Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by William Griffith Wilson (William W.) and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith (Dr. Bob) in 1935. In 1939 the fledgling organization published its basic textbook, Alcoholics Anonymous. This book, affectionately known as the Big Book, remains the primary text of the group today.

Through their travels, William W. and Dr. Bob, both former alcoholics, learned to treat alcoholism as a disease. They realized the necessity to counteract the hopelessness of the affliction. The conversion of AA lies in the transition from drunkenness to sobriety more than a state of not drinking. The two found that the conversion must move the alcoholic into a life that has no need for drinking. Bill W. and Dr. Bob went to work at the Akron City Hospital in Ohio and converted another drunk to sobriety. These three converts formed the first fellowship that would follow the parameters now followed by present day AA members.

These days AA boasts 2,000,000 recovered alcoholics worldwide. Many say such success lies in the famous AA 12 step program. The parameters of the program lie as follows:

1.One must admit to be powerless over alcohol — that their lives had become unmanageable.
2.Believe that a Power greater than themselves could restore them to sanity.
3.Make a decision to turn your will and your life over to the care of God
4.Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself
5.Admit to God, to yourself and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs.
6.Be entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7.Humbly ask Him to remove your shortcomings.
8.Make a list of all persons you have harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9.Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10.Continue to take personal inventory and when you are wrong promptly admit it.
11.Seek to improve your conscious contact with God as you understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for you and the power to carry that out.
12.Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all affairs

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Alcohol Detox, Alcohol Rehab, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Intervention, Prescription Drug Addiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.