provides great opportunity for growth. The person in recovery must admit their wrongs in front of their higher power and another person.
Acceptance: The key to Step 6 is acceptance—accepting character defects exactly as they are and becoming entirely willing to let them go.
Humility: The spiritual focus of Step 7 is humility, or asking a higher power to do something that cannot be done by self-will or mere determination.
Willingness: This step involves making a list of those you harmed before coming into recovery.
Forgiveness: Making amends may seem challenging, but for those serious about recovery, it can be a great way to start healing your relationships.
Maintenance: Nobody likes to admit to being wrong. But it is a necessary step in order to maintain spiritual progress in recovery.
Making contact: The purpose of Step 11 is to discover the plan your higher power has for your life.
Service: The person in recovery must carry the message to others and put the principles of the program into practice in every area of their life.
Secular alternatives
SMART Recovery is a secular alternative to 12-step programs like AA. Rather than emphasizing powerlessness and embracing a higher power, the SMART Recovery approach emphasizes viewing substance use as a habit that people can learn to control.13
Kelly JF, Levy SA, Hoeppner BB. An investigation of SMART Recovery: protocol for a longitudinal cohort study of individuals making a new recovery attempt from alcohol use disorder. BMJ Open. 2023;13(2):e066898. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2022-066898
It draws on aspects of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and helps members to build motivation, cope with cravings, change addictive thoughts, and adopt healthy habits.
see also
https://www.verywellmind.com/how-can-i-get-him-to-stop-63286
AA Gill https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/15/pour-me-a-life-aa-gill-review
https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/6098-circling-small-death-alcoholism-aa-gill-s-pour-me-life
from Gill
“This is ‘Choice Theory’. It’s a real thing. It was thought up by an American, a psychiatrist called William Glasser who worked in a veterans’ hospital in Los Angeles in the 1960s.
This thing is also called ‘Control Theory’ and ‘Reality Therapy’ and ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’.
Twenty-seven years later I realise that I stopped the wrong boat.”
“By chance Paul McKenna lived round the corner. I bumped into him on the street and asked, could he stop my nicotine-cudding? ‘Of course,’ he said, and I spent half an hour being relaxed and deprogrammed and recalibrated and positively reinforced. And as I was there I wondered if he could cure my allergy to gloves. ‘What’s it like?’ he said. It’s like claustrophobia for hands,”
“All for something that is essentially worthless, except as an allegory for something else that I don’t believe in. I still trust that as a society we shouldn’t sleep until everyone has a bed and that you can tell more about a nation by how it treats its lunatics than its footballers.”
“Still the medicine given to dyslexic children is more work, extra writing, remedial reading, more numbers . . . the utter abysmal useless cruelty of this has never occurred to a teacher. To compound failure with repeated failure reaffirms this humiliation and the fear and the loathing for words and learning, constantly pushing a door marked ‘lupl’.”
“the misery of the special slow ‘try again’ learning. I watched my son doing it. He relies on your impatience because, with the best will in the world, teachers, particularly kindly plump women, will encourage by offering hints, noises and vowel sounds. They can’t stand the suspense or the fact that we can fail to recognise a word we managed a moment ago. The child learns to decipher these with a lightning speed, then gets the word right or will rattle a stream of possibilities till they hear the squeak of congratulation that gives the teacher a little glow of pleasure, because she’s taught well. The recognised word is her little success, and the dyslexic will continue to encourage the plump woman, will help and reward her with the right word and a big smile that looks like gratitude but is actually pity because we found someone who’s worse at what they do than we are.”
“Every single Saturday for seven years. And I thought as he gripped my hand that it was an ignominious proof of the inflexible self-interest that runs through teaching and teachers, like the illegible writing through sticky seaside rock. Whose failure, Mr King-Harris, does that represent, yours or mine? It’s a rhetorical question.”
Gill on penises and Lincoln:
“But the really interesting thing is that once all birds had penises. They evolved from dinosaurs. They owned great Velociraptor knobs. So the real question is – why did they get rid of them? To lose a penis from one species is a misfortune, to lose it from a whole genera goes beyond careless, it’s a fucking Darwinian-humping disaster. Imagine giving up your willy for evolutionary convenience. “
“shot Abraham Lincoln was John Wilkes Booth . . . but I know that the man who shot John Wilkes Booth was Sergeant Boston Corbett. Shot him in the back of the head with his Colt pistol.”
“ Corbett was born in England and by trade was a hatter. Milliners used mercury for curing skin, it’s a poison that affects the brain – hence Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter. Corbett was definitely odd, he was exceedingly religious and castrated himself with a pair of scissors to prevent lust. He then had a spot of lunch before walking gingerly to hospital.”