Understanding the 12 Steps Why They Are Still Important

It might just be my perception, but it seems that Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12 steps seem to be out of fashion these days. Many people have recovered through AA and many more use it as an integral part of their support system.

Here is an article by the nationally known researcher and founder of Relapse Prevention Therapy, Terence Gorski.

Mr Gorski has recently joined the staff od Challenges Treatment Program in Ft Lauderdale, FL.

Understanding the Twelve Steps Why It’s Still Important
By Terence T. Gorski

The Twelve Steps were the first comprehensive guidelines for recovery that ever worked.  Prior to the development of the Twelve Steps, recovery from Alcoholism was still pretty much a hit-or-miss affair depending upon who you could get as a sponsor and how much of the verbal culture of AA your sponsor had correctly internalized. 

This is shown in the fact that during the first four years after its inception there were three functioning AA groups, in Akron Ohio,  and Cleveland Ohio.  It took these three groups, in spite of the dedication of many sober alcoholics, four years to produce 100 sober alcoholics in those three founding groups.

Early in 1939 Bill Wilson published the book Alcoholics Anonymous – The Text which explicitly explained the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and gave examples of how real recovering alcoholics used the steps in their recovery.  This book and the principles f the 12 steps it contained were warmly received by the print media and by 1950 there were 100,000 recovering alcoholics that could be found world-wide.

It was the writing, publication, and simple examples of how to apply the steps in the real world that allowed AA such rapid growth and expansion in resulted in so many previously “hopeless” alcoholics to find sobriety.

Many additional surveys and research projects in Project Match, a major national study completed the SAMHSA in 1993 showed that outpatients who received 12-Step Facilitation were more likely to remain completely abstinent in the year following treatment than out patients who received 9 other types of treatment.

Unfortunately, many recent “science-based” approaches to the treatment of alcoholism have left AA out of the picture.  This is unfortunate, because simple 12-Step Facilitation guides, such as Understanding the Twelve Steps by Terence T. Gorski and material published by the New York Office of Alcoholics Anonymous can significant increase recovery rates during the critical first year when rates of relapse are the highest.

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