Four Reasons that Many People Find the 12-Steps Helpful

The largest peer support organization is Alcoholics Anonymous with more than 2 million members and 123,000 weekly groups.  AA often evokes strong reactions from people, with many loving it and others hating it.  Regardless of what your think about AA, I would suggest that you, as a Peer Support Specialist, need to know their core tool for recover – the 12-steps. 

 The 12-steps have been used by millions of people to rebuild their lives. Anything that is so popular is worth looking at to see why people find it helpful. Again, you may or may not agree with the positions of AA or the beliefs reflected in the 12-steps, but you still should be curious to know what is embedded in any tool that people find so helpful.

 Let’s examine the steps, and look for the ingredients that may be driving their popularity. 

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. 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.

12. 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.

·        The 12-steps frame a story.  People need stories and rely on “narratives” to understand their experience and guide their behaviors.  The 12-steps describe a journey that people are encouraged to take.  This is related to the “hero’s journey” described in myths by Joseph Campbell (Campbell, 2008).  The “story” calls for courage to face a frightening and dangerous reality and gives a description of where that journey will take the person.  As a Peer Support Specialist, you’ll use your own recovery stories to help sketch out an overlying story of what recovery looks like.  Help your clients to see the deeper meanings in recovery.  This will enable them to see the task as larger and more meaningful than simply overcoming a specific illness.

·        If you look at these twelve statements, you can recognize some core elements in most recovery-oriented services and interventions.  These include the following five key messages:

1.     Honesty is critical:  We all must be honest with ourselves and others in order to move into, and progress in recovery. (see steps 1,4,5,8,9,10).

2.     Success is possible:  Hope for change must be present if people are to take action (see step 2).

3.     We must take active concrete steps to change:  recovery is not passive (step 3,4,5,6,7,8,9).

4.     We are each responsible for our choices and actions:  On-going accountability is established (steps 4,8,9,10).

5.     An eventual focus on serving other people becomes an active element of recovery.  We benefit from something larger than our own welfare to work towards.  This provides a larger meaning and more compelling motive (step 12).

As a Peer Support Specialist, you’ll want to keep these elements in virtually everything you do to support your clients. They need to hear from you about the importance of honesty, the reality of hope, the need to take active steps to recover, the fact that they must take on responsibility for their lives and, finally, the long-term goal of becoming a benefit to other people.

·        You will also notice a paradox in the messaging.  Several of the steps give the message that you are not in control of your behavior (steps 1,2 and 3). People often experience mental illness or substance use as being out of their control.  They often have tried unsuccessfully to change the related behaviors and feel demoralized by their inability to force the changes they seek. 

At the same time, the 12-steps give the message that you are in control of your behavior (steps 8,9,10,11). People need both to admit that they feel out of control, and that they need to resume control.  The 12-steps are one way to create a way of understanding how these two apparently conflicting messages fit.  As a Peer Support Specialist, you’ll want to help your clients accept the realities that they were not “in control” of their illness but that they are responsible, and so they are “in control”, of their lives now.  If you miss either element, your clients will struggle.

·        You will notice that the 12-steps point to things that are bigger than the individual.  Most prominently they point to God as “a Power greater than ourselves”.  They also point to the needs of other people, who we can benefit.

 People need to have a reason to recover.  Many people choose to begin recovery in order to benefit those they love.  It may be their family or their friends, or to honor loved ones who are no longer alive, or to allow them to live an “honorable” life…. All of which point to things larger than the individual. 

 As a Peer Support Specialist, a key part of your job is to help people to identify those things that are larger than themselves and that motivate them to pursue recovery. 

·        You will also notice that these steps involve connecting with other people (see steps 5,8,9,12).  Illness rarely occurs in a vacuum, and recovery virtually never occurs without collaboration and communication with others. 

 As a Peer Support Specialist, you are going to be very active in connecting your clients with other people, and encouraging your clients to embrace the reality that repairing old connections and building new connections is essential to a lasting recovery.

In summary, I want to encourage you to become very familiar with the 12-steps, not because you necessarily agree with them, but because (1) your clients are likely to know them and to have used them and (2) the 12-steps contain strategies that relate to your work as a Peer Support Specialist.  Knowing this tool will improve your ability to help your clients, which should be the goal of everything we do.

REFERENCES

Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (Vol. 17). New World Library.