So states the 12th Step of AA. To begin, let us look at each of these three clauses which comprise the 12th Step.

The first clause begins boldly by simply presupposing that we have had a spiritual awakening as a result of having worked Steps 1 through 11. Is this a bit presumptuous? Not at all. For it is not possible to work the first eleven Steps without experiencing change in our basic belief/faith system, and it is this change that is the "spiritual awakening." The term "spiritual awakening" as used within the context of spiritual healing means the coming to the belief that we are intrinsically good and worthy of our Higher Power's love, solely by virtue of the fact that that Power created us that way. The first clause also sets the prerequisite for a full experience of working the l2th Step—having worked the first 11 Steps.

This is not to say that one cannot and does not work the 12th Step from the early days of recovery. Certainly, any truly loving, unselfish act performed for another human is a form of a 12^th Step.

The second clause refers to carrying "this message." What is "this message?" This message is simply healing through the 12 Steps. Without it we may have our own program, but it cannot be a 12 Step program.

The third clause speaks of practicing "these principles." Again, "these principles" refers to the Step themselves. AA has no other principles of recovery—none. We are given many tools to use as means to the end of incorporating the 12 Steps into our lives, including such helpful devices as telephone therapy, sponsorship, speaking commitments, leading meetings, and many more. But it is important to realize that these alone do not comprise the program of recovery. They are merely tools to help us implement the 12 Steps. The Big Book tells us that our sobriety is contingent upon one thing—our spiritual condition—not how many meetings we go to, or how many times we call our sponsor, and our spiritual condition depends upon our working the 12 Steps.

So the last of the 12 Steps reiterates the entirety of the AA program of recovery three times, lest we miss the point. The AA program is stated at the beginning of Chapter 5 of The Big Book entitled "How it works." When all is said and done, the message that keeps us sober and sane is none other than the 12 Steps to recovery.

There are two actions stated in the 12th Step, "carrying the message" and "putting these principles to work in all our affairs". In reality, these are the same thing. The second simply states the method we use to accomplish the first. We carry the message most importantly by putting these principles into our lives and by becoming a power of example to others. Attraction rather than promotion is the guiding principle of our public relations policy. We do not "sell" sobriety; we "live" sobriety so that others who are ready will want it. We work our own program of recovery so that we can be a living example of a sober, happy life.

The prepositional phrase "in all our affairs" seems innocent enough on first reading, but it has profound implications. It is like the "elastic clause" of the U.S. Constitution in that it literally explodes the rest of the 12 Steps into all areas of our consciousness. For example: In the beginning stages of recovery from alcoholism we often instruct newcomers who are working the 1st Step to try to connect alcohol abuse with unmanageability. And so we should. But viewed through the elastic clause of Step 12 we can clearly see that the connection between alcohol or drug abuse and unmanageability accounts for only a subset of our total unmanageability. Now the connection must be made between our unmanageability and the presumption of power or control whether or not a given situation has any connection with alcohol or drugs. This fundamental connection is evident when we stop to realize that even years after we have stopped drinking or using, we still experience unmanageability in our lives. All of that unmanageability was not caused by alcohol or drugs, but all of it is in some way connected to our desire to be in complete control of our own lives.

In one sense we have been doing 12th Step work in a limited way all along. Every loving action we have performed in any way has been an expression of the 12th Step, from making coffee at meetings to listening to a newcomer who painfully asks us for help. Any expression of unconditional love is an expression of this principle.

The nature of so-called "12th Step work" is changing from the early days of the program. As detoxification and rehabilitation centers are doing more and more of the initial work of drying out alcoholics we have fewer "wet drunks" coming into recovery. Formerly much time was spent working with these wet drunks. More often now we see the addict after two to six weeks of clean time has elapsed. Most of our 12th Step work with an alcoholic early in recovery consists of providing emotional support and simple behavior modification tools to stay dry and clean. These are given in the AA book Living Sober. These tools are not the AA program of recovery, but preliminary tools to get the newcomer dry enough to begin to work the Steps. As the newcomer passes through the withdrawal stage and becomes less muddled, we can begin to carry the message of the 12 Steps to sobriety.

The 12th Step points us to another fundamental of spiritual healing—we must give it away to keep it. This sounds absurd because we all grow up to believe that if we give part of a commodity away we are left with less of it. Sobriety and healing are not a commodity—they are unconditional love, and can only be actualized by being given freely away. This concept is somewhat like a new idea which only becomes a powerful force when shared with others. If we are all part of a Transcendent reality, then to give to someone else is to give to oneself. The old axiom applies that we cannot teach what we do not know and we cannot share what we have not experienced. Spiritually, giving and receiving are the same thing, and indeed we receive healing and sobriety by the very act of giving it to others. Ultimately, we give the gift of sobriety to others because we benefit by so doing. We get sober for our own benefit, and we continue to heal by carrying the message for the same reason—our own benefit.

Note that on page I of Living Sober the following text begins the book: "This booklet does not offer a plan for recovery from alcoholism. The Alcoholics Anonymous Steps that summarize its program of recovery are set forth in detail in the books Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Those Steps are not interpreted here, nor are the processes they cover discussed in this booklet."

The 12 Steps present us with a way of living that is spiritually based. But they are even more than that. They present us with a justification for our healing and our sobriety, and ultimately a reason for existence, a reason for being.

When we first come to recovery most of us have no idea why we are alive on this planet. Were we just accidents? Were we supposed to do something? Or to be something? Or are we here to simply survive as long as possible in the meantime? We did not know and often did not really care. But we were sure of one thing—we were hurting and wanted the never-ending pain to stop.

The 12th Step at first seemed to be good and kind and generous, but not much more. As time passes we begin to understand that the l2th Step explains why our Higher Power chose us to receive the gift of sobriety and healing and why we were placed here from the beginning. To become healed and to do that by being a healing channel for others. Our healing continues and deepens as we freely give the gift of sobriety to others who ask for it. That is a wonderful reason for being.

An educated guess (for there are no reliable statistics) is that only about one in twenty-five active alcoholics ever achieve sound sobriety. Many of us used to wonder why we were chosen instead of the twenty-four or so other alcoholics to be saved from the misery of an alcoholic end—jail, an insane asylum, or a coffin. We now understand that all people are given the opportunity to be healed. Whether or not we choose to accept it is our choice, not our Higher Power's. So what is the difference between us and the twenty-four other alcoholics on the street? Nothing at all, except for our willingness to choose again and let ourselves be. Our free will allows us to decide how we will react to and feel about our reality, but it does not allow us to determine what our reality is to be. We cannot change the fact of our alcoholism any more than they can, but we can choose to allow the Transcendent energy to heal our spirits so that we can live soberly with our alcoholism.

The 12th Step is ultimately the reason for working the first eleven. It is not the only reason for getting sober in the first place, but the reason for being alive at all. We are healed to become healers. We are loved to become lovers. We are forgiven that we may forgive. We are given this day to live in peace and serenity that we may give the gift of peace and serenity to others—to carry the message.

Now we have reached our journey's beginning. The 12 Steps are processes, not goals. We never complete them, but we live them. Each Step sets in motion a dynamic which has the power to help change our whole way of perceiving ourselves, our notion of a Higher Power, and the world around us. The spiritual awakening initiates an ongoing healing dynamic, not an accomplished achievement. We are constantly emerging, growing, changing reality. We are not trapped in a static historical event. Having completed our initial working of the 12 Steps, our task is now to continue to put these principles to work in all areas of our lives. We can no longer compartmentalize our lives, living one set of values in one area while living another set in another area. The 12 Steps are a unified, healthy way to live, not just a way to stay dry. Ultimately, the 12 Step program of recovery is not about putting down the drink and/or the drugs—although that is a prerequisite for working the program. Getting clean and sober is a means to an end. We must remember that the purpose of the 12 Steps—and the program as a whole—is the same as the purpose for the Big Book, stated on page 45 where the reader is informed that the book's "main object is to enable ,you to find a Power greater than yourself which will solve your problem... " Amen. So be it.

What with all the buzz words and trendy cliches that bombard our ears and our eyes it is becoming a terribly confusing experience just to walk into a bookstore and try to choose from all the wealth of self-help books on everything from psychology to spirituality. They usually are grouped indiscriminately on a shelf labeled "recovery" or "pop psyche" or "new age". It seems as though every time an author coins a new term for a supposedly new idea the moguls of Madison Avenue go berserk with joy. A friend of mine in the publishing industry told me of yet another label in the business which amused me to no end—"California Vague". While somewhat descriptive, it wasn't marketable enough. So "New Age" was born. Like Co-dependency and ACoA, New Age has a much more saleable ring to it than "California Vague." Having said that, and at the risk of supplying yet another new term. I would like to posit for your consideration the term ,'Higher Power Esteem". But take heart—at the present moment I have no intention of writing another book on the subject or starting a new 12 Step fellowship to market the idea.

Today the recovery industry is a multimillion dollar business, growing bigger every day. What started out over seventy-five years ago as a small band of people trying to stay alive one day at a time has mushroomed into a whole tapestry of interwoven fellowships and professional disciplines. But common to all of the many flavors of recovery movements is the search for a sense of spirituality, the search for self, and, ultimately, the search for the Transcendent. In the early days that was a real problem for much of the therapeutic community whose attitudes were largely shaped by Freud and the post-Freudians who regarded spirituality as a neurotic symptom. That only began to change with the advent of Carl Jung. But the really big change in the therapeutic community's attitude toward the recovery movement came when such things as alcoholism became accepted for reimbursement by third party providers like insurance companies. All of a sudden rehabs began to spring up everywhere and therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists by the scores who had formerly been either mildly ambivalent or outright antagonistic toward the movement became instant allies with the various 12 Step recovery programs and instant experts at treating addictive disorders. And so we have our therapists telling us unceasingly that we have a self esteem problem, and we have recovery programs telling us we have a spiritual disease. How can we reconcile these? Are they really mutually exclusive?

I propose that spirituality and the search for an authentic self are not at odds at all, but rather they are merely two ways of approaching the same perceived reality. The case is rather like looking at the same diamond through different facets of its surface. The color refractions may be different, but it is the same precious gem at which we cast our gaze. I further posit that the search for our Authentic Self and the search for a Higher Power are one and the same.

For the moment let us turn our reflections back to an early stratum of our shared cultural belief system—the Creation myth in Genesis and its Hebrew presuppositions. Recognize it or not, our culture is shaped by our shared mythological inheritance. 20th century biblical criticism has shown us that in the ancient Hebrew concept God was so awesome and powerful that He could not even be looked upon directly without facing certain death. One could not even touch the Ark of the Covenant without being struck down by the pure power of direct confrontation with the Almighty. In the earliest Old Testament literature God could not even be given a name except the Hebrew form of the verb to be, for to name this thing was to describe it, and God could not be described because He could not even be confronted directly.

The ancient Hebrews did not isolate themselves from their notion of God at all. Far from it. Their creation myth, the foundation of everything that was to come in their theological thought system, insists that while we cannot directly look upon God, we can look at His image. We are created in the very imago Dei, the image of God. It is as though God gave to us at creation a core, a center which is very much like a mirror which reflects indirectly our Creator. It is that core, that center, which is the authentic self and which is the very image of God, imprinted at creation in the heart of humanity. It is this basic reality which later expressed itself in the wisdom literature as Personified Wisdom or Sophia, and was later developed in the New Testament literature as the Holy Spirit. Its most highly developed form is seen in the Johannine literature as the Paraclete, the very indwelling of the Spirit of Christ in the believer.

Carl Jung in his book Aion, Researches Into The Phenomenology Of The Self, in describing the archetypes of the collective unconscious says, ''The self on the other hand. is a God image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one. Of this the early Christian spirit was not ignorant. Otherwise Clement of Alexandria could never have said that he who knows himself knows God." This is not to say that God has no existence outside of our minds, as our Freudian friends would have us to believe. It is to say that the closest perception of God we can have at all is by gazing into that mirror image of God which is imprinted inside each one of us. It is the task of the recovery process, including l2 Step programs and psychotherapy, to help us clean away the debris which prevents us from being able to see that mirror reflection clearly. That debris that gets in the way by encrusting our inner mirror with layers of corruption includes all of those things that psychology has described so well to us beginning with Freud and including all of our defense mechanisms, addictions, projections, repressions, ACoA issues, incest issues, and all the rest. The fact remains that to find God we must be willing to do the work to find our authentic selves. Conversely, when we begin to find out who we really are, we will also begin to see more clearly the reflection of the Creator who made us who we are. It has been said of Carl Jung that he forged a synthesis between psychotherapy and spirituality, but that implies that the two were ever really separate in the first place. What Jung demonstrated was that a depth psychology without a spiritual base was foundationless and that a spirituality without psychic health is an absurd contradiction in terms.

It is hardly surprising that for many of us coming into recovery our concept of God "as we [don’t] understand Him" is tightly bound up with our childhood experience. After all, for our formative years the only true "Higher Power" we know of consists of our primary care givers. The first awareness we have of any power greater than ourselves is that of our parents. Given the patriarchal society in which we all grew up, that translates into Daddy as God. If Daddy was an alcoholic, or an addict, or a co-dependent, it is a sure bet that we came out of the experience with a pretty warped understanding of God. It was unavoidable and completely subliminal. I am reminded of listening to a client tell me extensively about his relationship with his alcoholic father as a child. I then guided his monologue to other things long enough for him to forget his words about his father. Then, I questioned him about his belief about a Higher Power. After he spent some time describing what he believed about God, he was completely astonished when I pointed out to him that he had used the very same descriptive adjective when describing God as when describing his father.

In my work with people in recovery I often speak of our God esteem level. How often have you noticed that on days when you feel like you would have to reach up to touch bottom, at that very same time it seems that God is nowhere to be found? It is predictable. We all go through periods where our sense of spirituality and the presence of any Transcendent being is non-existent, and it is during those same periods of time that our self esteem level is under the carpet. There is no accident here, because the two are the same thing, and that realization gives us a clue as to what we might be able to do about it. When my own defense mechanisms (also known as "character defects") have forced me into a roadblock and faced me with my own low self esteem issues to the point that I am getting nowhere, I can often break the roadblock by working instead on my God esteem issue. The l1th Step, which deals directly with prayer and meditation, is a powerful tool when used to work on low self esteem issues. It is impossible to work on one's conscious contact with the God of his or her [non-]understanding without precipitating a change in one's self image, for the image of the self is the image of God, the imago Dei. After all, how is it possible for me to feel anger, resentment, jealousy or fear if I am firm in my gut level belief that I am a child of the most powerful force in the universe? Obviously, it is not. By clearing away more of the debris from my internal mirror, I not only see a clearer reflection of my Creator, but I also see a clearer picture of my authentic self.

One might object, "is not this in direct contradiction to our work in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Steps where we must acknowledge that we are not God? Isn't there a contradiction here?" Not at all. We speak of the authentic self as being the reflection of God, not God himself. We speak of being created in the image of God, not as Gods unto ourselves.

At this point let us stop to consider the nature of the fear that all of us who come into recovery have—the fear described by Bill Wilson as the "fear of becoming the hole in the doughnut." His colloquial phrase is very descriptive of the reality that we all experience, which is the fear that at our very center is a void, a gaping emptiness. This is simply another way of saying that when we come into recovery we have no developed, defined self concept. Since we have no defined self concept, we have a terrible time drawing boundaries. We have tried all our lives to fill the void we fear exists at our core by playing roles (Jung referred to these roles as our persona). When the fear becomes intense, we try to mood alter the pain with drugs, or alcohol, or sex, or food, or anything which will draw our attention away from what we fear is the void that is inside. When we first come into recovery we may even try to fill the imaginary void with our 12 Step program work. We may try to fill the void with religion. The basic reality of recovery is that whenever we use anything (including religion or the program itself) to alter our mood, we are using it addictively. We can and do use almost anything addictively, and in the beginning stages of recovery we not only may, but probably will use the program itself to mood alter our pain. At least the attempt to fill the imaginary void by filling our lives with program is not likely to get us drunk. We even advise newcomers to substitute going to meetings for going to bars. But this is still not the real objective of recovery. Substituting a relatively harmless addiction for a harmful one is the first step in the long road which ultimately leads to the finding of our authentic selves, and the sudden realization that our core is not a meaningless, empty void, but it is instead the very image of our Creator. In speaking of AA, the original 12 Step program, Bill Wilson is quoted as having said that the objective is to put AA into our lives, not to put our lives into AA.

Notwithstanding the above line of thought, it is also important not to confuse psychotherapy and 12 Step recovery. While the end toward which they both work is the same, they are not interchangeable. 12 Step meetings are not group therapy sessions. Therapy involves opening up on an emotional level which, if not facilitated by a trained therapist, can be outright dangerous. 12 Step meetings are primarily educational and social. We share our experience, strength and hope. But we do not play the Amateur Therapist game—or at least, we should not play it. Most forms of psychotherapeutic work take place on the emotional level, and addictive disease is a three-level pathology—physical, emotional and spiritual. The 12 Steps provide tools to help us deal with all three levels. Our disease includes behaviors, feelings and beliefs all of which need treatment. On the behavioral level, we begin by treating the physical symptoms of our disease with behavior modification tools. On the feeling level, we treat the emotional component of our disease with group interaction, honest sharing and allowing ourselves to be taught and guided by others. On the spiritual level, we treat the diseased belief system by the use of spiritual disciplines of prayer and meditation, self examination, admission of fault, and forgiveness of self and others. The 12 Steps offer tools to work on all three levels.

When understood in this way, psychotherapy can be a tremendous ally in the process of t2 Step recovery, providing that we do not confuse the two. They are not the same, even though the two have the same thing as their goals. When we reach the point of blockage in our recovery process, that "dark night of the soul" spoken of in the mystical literature of the monastic tradition, often the block can be removed by therapeutic intervention if that block is indeed an emotional one. But the process of recovery is one which, while at times seemingly lengthy and arduous, is also creative and exciting. The very fact that we never get totally well also means that there is no end to the depth of healing that we can experience. As we begin to clean the debris from our internal mirror, we begin to see more clearly who we are as we begin to see the reflection of our Creator who made us what we are.

God grant us the serenity

To accept the things we cannot change

Courage to change the things we can

And wisdom to know the difference.