from the '12 Step and 12 Tradition' book:

"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable."

"Who cares to admit complete defeat? Practically no one, of course. Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that, glass in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only and act of Providence can remore it from us...

"But upon entering A.A. we soon take quite another view of this absolute humiliation. We perceive that only through utter defeat are we able to take our first steps toward liberation and strength. Our admissions of personal powerlessness finally turn out to be firm bedrock upon which happy and purposeful lives may be built...

"The principle that we shall find no enduring strength until we first admit complete defeat is the main taproot from which our whole Society has sprung and flowered...

"There was... no such thing as the personal conquest of this compulsion by the unaided will... It was a statistical fact that alcoholics almost never recovered on their own resources...

"In A.A.'s pioneering time, none but the most desperate cases could swallow and digest this unpalatable truth. Even the 'last-gaspers' often had difficulty realizing how hopeless they actually were. But a few did, and when these laid hold of AA principles with all the fervor with which the drowning seize life preservers, they almost invariably got well...

"... Practicing AA's remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess his faults to another and make restitution for harm done? Who cares anything about a Higher Power, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry AA's message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic, self-centered in the extreme, doesn't care for this prospect - unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself..."