Alcoholics Are Not Powerless Over Alcohol

It wasn’t until I had a full understanding of this word that my spiritual journey really was able to begin. It also made me realize that I’m not a bad person or a weak person. I finally understood what an alcoholic and addict really is. I saw that I was worse than I knew, but understanding the problem helped me accept the solution. Today with the understanding of powerless, our number one priority is our relationship with our creator and how we can best serve. Addiction treatment centers often talk about “powerless” as a way to describe the feeling of being unable to control one’s life.

• A person shouldn’t consider themselves weak-willed or incapable when they admit to their powerlessness, and they don’t have to do anything about their addiction yet.
• Powerlessness means accepting the fact that you will never be able to drink safely again and letting go of the idea that you can simply “cut down” or manage your drinking.
• In this article, we’ll explain the definition of powerlessness and why it’s so important in AA’s twelve steps process.
• Conceptually, powerlessness is also an element of 12 Step programs.
• When we admit that we are powerless over alcohol or drugs, we admit that we are living with a disease that alters the chemical makeup of the brain.

Admitting Powerlessness

There is an instructive, and important, wrinkle here, illustrated by the sibling Twelve Step program of Al-Anon. When the early recovering alcoholics met, their wives began congregating around the kitchen table wondering how the Twelve Steps might heal some of their wounds and often resentful behavior. They shared how each had pled, cried, demanded, shouted, withdrawn, over-controlled, and ignored their alcoholic husbands, but generally concluded that they too were powerless. In the wives’ case, they had to admit the reality of their absolute inability to force or cajole an alcoholic to change.

Alcoholism contributes to many physical and mental health issues, and even death.

For many addicted to alcohol and drugs, it’s difficult to admit the way addiction has made their lives unmanageable. The self-awareness that comes with realizing how bad things are and how damaging the substance abuse has been is how you can start to desire a better future for yourself. We are not meant to go through this life alone and we need other people so we how am i powerless over alcohol can be healthy, strong and independent. If you are struggling with addiction to alcohol, drugs or a combination of substances, you don’t have to deal with your problems alone. We’re available to talk 24 hours a day, and we offer a wide variety of science-based treatment programs. You aren’t powerless when it comes to entering treatment or a recovery program.

Admitting powerlessness over a narrow, but deep, part of life.

To learn more about our vision and treatments, please contact us today. Acceptance includes taking responsibility for our actions and accepting that we cannot change what has happened in the past. It’s not easy to admit this, but if we don’t accept that we are powerless, then we won’t be able to move forward. Recovery is a journey that can seem intimidating if you’re just beginning, but in AA, you just have to take it one step at a time.

If your substance use has ever put you in the hospital, you have a problem. As a part of treatment at MARR, our clients complete a First Step Inventory, which includes examples of powerlessness and unmanageability from various areas of life. This assignment starts to create awareness of how this disease damages one’s life. When you lay it all out, you will see that you did not have control in those moments. The First Step does not say that you are powerless over your actions, your decisions, or your relationships; it says that you are powerless over alcohol/drugs.

• There’s a big difference between prescribed medication and self-medicating.
• Naimi served on an advisory committee that wanted to lower the recommendation for men to one drink per day.
• Too often they are cut adrift and left seeing themselves as a loser, weak, pathetic.
• Before the admission, the alcoholic was “he/she who could drink moderately (sometimes, or eventually if they could just find the right strategy).
• Until we can accept powerlessness, we will not fully seek Power.
• For many who join Alanon, this comes as a relief, as they are told – “we didn’t cause it, can’t cure it, and can’t control it”.

Tell Someone if You Feel Like Drinking

• To drive this analogy home, let’s further assume that as the waters recede from the earth and dry land reappears, our flood survivors become determined to rebuild on the same spot.
• Ashamed to admit failure, we began hiding our use from the same people who tried to help us, and then we pushed them away.
• What happens in a group of people admitting powerlessness over addiction is a power in itself.
• These studies compare people with a gene variant that makes it unpleasant to drink to people without the gene variant.
• The concept of powerlessness can seem quite foreign, especially to those from countries like America whose culture idolizes independence and raising one’s self by their bootstraps.
• Reaching Step One through ExperienceSometimes drug use can give addicts the illusion of having control especially over their emotional life.

Recovery Advocacy

What Does it Mean to Say You’re Powerless Over Drugs and Alcohol?

Here’s what author and interventionist Jeff Jay has to say about Step One and being powerless:

• Their lives too had become unmanageable if they tried to force solutions that had no chance of working.
• For most addicts and alcoholics, reaching out for help and admitting powerlessness is the most difficult part of the recovery process by far.
• We will no longer be slaves to chemical substances, living our lives to drink and to drug and to die.
• In the early 1980s some research showed that, rather than just wait, if you address people’s motivation, they changed (you would expect that wouldn’t you? You expect that treatment would change drinkers).
• From Dry January to Sober October to bartenders getting creative with non-alcoholic cocktails, there’s a cultural vibe that supports cutting back.