How we work
AA Preamble (video)
What is AA? The Alcoholics Anonymous Preamble is a short definition of AA’s main purpose and is often read out at meetings.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.
Alcoholics Anonymous can help people of any age from teens to elderly and from all backgrounds and ethnic groups.
A.A. works through members telling their stories of what we used to be like, what happened and what we are like now, and often centres around attendance at A.A. meetings. The A.A. programme, known as The Twelve Steps, provides a framework for self-examination and a road to recovery, free of alcohol.
The Three Legacies of AA are: recovery, unity and service.
- The suggestions for recovery are the Twelve Steps;
- The suggestions for achieving unity are the Twelve Traditions;
- The suggestions for service are described in Twelve Concepts for World Service, The AA Service Manual and Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age.
The relative success of the AA programme seems to be due to the fact that an alcoholic who no longer drinks has an exceptional faculty for “reaching” and helping an uncontrolled drinker.
In simplest form, the AA programme operates when a recovered alcoholic passes along the story of his or her own problem drinking, describes the sobriety he or she has found in AA, and invites people who are new to AA to join the informal Fellowship.
The heart of the suggested programme of personal recovery is contained in Twelve Steps describing the experience of the earliest members of the Society:
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
- 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.
People who are new to AA are not asked to accept or follow these Twelve Steps in their entirety if they feel unwilling or unable to do so.
They will usually be asked to keep an open mind, to attend meetings at which recovered alcoholics describe their personal experiences in achieving sobriety, and to read AA literature describing and interpreting the AA programme.
AA members will usually emphasise to people who are new to AA that only problem drinkers themselves, individually, can determine whether or not they are in fact alcoholics.
At the same time, it will be pointed out that all available medical testimony indicates that alcoholism is a progressive illness, that it cannot be cured in the ordinary sense of the term, but that it can be arrested through total abstinence from alcohol in any form.