What does Step 1 say? Powerless over what?
In short:
- Step 1 as printed reads: "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable." (p. 59) The two halves are joined by a dash, not "and."
- The powerlessness the Step names is over alcohol. The word "powerless" appears exactly once in the forewords, the Doctor's Opinion, Chapters 1 to 11 and the appendices: in this Step.
- The book does say that our own power fell short in other ways too, but its answer there is a Power greater than ourselves and a lot of action. It never tells the reader to accept being powerless over everything.
The Step as printed
Step 1 is the first of the twelve listed on page 59: "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable." (p. 59) Note the punctuation: it's a dash, so the two halves read as one statement. Read that way, lives became unmanageable because of the powerlessness over alcohol; the book doesn't spell the link out further.
A search of our text of the Big Book's opening sections, all eleven chapters and the appendices finds "powerless" only here. The book doesn't use the word anywhere else to describe the alcoholic's condition.
What Chapter 3 says the powerlessness is
Chapter 3 (pp. 30–43), "More About Alcoholism," is the book's own explanation of Step 1's ground. Read in full, it's about one thing: drinking. - It opens by saying the first step in recovery is to concede fully, to our innermost selves, that we are alcoholics, and that alcoholics are people who have lost the ability to control their drinking (p. 30). - It lists the ways members tried to control it, from drinking beer only to going to sanitariums (p. 31). - Whether a person can quit on a nonspiritual basis "depends upon the extent to which he has already lost the power to choose whether he will drink or not" (p. 34). - The stories of Jim and Fred show the "insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink" (p. 37) that wins out over sound reasoning and self-knowledge (pp. 35–43). - The chapter ends: the alcoholic "at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink" (p. 43), and "His defense must come from a Higher Power" (p. 43).
Page 60 sums up what the earlier chapters establish: "That we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives" (p. 60).
Powerless over everything?
The text doesn't teach that, but it's worth being exact about what it does say, because it's easy to overcorrect.
The book does say our own resources failed beyond the bottle. "Lack of power, that was our dilemma" (p. 45), about the failure of moral codes and philosophies to keep alcoholics sober. Self-centredness couldn't be reduced "by wishing or trying on our own power" (p. 62). Fear wasn't solved by self-reliance (p. 68).
What it never does is call the alcoholic powerless over those things and leave it there. In each case the answer is help from a Power greater than ourselves plus action. And the rest of the program is a list of things to do, with responsibility squarely on the person: write the inventory (pp. 64–71), face creditors "no matter how far we have to go" (p. 78), make amends even at the risk of losing a job or going to jail (p. 79). The book even names a right use of will power: keeping God's will in view through the day "is the proper use of the will" (p. 85).
So the Step names alcohol. The book's broader point is that self-will alone didn't work, not that a sober alcoholic has no power over his life.
Read it yourself
- Chapter 5, "How It Works" (pp. 58–71), where the Steps are listed: https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt5.pdf
- Chapter 3 (pp. 30–43), "More About Alcoholism": https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt3.pdf
- Chapter 4 (pp. 44–57), "We Agnostics": https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt4.pdf
- The full book, Alcoholics Anonymous, is sold by A.A. World Services at https://onlineliterature.aa.org.
Sources
| Source | Pages | First published |
|---|---|---|
| Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 5, "How It Works" (Step 1) | 59–60, 62, 68 | 1939 |
| Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 3, "More About Alcoholism" | 30–43 | 1939 |
| Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 4, "We Agnostics" | 45 | 1939 |
| Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 6, "Into Action" | 78–79, 85 | 1939 |
| Alcoholics Anonymous, forewords, Doctor's Opinion, Chs 1–11, appendices (searched for "powerless") | — | 1939 text; the later forewords and the appendices were added from 1955 to 2001 (Preface, pp. xi–xii) |
Page numbers are from the fourth edition (2001). The Preface says the program chapters have been "left largely untouched" since 1939 (p. xi), but our sources have no first edition to compare page numbers against.
Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. Quotations are brief and cited; the Big Book is © A.A. World Services, Inc.
These pages answer questions about A.A. from A.A.'s own published literature, read in full, with every quote checked word for word against the page it cites. Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. What we read, and when each source was written.