Carrying the Message: Step 12 and Working With Others

Carrying the message is the heart of Step 12: "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" (page 60). The Big Book devotes an entire chapter to it, Chapter 7, Working With Others, and opens with one of the most quoted lines in the whole book: "Practical experience shows that nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics" (page 89). Notice what that sentence actually claims. Not that helping others is a nice extra once we feel better, but that it protects our own sobriety more reliably than anything else we can do.

The same page makes it a direct instruction: "Carry this message to other alcoholics!" (page 89). Then it tells us why we, of all people, are qualified: "You can help when no one else can" (page 89). Doctors, family, and friends may have tried for years to reach a drinker and failed. But one alcoholic talking honestly to another gets a hearing nobody else gets, because we have been where they are. Our drinking history, the thing we were most ashamed of, becomes the very credential that lets us reach someone still suffering.

Why Working With Others Keeps Us Sober

The Big Book is blunt about our stake in this. Early in the book it says "our very lives, as ex-problem drinkers, depend upon our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs" (page 20). That is strong language, and it is meant to be. The alcoholic mind drifts back toward self, and self-centeredness is described on page 62 as the root of our troubles. Twelfth Step work is the practical antidote. When we sit with a newcomer, we cannot stay wrapped up in our own problems. We hear our own story out of someone else's mouth, and we remember exactly what we were saved from.

Chapter 7 also promises something beyond protection. "Life will take on new meaning" (page 89). Watching people recover, watching them turn around and help others, watching a fellowship grow up around us, the book says this is an experience we must not miss. Later in the chapter it goes further still: "Helping others is the foundation stone of your recovery" (page 97), and it adds that an occasional kindly act is not enough. This is daily material, not a merit badge we earn once.

How We Actually Carry the Message

The chapter is practical about method. We are told to learn what we can about the prospect first, to approach him when he is ready to listen rather than when he is very drunk, and to talk as one alcoholic to another, sharing our own drinking history before we ever mention a solution (pages 90-91). We describe ourselves as someone who has found an answer, not as someone recruiting for a cause. If he is not interested, we do not force it; the book tells us not to waste time chasing a man who cannot or will not work with us, because our job is to be useful, not to argue anyone into recovery (page 96). And carrying the message is bigger than formal Twelfth Step calls. It is sponsorship, greeting the newcomer at a meeting, sharing honestly, and letting our changed life speak. The book's closing page puts it simply: "Give freely of what you find and join us" (page 164).

The Spiritual Awakening Comes First

Step 12 begins with a condition: having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. We carry a message we have actually received. That is why the first eleven steps matter so much; without them we have sympathy to offer, but not a solution. The awakening does not need to be dramatic. Appendix II describes most of our spiritual experiences as gradual, of the educational variety (pages 567-568). What matters is that something real has changed in us, and we give it away to keep it. Freely we received, so freely we give. That exchange, one alcoholic helping another, is the engine that has kept this fellowship alive since two men sat down together in Akron in 1935.