Step Twelve: what the Big Book actually says

The Step itself

"Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs." (p. 60)

The Big Book doesn't leave the Step there. It gives a whole chapter to how it's done.

Where the book explains it

Chapter 7 begins by naming its subject: "This is our twelfth suggestion: Carry this message to other alcoholics!" (p. 89).

Almost everything after that is instructions. They make sense once you remember where A.A. began. In 1935 there were two sober alcoholics (Ch. 11, pp. 153–156). The only way there would ever be a third was for them to go out and find one, someone still drinking who had never heard of them. Chapter 7 is what they learned doing that.

What the chapter tells you to do

Read straight through, the fifteen pages work as a field guide:

1. Find drinkers who want to stop. Ask doctors, ministers and hospitals (p. 89). Don't try to persuade someone who doesn't want to quit (p. 90).
2. Learn about the man first, and choose your moment. Talk with the person closest to him, wait for the end of a binge, and never force yourself on him (p. 90). An approach through a doctor or an institution is better than through his family (p. 91).
3. Talk about your own drinking, not his. See him alone. Tell him enough of your story that he'll start telling his, and for now say nothing about how you got sober (p. 91).
4. Let him decide whether he's an alcoholic. Describe the illness from your own experience, and don't label him (p. 92).
5. Tell him how you recovered only when he asks (p. 93). Outline the program of action and say why you're helping (p. 94).
6. Leave him free. Make it plain he's under no obligation and needn't see you again (p. 94). Don't wear out your welcome or rush him (p. 95).
7. If he isn't interested, find someone who is. The book is blunt about it: spending too long on one person "is to deny some other alcoholic an opportunity to live and be happy" (p. 96).
8. Be ready for what it costs. Lost sleep, your money and your home, trips to courts, hospitals and jails (p. 97). Help his family even if he keeps drinking (p. 97).
9. Go wherever you can be useful. Even "the most sordid spot on earth," if you're there to help (p. 102).

What it isn't

It isn't sponsorship. The word doesn't appear in the chapter. The relationship it describes is with a man who may not be in A.A. at all yet, who owes you nothing (p. 94), and who is free to go to someone else when he's ready to make his decision and tell his story (p. 96). Nothing in these pages describes an ongoing arrangement with a member already in the rooms.

It isn't a private spiritual experience. The Step opens with a spiritual awakening, and the Big Book's own appendix on that phrase, written after the first printing (p. 567), says most such changes are of the "educational variety" and develop slowly over time, not as sudden upheavals (p. 567). The action the Step asks for is carrying the message.

It isn't self-serving. The chapter's first line says that working with other alcoholics protects the helper's own sobriety (p. 89), and it says so again: your effort "plays a vital part in your own recovery" (p. 94), and "Helping others is the foundation stone of your recovery" (p. 97). Taken alone, those lines can sound like "help others to keep yourself sober." But the chapter doesn't stop there. It asks the newcomer to "place the welfare of other people ahead of his own" (p. 94), it lists what the helper gives up (p. 97), and it says "Do not think of what you will get out of the occasion. Think of what you can bring to it" (p. 102). The helper's sobriety is real and named, but the chapter's stated aim is the other man: "To be helpful is our only aim" (p. 89).

God in the chapter

God is mentioned, and the helper is told to "stress the spiritual feature freely" when describing his own recovery (p. 93). The chapter is also plain that recovery rests on God: the helper is to "Burn the idea into the consciousness of every man that he can get well regardless of anyone," and "The only condition is that he trust in God and clean house" (p. 98); his recovery "is dependent upon his relationship with God" (p. 100). But every instruction about how to present God to the newcomer is an instruction to hold back. The newcomer can choose any conception of God that makes sense to him (p. 93). Use everyday language, and don't raise theological issues "no matter what your own convictions are" (p. 93). You're not there to instruct him in religion (p. 93). "We have no monopoly on God" (p. 95). "Never talk down to an alcoholic from any moral or spiritual hilltop" (p. 95). The chapter forbids preaching. What it asks for is rescue.

Read it yourself

A.A. publishes these chapters free on its own website: - Chapter 7, "Working With Others" (pp. 89–103): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt7.pdf - Chapter 5, "How It Works," where the Twelve Steps are listed (pp. 58–71): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt5.pdf - Appendix II, "Spiritual Experience" (pp. 567–568): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_appendiceii.pdf

The full book, Alcoholics Anonymous, is sold by A.A. World Services at https://onlineliterature.aa.org.

Sources

Page numbers are from the fourth edition (2001). The Preface says the program chapters have been "left largely untouched" since 1939 (p. xi); 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.