12 Steps of Recovery

For a Proud Pickle

The 12 step program, found in our basic text book of Alcoholics Anonymous, will change the life of anyone who embraces it.

Are you completely pickled and can no longer dill with your life?

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

Fully accept pickled predicament and asked for help.

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

Are you, on your own, going to unpickle your self? NO! Once a pickle, always a pickle!

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

Write down all the things that have pickled you up, or you have ever pickled up and don't lie or leave anything out.

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

Honestly tell someone trustworthy how pickled you are.

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

Well, that has revealed a lot of pickled patterns. Do you want to drop those pebbles?

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

Are you are willing to live in a new way that's not all about you and your previous pickled patterns?

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

Prepare to apologize to everyone for everything that got pickled up by your being so pickled.

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

Now Apologize. Unless that would make things more pickled.

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

Watch for pickled thinking too, or behavior, and when you find yourself getting crunchy promptly admit!

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

Stay Connected to your new perspective.

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.

Work with other pickles, practicing these principles inside and outside the jar.

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 Elevator is Broken.

You will have to take the stairs.

The 12 steps encompass certain principles that, if followed, will free you from misery, however quiet or consuming the pull to your drug of choice is.  One of the best parts of this program is developing a belief in a Higher Power of your understanding.  This program asks us to consider the possibility of hope.  Hope that a different perspective is possible.  Hope that there is a different way.  No matter what your problem, the steps will give you access to The Solution.  This Solution will effortlessly form around your flaws and attributes, placing you on the path you were always intended to walk, making you, quite simply, the best version of yourself it is possible to be.  This includes good flaws, some odd thoughts, and occasional behavioral outbursts.  We aim for progress not perfection.

-Russel Brand, Recovery, Freedom from Addiction