What exactly is a 12-step program? It is the people, principles, prayers, and lifestyle practices of recovery from addiction that was started by Alcoholics Anonymous back in the 1930’s. To work a program successfully, you need all four—the people, principles, prayers, and practices. You can’t just read and learn at home, just go to meetings and call your sponsor, just ask God to take away the desire to act out, or just change your ways with willpower or healthy thinking. To recover you need to do it all.
12-step programs are being used by many to recover from addictions to substances like alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and addictions to behaviors like gambling, internet pornography, overworking and overeating.
You start new recovery behaviors in order to change the thoughts, feelings and situations that used to trigger relapse. To insure change, much repetition is built into “the program.” Certain things are repeated verbatim at each meeting, like reading the 12 steps of recommended problem-solving tools. What are the 12 steps? Here’s the gist of them in six pieces:
How does recovery work? Meetings sometimes begin by reading also the 12 traditions of how groups manage their affairs. The 12 traditions keep groups from owning property, competing with each other, making public statements, or taking stands on divisive and controversial issues like politics and religion. To make sure they keep the focus on principles not personalities, they emphasize protecting the anonymity of its members. They have “no leaders, just trusted servants.”
The program grows “by attraction, not promotion,” so 12-steppers don’t make public statements about whether they are in a program like AA or not, or how much good it’s doing them. They don’t try to talk others into sobriety or joining the group. It grows only by people noticing changed lives, and deciding to come try 12-stepping for themselves, because “I want what you have.”
All this makes 12-stepping different from religion, which encourages its churches to own property, and encourages its members to testify, evangelize, and do public witnessing. AA encourages worship and bible study, but it endorses no particular “sect or denomination.” Like the self-help movement, people are encouraged to be in charge of their own program, and grow at their own pace. They decide for themselves if they are an alcoholic or gambling addict or whatever, and they choose their own home group, sponsor, etc. A home group is the one you go to most regularly, usually every week, and it’s usually where your sponsor goes.
To find the right sponsor for you, try to pick out one or two people that you like at each meeting you attend, especially meetings that your schedule allows you to make on a regular basis. Try to pull those folks aside after the meeting, and tell them you liked what they said. Be specific about how it relates to you, and then wait for them to say more. If you like what they have to say again, ask if you could have their phone numbers. (Nearly everyone will give this to you, because that's how they stay sober and serene – if they don't give it away, they know they will lose it.) Use the phone numbers two or three times, and if those phone calls go well, ask if you could talk with them about possibly sponsoring you. Ask how they like to structure their relationships and contacts with their sponsees, and try it their way. Talk out frankly with them any problems you ever have with what they say. It helps to “do what you're told,” but if it works out badly for you, tell your sponsor about it straight up. You don't have to tell your sponsor everything, but you would be a fool to lie or misrepresent things to your sponsor. The frequency and format of meetings with a sponsor is worked out between the sponsor and sponsee. You can’t work a fourth and fifth step without a sponsor, and you can’t stay sober or get serene without taking those steps. It is important to make this relationship a priority, because it has very important purposes.
There are three main jobs of a sponsor. One is to make your meetings work for you, to make sure that going to meetings is a constructive experience for you, and for others. Your sponsor is always your same gender, but here I will talk as if he is male. He gives you feedback on what you say and how you interact. He troubleshoots any relationship issues you have with others in the group, and in the program as a whole. He cannot do this very well if you don’t both go to the same meeting on a regular basis.
His second and most important job is to walk you through the 12 steps. This is a master-apprentice system: recovering people need to be ushered through the 12 steps one at a time by somebody that has himself been ushered through the 12 steps the same way. To make it a good learning experience, your job is to do as you are told. If you don’t think it is good for you, check it out with somebody else, and then talk it out with your sponsor. Think of the steps as problem-solving tools that are dangerous in the hands of a novice. Just as you would need to have somebody show you and oversee you as you learned how to use a gun, a power tool, or take care of a baby, each step is meant to be learned by first listening to instruction, hearing what others have experienced to be safe and effective, and finally letting others watch you do it. The spirit of the law is as important as the letter of the law: the purpose and attitude of a behavior is as important as the exact action that you decide to take.
The last purpose of a sponsor is to help you live a better life, by giving you encouragement and advice on the practical problems of living in recovery. The thing is, he won’t know very well how to do this if you don’t let him do the first two things as well. People often ask, “How long do I have to go to meetings?” The best answer is, “Until you want to go, because you like the better living, laughing, and loving you find in those rooms, and later, you find coming out of your heart.”
Recovery is like the medical model. It teaches that your addiction is a disease. Alcoholism for example is portrayed as a physical allergy and a mental obsession, and medical treatment and hospitalization is encouraged as an adjunct to any recovery that needs it. We aren’t responsible for having the illness or addiction, but we are responsible for whether we get treatment, by working the program of recovery that gets us well.
In conclusion, as I understand it, 12-step recovery teaches that “anything you put before your recovery you will lose,” including your job, your health, your family, and your faith. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you follow the 12-step way of life, it is free, and it makes everything else in your life better. You get not only sobriety, but serenity. As they say, “it works if you work it.” For a more elaborate cost-benefit analysis of recovery, ask me for my outline by that title.
People trying to save or help their addicted loved ones are in a similar position to a pastor trying to save his congregation from sin. They often use similar tactics. After a time of this helping, the addict comes to resent the reforming efforts of the loved one, who is after all supposed to be his parent or spouse, not his counselor, sponsor, or pastor. The helping loved one begins to sense this resentment deep down, and to feel that if the addict recovers, he will probably leave, and the relationship will probably be severed. To avoid feeling this fear, the enabler keeps playing the helping games that in strengthen the addict’s dependency on the enabler. This makes things worse.
The really good pastors remain in their minds rather independent of their churches. They know who they would be, how they would live when they move on. There is an old English term for a pastor who is dependent on his congregation. The wordvicarious comes from the old English word vicar, referring to a rector (pastor or priest) who wasn't paid enough money to buy his own food and shelter, so he depended on his congregation to feed and house him. He couldn't work anywhere else until they or the bishop released him to. He was taking care of his flock, but he was also depending on them for everything, and he had lost touch with who he would be without them.
Vicars therefore live for and through the congregation, to the neglect of their own personal life. Some are afraid to offend their congregation, and so they tell them whatever they think the people want to hear. Often they feel they have to raise the congregation up spiritually or financially before they have a right to live their own lives. Other vicars are tyrants, controlling their flock through preaching that lays down the law in stone, with fire and brimstone. The controlling types we therapist call active-dependent, and the comforting approach we call passive-dependent. Whether active or passive, controlling or comforting, vicars live vicariously for and through those they help. So if you want another word for this process of codependency or enabling, you could call it vicarity.
Now as addictions progress and take more and more of the addict’s freedom and life, addictions go through stages. Likewise, as the loved ones keep trying to help by pouring in more and more love, they are also losing their freedom, their strength, and their life. In the later stages, like the addict, they find they have suffered great losses – finances, freedom, self-respect, health, faith, and relationships with family and friends. At these later stages, the exhausted codependent enabler is like a vampire. Trying to suck the poison out of the addict as if he had a snake bite, she is in effect joining the addiction as she sucks more life, freedom, and self-respect out of the addict. She feels most alive, not when she is living for God through her body, but when she lives for her addict, through his body. A key sign the enabler is out of control is a loss of good lifestyle balance between work, rest, and play. Toward the end, burned-out enablers need a sabbatical rest.
With any addiction to chemicals or to a habit, loved ones trying to help addicts need to realize and continually remind themselves of three things: “I didn’t cause the addiction, I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it either.” But you can make it easier for addicts to keep their addiction going. How? The counterproductive efforts people make to help and reform their addicted loved ones are called enabling behaviors. Those who do them are calledcodependents, because these behaviors make them just as dependent or hooked on helping the addict as the addicts are hooked on their addictions. This over-protection and over-indulgence just stimulates the shame and irresponsibility that fuel the addict’s habit.
Because addictions work on people like hypnosis does. I have studied and seen how skilled hypnotists can hypnotize virtually anyone, especially people trying the hardest to resist. Their secret is that they know how to make your efforts to resist hypnosis work in reverse to stimulate the trance. Hypnotists wear out those who resist them, by getting them to push against themselves to the point of exhaustion. Those trying to resist hypnosis surrender to the trance in any manner much like addicts slipping into their mindless habit. So when loved ones try to straighten out addicts, this enables even more addictive behavior, excuses and cover-ups, which wears the loved ones out to the point of exhaustion and surrender. And like hypnosis, this all works out under the cover of denial, subconsciously, with loved ones thinking they’re helping when they’re actually playing right into the hands of the addiction.
Here are twelve of the most common enabling behaviors to avoid:
So what does work to help loved ones recover from an addiction?
Tell the truth. Say that their addictions, excuses, and lies disgust you, and make you want to leave them alone. Tell others the truth about the addict too—stop covering up for them.
Withhold whatever they abuse. Take away the money, housing, vehicles, jobs, privileges, responsibilities, and loved ones you can’t trust them with. They all fuel the addiction anyway.
Show love by giving only your self to the addict, not the things in the previous paragraph. You talk on the phone or meet them for a meal, but you don't hang out for long. If they have stolen, meet in a restaurant, not in your home.
Ask about their recovery, what they are learning, what responsible things they are doing.
Discipline lies with doubt. “I would like to believe you, but you know you have lied about this kind of thing before. Time will tell. Actions speak louder than words.”
Leave them alone. Stop paying attention to them. Don’t spend time with them. Don’t let them see that they tick you off, just that they turn you off. If necessary, kick them out or separate from them. This may require that you "get a life," or at least live a life full enough for you to let go of the addict.
Take better care of yourself. Most enablers don’t know how, or don’t care enough about themselves to do it. Those who do care would benefit from counseling.
Join a support group, a recovering community of friends and family. Sharing your "experience, strength, and hope" with others in your situation will give you the strength you can't find elsewhere, and can't do without. This happens in the 12-step program for enablers, Al-Anon (www.al-anon.alateen.org).
Conduct an intervention. When you’re tired of doing everything else, you might do well to gather loved ones and let a professional teach you whether and how to present an offer the addict can’t afford to refuse. For details on this and other suggestions for codependents, see www.interventioninfo.org/research/family.php. From what I know, the best local treatment available for addicts is at the nationally acclaimed Healing Place, in Louisville.
What exactly is a 12-step program? It is the people, principles, prayers, and lifestyle practices of recovery from addiction that was started by Alcoholics Anonymous back in the 1930’s. To work a program successfully, you need all four—the people, principles, prayers, and practices. You can’t just read and learn at home, just go to meetings and call your sponsor, just ask God to take away the desire to act out, or just change your ways with willpower or healthy thinking. To recover you need to do it all.
12-step programs are being used by many to recover from addictions to substances like alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and addictions to behaviors like gambling, internet pornography, overworking and overeating.
You start new recovery behaviors in order to change the thoughts, feelings and situations that used to trigger relapse. To insure change, much repetition is built into “the program.” Certain things are repeated verbatim at each meeting, like reading the 12 steps of recommended problem-solving tools. What are they? Here’s the gist of them in five pieces:
1. Admit you’re powerless over your addiction, and that your life is unmanageable by you alone. Admit you need “a higher power.”
2. Entrust your will and your life to the care (not control) of God “as you understand him.” If you’ve been burned by organized religion, you can make your higher power to be the spirit of the program, the wisdom of the Big Book (AA’s collection of stories and advice for staying sober), or whatever works for you until your understanding of God grows.
3. Examine your past behavior and motivations. Take inventory of your moral strengths and weaknesses. Look at your problems and ask, “What was my part of this? How do I clean up my side of the street?” Confess what you’ve done and why to God, another person, and yourself.
4. Make amends to yourself and others for the mistakes you’ve made. Pay back the money, self-esteem, truth, etc. you have taken from other people, “except when to do so would injure them or others.” We go tell people we are sorry, and make every effort to restore what we have taken.
5. Give back to others what you have received. Yougive service to your groups by telling your story, chairing meetings, helping newcomers, and cleaning up. This keeps you growing and avoids relapse.
Meetings sometimes begin by reading also the 12 traditions of how groups manage their affairs. The 12 traditions keep groups from owning property, competing with each other, making public statements, or taking stands on controversial issues like politics and religion. To make sure they keep the focus on principles not personalities, they emphasize protecting the anonymity of its members. They have “no leaders, just trusted servants.”
The program grows “by attraction, not promotion,” so 12-steppers don’t make public statements about whether they are in a program like AA or not. They grow only by people noticing changed lives, and deciding to come try 12-stepping for themselves, because “I want what you have.”
All this makes 12-stepping different from religion, which encourages its churches to own property and its members to lead groups and do public witnessing. AA encourages religion, but it endorses no particular “sect or denomination.” Like the self-help movement, people are encouraged to be in charge of their own program, and grow at their own pace. They decide for themselves if they are an alcoholic or gambling addict or whatever, and they choose their own home group, sponsor, etc. A home group is the one you go to most regularly, usually every week, and it’s usually where your sponsor goes.
To find the right sponsor for you, try to pick out one or two people that you like at each meeting you attend, especially meetings that your schedule allows you to make on a regular basis. Try to pull those folks aside after the meeting, and tell them you liked what they said. Be specific about how it relates to you, and then wait for them to say more. If you like what they have to say again, ask if you could have their phone numbers. (Nearly everyone will give this to you, because that's how they stay sober and serene – if they don't give it away, they know they will lose it.) Use the phone numbers two or three times, and if those phone calls go well, ask if you could talk with them about possibly sponsoring you. Ask how they like to structure their relationships and contacts with their sponsees, and try it their way. Talk out frankly with them any problems you ever have with what they say. It helps to “do what you're told,” but if it works out badly for you, tell your sponsor about it straight up. You don't have to tell your sponsor everything, but you would be a fool to lie or misrepresent things to your sponsor. The frequency and format of meetings with a sponsor is worked out between the sponsor and sponsee. It is important to make this relationship a priority, because it has very important purposes.
There are three main jobs of a sponsor. One is to make sure that going to meetings is a constructive experience for you, and for others. Your sponsor is always your same gender, but here I will talk as if he is male. He gives you feedback on what you say and how you interact. He troubleshoots any relationship issues you have with others in the group, and in the program as a whole. He cannot do this very well if you don’t both go to the same meeting on a regular basis.
His second and most important job is to walk you through the 12 steps. This is a master-apprentice system: recovering people need to be ushered through the 12 steps one at a time by somebody that has himself been ushered through the 12 steps the same way. To make it a good learning experience, your job is to do as you are told. If you don’t think it is good for you, check it out with somebody else, and then talk it out with your sponsor. Think of the steps as problem-solving tools that are dangerous in the hands of a novice. Just as you would need to have somebody show you and oversee you as you learned how to use a gun (or take care of a baby), each step is meant to be learned by first listening to instruction, hearing what others have experienced to be safe and effective, and finally letting others watch you do it. The spirit of the law is as important as the letter of the law: the purpose and attitude of a behavior is as important as the exact action that you decide to take.
The last purpose of a sponsor is to help you live a better life, by giving you encouragement and advice on the practical problems of living in recovery. The thing is, he won’t know very well how to do this if you don’t let him do the first two things as well.
Recovery is like the medical model. It teaches that your addiction is a disease. Alcoholism for example is portrayed as a physical allergy and a mental obsession, and medical treatment and hospitalization is encouraged as an adjunct to any recovery that needs it. We aren’t responsible for having the illness or addiction, but we are responsible for whether we get treatment, by working the program of recovery that gets us well.
In conclusion, as I understand it, 12-step recovery teaches that “anything you put before your recovery you will lose,” including your job, your health, your family, and your faith. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you follow the 12-step way of life, it is free, and it makes everything else in your life better. You get not only sobriety, but serenity. As they say, “it works if you work it.”
Dr. Paul Schmidt, Psychologist Life Coach mynewlife.com For Personal and Family Integrity
I have never really had a position or opinion on marijuana, and in recent weeks I have grown weary of this ignorance. To prepare my thoughts on this subject, I have done three things. First, I have obtained professional training as a certified addictions specialist from the International Institute for Addiction and Trauma Professionals. Secondly I have spent several hours looking through the research on the effects of cannabis use (news flash: it is profoundly inconclusive). Finally, I have discussed the positive and negative effects of marijuana with over 100 people who have used it, and with almost as many of their loved ones who had their own opinions about how pot had affected these people for better or for worse. I have also spoken with other mental health practitioners about what they have read, and what they have observed with the folks they have treated.
The main active ingredient in cannabis is THC, which is short for delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, found and the leaves and flowers of the marijuana plant. The concentrated form of this substance is a more addictive drug, hashish.
Depending on the situation and the person using it, any effect of marijuana may be considered positive or negative, beneficial or harmful. Therefore I will just list the effects without judgment, starting with generally the most widely acknowledged, and proceeding to the less:
Physical addiction in the form of dependence does not often occur, but it is always useful to look at 10 signs of any addiction. Licensed addictionologists such as myself know that research often defines an addiction as the presence of three or more of 10 signs. The following are ten hallmarks for any addiction:
___ impulse control (recurrent failure to resist impulses to use/act out),
___ broken plans (frequency/duration of use keeps exceeding what’s planned),
___ can’t quit (persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to stop for good),
___ time loss (using takes up excessive amounts of time),
___ preoccupation (thoughts of using keep intruding),
___ irresponsibility (using occurs during times committed to obligations or responsibilities),
___ social fallout (recurrent negative consequences of use in work and/or family life),
___ social dropout (skipping social, occupational, or recreational activities to use),
___ behavioral escalation (it takes more pot or risk to get the same emotional relief), and
___ withdrawal symptoms (irritation, tension, or despair when unable to get high).
How would you score yourself or your loved one on these criteria?
The most widely recognized positive uses of marijuana are with medical patients who are fighting chronic, debilitating, perhaps even fatal stress-fed conditions, such as cancer, Parkinsons, PTSD, ADHD, etc. It is useful with patients experiencing chronic pain. It also benefits neurotic, overly responsible people who need temporary assistance learning to loosen up in a recreational setting.
However it has not had good outcomes with people suffering from confusion and inner turmoil, such as schizophrenics and folks with mood disorders, because they become more withdrawn into their troubled selves. Nor has it been good for passive, disengaged individuals who are under-achieving in their financial and career lives, or for disengaged people who aren’t well connected or bonded with their significant others.
For middle school and high school students, a growing subculture has developed that celebrates vaping. The darker elements of the marijuana industry is producing and distributing misinformation that looks very scientific. These videos, podcasts, memes, and links give much encouragement to vapers for using.
The same social media are very inviting to social opportunities. They provide an easy entry and access to young people who lack social skills, or who are going through a hard time and need to socialize with others who feel disconnected.
Emotional pain, like physical pain, has two healthy effects on people: it draws our attention to problems, and motivates us to solve them. Emotional pain as a very important third purpose, that physical pain does not -- it motivates and actually creates emotional bonds with other people going through similar problems and emotions. Marijuana numbs both physical and emotional pain, and the sense of urgency or importance about anything that might need to be done to solve a problem.
Therefore, young people who get high together are drained of their awareness of their problems, their motivation to solve them, and their access to other people who are not only facing such problems, but also finding ways to bring good things out of these painful situations.
Compared to beverage alcohol, booze leads people initially to higher levels of social interaction and other purposeful activities. Pot on the other hand leads its users to become more passive spectators, more likely to withdraw from social activities, at least from those people who don’t use marijuana. In short, alcohol tends to make folks more active and passionate, whereas pot tends to make its users more passive and reflective. Alcohol initially expands the intensity of whatever it is poured out onto, whereas marijuana puts a calming fog down on whatever it finds. Pot therefore has a much better and far less damaging effect than alcohol does on people who are angry, or driving a vehicle.
Legalizing marijuana use is likely to have similar effects on society as legalizing gambling has had. There will be more of it done, and less fear and shame for doing it. It will be more popular with lower classes whose lifestyles evoke higher levels of anger, tension and stress. Therefore it will raise more money for government and big business at the disproportionate expense of the lower and middle classes.
So is pot doing you more good or harm? How can you determine if your use of pot is having a more positive or negative effect on your life, and on those around you? The answer is as simple as it is painful and challenging. List four or five things that you most want to accomplish or experience in life. (If you have trouble doing this, you might be getting too much THC, or TMW, “too much weed.”) Then ask one or two adults who depend on you the most to answer the same question about you (to list four or five things they most want you to accomplish or experience in life). Then exchange copies of your lists so that all of you are looking at the same expanded list of goals. Finally everyone is given list of marijuana’s effects bulletized above, asked to consider its effects on all the various hopes and goals for your life, and to give a number from -5 to +5 on how they believe smoking pot will affect your chances of fulfilling each particular dream. When you get everyone’s papers back, the numbers will pretty much answer your question.
A. Chronic, progressive, incurable, fatal disease that is characterized by loss of control over alcohol and other sedatives.
1. Chronic—you’ve had the problem for a little while.
2. Progressive-- Grows on you; gets worse; going to take more alcohol to get a good buzz.
3. Incurable-- Always going to have it; after years of recovery; even after you stop the temptation will always be there.
4. Fatal-- Does kill you; Kills you physically, mentally, and kills relationships.
B. Primary Disease – Alcohol becomes more important than anything else: you’ve got to stop this before you can cure anything else (depression, marriage, anxiety, etc.)
C. An allergy – alcoholics are allergic to alcohol. Its first effect is like it is to others, giving a little buzz, but when that wears off, they feel an uncomfortable feeling in every cell that gets blood, which is experienced as a "dis-ease" that calls for another drink.
A. Phase one (physical) – do things under the influence of alcohol that a person might regret; say things that might upset somebody else, or maybe become violent towards another person.
1. Blackouts – people aren’t aware that a person maybe blacked out; the person who was blacked out does not remember a thing
2. Sneak Drinking
3. Mentally preoccupied with booze
4. Gulping drinks
5. Looses temper under booze
6. Blaming booze for misconduct
B. Phase Two (middle phase) – builds up into serious problems
1. Make alibis for drinking
2. More remorse
3. Go on the wagon
4. Try to change the pattern of your drinking
5. Socializing more with heavy drinkers than normal people
6. Problems on the job
7. Problem’s in the person’s family life
8. Have a secret supply
9. Physical and psychological changes
C. Final phase
1. Start breaking moral rules (stealing, cheating etc . . .)
2. Logic distorts to where a person plans their whole life around drinking
3. Three ways out – Death, insanity, and recovery
A. Tolerance – more and more of the stuff to give you the same fix or buzz
B. Obsession – steals attention away from everyday things; think about it more and more, sometimes even when you’re trying to think about something else
C. Withdrawal pains – shakes, bad stress tolerance after the drink wears off, creating the desire for another drink
D. Lose will power – you break promises to yourself about your drinking
E. Tremendous Denial – you don’t connect problems to drinking that others do; ask the question: How would you know if you were an alcoholic?
F. Self defeating pattern of behavior under the influence
A. People
1. At AA meetings find a person who you thought sounded really good during the meeting and get their number.
2. Ask that person to be your temporary sponsor
3. Stick with the winners
4. Stick around after the meeting because maybe some people will get together afterwards to provide further support
B. Principles
1. The battle is to surrender the flesh to God
2. The flesh needs to be trained to understand that it does have cravings but also to understand the word no; it needs to learn to KNOW better than to have a drink, even when you WANT one.
3. The two main things to read are "The Big Book" (which tells how the Program works, and gives the stories of many who have recovered) And the "Twelve and Twelve" which explains the twelve steps for the alcoholic and 12 principles for groups and meetings
A. "The program" is working the steps under the direction of a sponsor, who has worked through the steps successfully himself.
B. What are the twelve steps?
1. Steps 1-3 are to help you realize how screwed up your life is on alcohol
2. Steps 4-5 are about taking a searching moral inventory of yourself
3. Steps 6-9 are about how to make amends to other people
4. Steps 10-12 are maintenance steps
A. Hero-- the child becomes an overachiever; perfectionist; carries the flag for the family.
B. Scapegoat – non-achievers; draw punishment to themselves to draw it away from the alcoholic.
C. Joker – "Whistle through the graveyard"; becomes very shallow; makes a joke out of everything.
D. Loner – Deeply unhappy; "lost children"; hide from everything
A. Anyone who lives lives for and through an addicted person
B. Loved ones who become addicted to alcoholics, who become addicted to trying to help them.
C. Co-dependents make it easier for the alcoholic to drink more and continue on a downward spiral.
1. Co-dependents lie to the alcoholic to make things better
2. Co-dependents make excuses for the alcoholic
3. They assume responsibility for fixing or reforming him
4. They need to learn they didn’t CAUSE it, can’t CURE it, and can’t CONTROL it (the alcoholism)
D. Like alcoholics, they can recover much better if they work a program of recovery too. Al-Anon is a fellowship just like AA, often with meetings at the same time and place, just down the hall.
O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you and I detest my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend you, my God, Who are all good and deserving of my love. I firmly resolve with the help of your grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.
What caused my relapse (inner circle violation)?
What had I neglected from the program I was working (outer circle, preventive behaviors)?
For how long? Why?
What else should I have (and can now) put in that outer circle as recovery behaviors?
What slips had I ignored, not made amends for (middle circle)?
What else should I have (and can now) put in that middle circle as slips to report?
What old character defects I’ve inventoried before were at work here?
What new character defects can I discover in the ruins of this relapse?
What harm have I done?
Who have I hurt? (include God and yourself)
What I have I taken from them?
What have I dumped on them in return?
What amends do I need to make to all these people, to put back what I took, plus some to take away the harm I gave, and to teach myself a lesson, that it isn’t worth it to do these things?
What about working an intensive outpatient treatment program?