What's especially amazing is how so many people who weren't Christians became one while going through the program. The whole thought process of there being a higher power is something many of them hadn't bought into before going through the program. The fact is, if you want to see someone truly change consistently for the better, a conversion of spirit is the absolute key.
Here's a rundown of the 12 steps:
Step 1: Admit to being powerless over the drug. The importance of this is if someone continues to believe they can conquer their addiction on their own, they’ll continue to fail.
Step 2: Accept that a higher power, in whatever form, will restore your sanity. If they don’t believe that a power much stronger than themselves will get them through any challenges, then they’ll never have the confidence they need to overcome addictions. Hope is critical to the process.
Step 3: Make a decision to turn your will and life over to a higher power. This goes with step two in that a person must invoke a more powerful source for change.
Step 4: Take a moral inventory of yourself. Humans are strange. We too often find it very easy to point out the faults of others while looking past our own. We must know what we’re up against. We also most understand humility through recognizing our own faults and admitting we need God to make progress on improving our short comings.
Step
5: Admit to a higher power, another human, and yourself, the nature of your wrongdoings. Confessing to someone else our sins, is one of the hardest things we’ll ever do, but it’s a crucial tool in wanting to do better because we don’t want to have a bunch of bad things to confess and be embarrassed about; basically, it gives us an added incentive to try and do the right things.
Step 6: Accept that a higher power will remove your character defects. This is about not just believing in yourself but believing the one way to truth and healing is to believe that God has the power to accomplish positive change in our lives.
Step 7: Humbly request the higher power remove your shortcomings. If a person does this with a believing heart, then it shows that he or she does believe in a higher power and God will bless it.
Step 8: List people you hurt during your addiction and be willing to make amends. People who reach this step knows how much it hurts. We don’t like to relive our mistakes. We don’t want to be reminded how we’ve hurt other people. This part of the process is cleansing because it makes us think about how we’ve failed and how it impacted other people, giving us more reason to try and do the right things and not hurt others again due to our addictions.
Step 9: Make amends to those people unless it would harm them. This one is a reminder that although we need step eight to move on, that not everyone would benefit through our confessions and apologies, and we need to consider this before confronting them.
Step 10: Continue to take a personal inventory, and when you’re wrong, admit it. There’s immense power in admitting our weaknesses, and for stress purposes, it’s way better to get the apology over with.
Step 11: Use prayer and meditation to connect with the higher power. Talk about tapping into power. Even people who aren’t spiritual per se, know the many benefits of meditation. Prayer is like making a phone call to God. You don’t call someone who you don’t believe is there. When we invoke the Holy Spirit and strike up a conversation with God, we tap into an energy/light source that is mesmerizing and life changing.
Step 12: Carry the message of AA and NA to others and continue to practice the principles of the 12 steps in your daily life. The thing about talking something up is that you talk yourself up each time you do. It gives a person added motivation to continue the journey towards self-actualization.
After all these years, The 12-Step Program is still going strong and changing lives for the better. It’s helped bring families back together. It’s saved marriages. It’s saved lives. It’s helped reduce our prison population. How amazing is that?!