Step 1: How can it help me? I'm not an alcoholic.

Step 1:
We admitted we were powerless over our Hurts, our Habits, and our Hang-ups,
that our lives had become unmanageable.

Is it not interesting that when you replace the word "alcohol" with the 3Hs (Hurts, Habits, and Hang-ups) that meaning of the 1st Step starts to hit home?

We are all broken. The moment Eve took a bite of that apple everything changed. Now, we just try our best to get through it, but life has a way of throwing things at us that make it difficult to cope.

Most of us are raised in a fairly dysfunctional home, or maybe we went through some traumatic event when we were younger. During that time we found what worked for us; what got us through it all. A fair amount of the time, what got us through was not healthy, nor was it affective.

As we grew, we hung on to this coping method. We may have modified it some, but it is still recognizable. You may have the same exact way of dealing with things as you did when you were a kid. However, as I got older, I found something that worked better for me: Alcohol.

What most people don't realize is that had I chose something else, I'd be no better off. I might not have lost 5 years of my life to blackouts and poor decisions, but I still would have been coping instead of dealing.

Drinking was one of my Hurts, Habits, and Hang-ups. What is yours? Anger? Laziness? Maybe you deal with everything by taking nothing seriously. Maybe spending money takes away the bad feelings you have after you get in a fight with your husband. Maybe you don't know how to handle the feeling of being overweight. I could go on a name an endless amount of things that you could be doing to deal with life. Things that are not healthy.

So, what are you powerless over? What has made your life unmanageable?

Fear not my fellow messed up brethren! There are 11 more steps helps you get your life back!

Johnny