My friends, you're about to hear the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous explained in just 12 minutes. I'm Jerry Banfield, and I've been sober for nine and a half years in Alcoholics Anonymous. The number one thing you need to know is that being sober is awesome. I know that when you're newly sober or trying to quit drinking, like I did so many times in the past, it's easy to think, "Man, sobriety sucks. I'm really missing out. Life's passing me by. I've failed. How am I ever going to have fun and enjoy my life again?"
What I can tell you today is that I love being sober. I love the life I have. I love the wife I have, the kids I have, the house I have, the work I do, and the health my body's in. All the things I came in with and felt hopeless about when I got sober have been fixed. I've even had to make new dreams, because my life has gotten so good.
Doing these 12 steps is the way that this works, and going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is where you can find people to help you with it. But getting an understanding of the steps is the most crucial part. In my experience, you can actually do the steps without even having a sponsor and without even reading the whole book, using what I'm about to share here. It will work better and be more thorough and effective if you can really apply this process with other people. I hope this helps you understand how I've done this, and how you can do it too.
Step One: Getting Honest About Powerlessness
Step one in Alcoholics Anonymous is very simple, but denial can be one of the hardest things to get through. It was for me. For many years, everybody else in my life was sure that I was an alcoholic. They had no denial about it. My father, who was also an alcoholic and who got sober at 40 without Alcoholics Anonymous, had told me, "Jerry, you abuse alcohol." I remember it hurt my feelings. I couldn't deny it, but I also didn't want it to be true.
Step one is about getting honest and stopping that line of thinking that asks, "Well, what do I want to be true?" Instead, you look at the facts. The facts are that if you drink alcohol in a way that causes problems in your life that wouldn't have happened without alcohol, I think that's enough evidence that either you're an alcoholic, or the safest, smartest thing to do would be to just not drink at all. And if it's ever difficult to not drink at all, then alcoholism exists there. There's powerlessness over alcohol.
What we've seen the longer Alcoholics Anonymous has been around is that people don't have to go all the way down the drain to the very bottom. The earlier you can catch your alcoholism, the fewer consequences you might have. I never went to jail as a result of my alcoholism, and I never got arrested as a result of it. And yet I had signs that were all over the place. I wrecked a car drunk driving, but I got away with it. They even let me become a police officer afterward, so I thought, "It doesn't really count, does it?" But as an alcoholic, I lost jobs and relationships, I hurt myself, and I caused so many problems for others. If I hadn't been drinking, most of those things at least wouldn't have happened. That's evidence of powerlessness over alcohol.
If you can't just easily stop drinking and never think about it, never worry about it, and never struggle with staying sober, then you're probably experiencing powerlessness over alcohol. The easiest way to test that out is to see if you can stay sober. If it's really super easy, and you never change your mind and forget all the reasons you should never drink again, that's one thing. But if you do change your mind and forget, that's proof that not only are you powerless over alcohol, but that your sober life is unmanageable.
That was the hardest thing for me to stomach. I thought that if I just quit drinking, I was a great guy with no problems. What I realized is that I used to struggle with wanting to drink even when I was sober, because I didn't like being in my own head and my own body throughout the day. When the pain would come up of hating myself, being frustrated with life, and hating others, drinking was my solution to get through it. That's why it was so hard to give up.
That's where we begin to see, in step one, that if you really do it thoroughly, you realize: I am insane. I know I should never drink again. That would be the only smart thing to do, the only way to take care of myself and prevent all these problems. And yet my mind still fantasizes about it and really wants to do it, and I have a hard time. That's insanity. Real step one is looking in the mirror and realizing, "I'm crazy. Sober, with nothing in me, I'm crazy."
Steps Two and Three: Hope and a Decision
Step two is looking around and seeing other people at AA meetings. You see people who were crazy. Maybe they're still a little crazy, but you can see what I saw, which is, "Wow, these people used to be crazy like me, and they're not anymore. That's amazing." Step two is that simple thing of looking around at meetings and realizing other people have been as crazy as me, and they've been restored to sanity, and I want that.
Step three is a decision that I'm going to do what it takes to get what they have. When I walked into my second AA meeting, which was nine years after my first meeting, I had walked into the first one thinking, "No, I'll just keep being crazy, there's no problem here." By my second meeting, I knew I was really messed up. I walked in and saw people who were happy and clearly weren't crazy anymore, and I thought, "I want what they have." Step three is just that decision: I want what they have, and I'll do whatever it takes to get it.
Steps Four and Five: Inventory and Honesty
Step four is, "Okay, let me figure out what I've got. What exactly do I have?" And that's comprehensive. It's not just, "Well, why do I suck so much, and what are all these resentments?" When I did my fourth step, I wrote a 10,000-word honest story of my life. For the first time, I looked at my whole life from birth to that day. I didn't lie or hide about anything. I wrote everything I thought should be in a story of my life, as if it were a movie, or as if it were told from God's point of view. This is how my life looks from start to finish.
Step five is, "Okay, I'm going to talk with somebody about my life." I'm going to talk with them especially about the things I don't want to talk about: the times I've harmed myself or others, or when bad things have happened to me. I'm going to talk about all the things I really don't want to talk about, that I'm scared to talk about, with someone I trust can handle it. I found people in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings who I realized I could tell my entire life story to completely honestly, not holding anything back and not minimizing anything, just being totally honest, and they could handle it.
I even started the fifth step before I had a sponsor. I just started raising my hand and sharing about the surprising trends I'd found in my life story. For a guy who just thinks he's nice and isn't doing anything wrong except drinking too much, you write that whole life story out and think, "Wow, this hasn't been going so well, and I've been a part of everything that's happened."
Steps Six and Seven: Ready to Change
That gets us to step six, where we start to see, "I don't want to keep acting the way I've been acting. I don't want to keep drinking. I don't want to keep being crazy sober either. And I'm ready to change." That's what step six is really about: saying, "I'm ready to change. I'm ready to stop being afraid. I'm ready to stop being crazy. I'm ready to start loving myself and loving other people." This is where the fifth step can give us a vision into the sixth step. When we talk with somebody else who's been through this process, we see how they feel about their life, and that's where I thought, "I want to feel how they feel about their life. I want to be how they're being."
Step seven is very similar to step three. It's, "All right, I'm going to do the work. I'm going to do whatever it takes to change. I'll do whatever it takes to be a person I'm proud of, to create a mind that I like spending all day with, to create a body I like being in all day. I'm going to take control of my life." If you need to pray to God and say, "God, please, I'll do anything to be free from these defects of character," and if you want to read the seventh step prayer, all that stuff is helpful. To me, the seventh step is, "Look, I'm ready to be free of this crap from the past. I'm going to use it as experience, and I'm going to go forward and be the kind of person I really want to be and am proud of being."
Steps Eight, Nine, and Ten: Making Amends and Staying Current
In step eight, we look around and take inventory, especially of our relationships and where we've hurt people. What's most important, to me, is to identify the people we have ongoing relationships with that we want to keep having relationships with, and who we've hurt. These are the people where we can start being a different person and changing. For me, it was looking at my wife and my mother especially, and then my brother and friends and other family. These are the people I've really hurt with my drinking, and these are the people I'm going to make amends to.
In step nine, I start making amends by first being honest about how I acted before. The things I lied about and tried to hide, I bring those out in the open. Even if in the short term it creates pain, now we have honesty. Now we have transparency. Now you see what I was doing before, you see that I want to go forward and not do any of that stuff, and you see that I want to have a healthy, happy, supportive relationship. I want to be the kind of person my brother describes today when he says to me, "Everybody gets along with you, Jer. You used to be a real jerk, but now everybody gets along with you." That's working these steps. That's when you know you've gotten into the ninth step: when people find it easy to get along with you.
Step ten is where I continue to take inventory of what's going on with me on a moment-to-moment basis. If I'm disturbed, then I slow down and step in, and I ask: what's going on?
When something goes wrong, I've found the most effective thing I can do is immediately ask for help, set an intention, or simply experience the emotion and move forward. In my experience, the problems usually start in one of two places: when somebody hurts my feelings, or when I get scared. Those are the two situations where I tend to get completely selfish and delusional. So the first step in catching it is step ten, where I notice, "Oh, I'm in this crazy mindset again." Once I see it, I tell myself I will do whatever it takes to get out of that mindset, to learn from it, and to move forward while actually feeling the feelings.
Sharing It Out Loud
A very effective way to do that, in my experience, is to share about it: talk about it at a meeting, call somebody on the phone, or tell somebody in person. The more I practice it, the easier and easier it gets.
Step Eleven: Prayer and Meditation
Then we get into the part of life that I think is truly amazing, which is step eleven. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, which to me means conscious contact with the human collective, with the bigger reality. From there I start setting very clear intentions through prayer. I'll say, "I'll do whatever it takes to have a healthy body. If I have to change my diet, whatever it takes." I work this process on all the different parts of my life, deepening it alongside sobriety. I'll do whatever it takes to have a very happy, loving, productive, sober life. I'll do whatever it takes to be a husband I'm proud to be, a father I'm proud to be, a person online I'm proud to be.
I set that intention, and then meditation, to me, is simply listening. Once I've set the intention, I get quiet and I listen. I've seen people do great things with this approach. Someone might say, "I want a really loving partner in my life. I'm going to prepare myself to receive them." That's the prayer. And then the meditation is being quiet and paying attention, watching for the guidance and instruction from the universe.
Step Twelve: Carrying the Message
That takes us to step twelve, where we have a spiritual awakening to the truth that I am one with God, that we are all one. I've come to believe I'm much more than a mind, a body, and a story. We're all connected. And now I'm going to carry this message to alcoholics who are still suffering, and I'm going to keep practicing everything I've learned in Alcoholics Anonymous in all areas of my life.
So that's exactly what I'm doing right here: carrying the message. If you want to see more of how I've been living this out day to day, you can follow along with my Life playlist. I hope this was useful for you.