# Is "your best thinking got you here" in the Big Book?

**In short:**
- No. The saying isn't in the Big Book or anywhere else in our sources.
- Part of its idea is in the program text: the alcoholic's sound reasoning "failed to hold us in check" (p. 37), self-knowledge didn't keep Bill or Fred sober (pp. 7, 42), and "Our ideas did not work. But the God idea did." (p. 52).
- But the text doesn't tell anyone to stop thinking. It says "Logic is great stuff" (p. 53), reasons with the doubter for pages, and in Step Eleven says "God gave us brains to use" (p. 86). What it distrusts is the alcoholic's thinking about drink, thinking driven by self-will, and reason treated as the last word (pp. 49, 54).

## What the search found

All our sources were searched for "best thinking," "thinking got," "thinking brought," "stinking thinking" and "your thinking," with page breaks joined. None of them turns up the saying, in the program text, the stories of any edition, the pamphlets or the history books.

## Where the text agrees with the saying

The Big Book does say, more than once, that the alcoholic's own mind couldn't get him sober:

- **Reason lost to the first drink.** "Our sound reasoning failed to hold us in check. The insane idea won out." (p. 37).
- **Self-knowledge failed.** After treatment Bill thought "Surely this was the answer—self-knowledge." (p. 7), and then drank again (p. 7). Fred, after his relapse, "saw that will power and self-knowledge would not help in those strange mental blank spots" (p. 42). The chapter says the real alcoholic "will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge" (p. 39).
- **Their own ideas.** "Our ideas did not work. But the God idea did." (p. 52). Earlier the same chapter admits that "we agnostics and atheists chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word" (p. 49).
- **Self-will.** The alcoholic is "an extreme example of self-will run riot" (p. 62), and "our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making" (p. 62).
- **Reason has limits.** "Hence, we saw that reason isn't everything." (p. 54). Reason as most of us use it isn't entirely dependable, "though it emanate from our best minds" (pp. 54–55). The "best minds" there are the experts who once proved men could never fly (p. 55), not the alcoholic in particular.

## Where the text disagrees with how the saying is often used

When the saying is used to mean "don't trust your mind, don't think, just do what you're told," the program text says otherwise:

- **Reason is a gift.** "Logic is great stuff. We liked it. We still like it." (p. 53). "It is not by chance we were given the power to reason" (p. 53). The writers say they wouldn't be satisfied with a proposal that didn't lend itself to reasonable approach (p. 53), and they spend Chapter 4 giving reasons (pp. 48–55).
- **Thinking, cleaned up, is used every day.** Step Eleven's morning: ask God to direct our thinking, "especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives" (p. 86). "Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use." (p. 86). "Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives." (p. 86).
- **Bill's way of checking his thinking.** "I was to test my thinking by the new God-consciousness within." (p. 13).
- **Where the thinking goes wrong.** Apart from self-will (above), the book locates the trouble in drink: the alcoholic "is often perfectly sensible and well balanced concerning everything except liquor" (p. 21). "However intelligent we may have been in other respects, where alcohol has been involved, we have been strangely insane." (p. 38). Chapter 10 calls him "a victim of crooked thinking, directly caused by the action of alcohol on his brain" (p. 140).

## What this means

The saying holds a real point from the book: the alcoholic's own reasoning, will power and self-knowledge didn't stop him drinking, and self-will got him into trouble. The book doesn't conclude that thinking is the enemy. It says the mind fails on the subject of the first drink and when it is run by selfish motives, and that the answer is a Power greater than ourselves, after which the reader is told to use his brains with assurance (p. 86). See: *Is "it's not a drinking problem, it's a thinking problem" in the Big Book?*

## Read it yourself
- Chapter 3, "More About Alcoholism" (pp. 37–43): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt3.pdf
- Chapter 4, "We Agnostics" (pp. 48–55): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt4.pdf
- Chapter 6, "Into Action" (Step Eleven, pp. 86–87): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt6.pdf
- Chapter 1, "Bill's Story" (pp. 7, 13): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt1.pdf

## Sources
| Source | Pages | Date |
|---|---|---|
| All our sources (searched) | — | various |
| *Alcoholics Anonymous*, Chapters 1–6, 10 | 7, 13, 21, 37–42, 49–55, 62, 86, 140 | 1939 |

*Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. Quotations are brief and cited; the Big Book is © A.A. World Services, Inc.*