I have yet to meet someone that hasn’t come to a recovery program for the sole purpose of trying to find healing from an addiction. Whether it’s AA, NA, OA, SLAA, CA, Al-Anon, CoDA, or any other program that was formed based upon the 12 Steps, there is a common language used in each of them to guide a person to that healing. And one of the greatest things a person finds in all of these programs as they begin their own path of recovery is something called “The Promises”.
The following is the list of the promises as they are laid out in just about all 12 Step literature:
1. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
2. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
3. We will comprehend the word Serenity.
4. We will know peace.
5. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.
6. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.
7. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
8. Self-seeking will slip away.
9. Our whole attitude and outlook on life will change.
10. Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us.
11. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
12. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
For the longest time, I thought these promises were bogus. I figured they were just some type of mumbo-jumbo that were written tons of years ago and held no purpose anymore. I often heard many people in meetings read and talk about them and how much their lives have actually changed to match what those statements were saying. What I didn’t realize is just how true each of those 12 promises were until I began to really do the work in my own recovery.
Looking back I realize now there was a gateway I had to pass through to begin to see these promises coming to fruition in my own life. I always had the key to this gateway, but I was too afraid to use it. It came down to a decision I continued to make on some level in my life of following self-will versus God’s will.
Living in self-will is what led me to all of my addictions in the first place. It’s what got me in trouble all the time. It’s what caused me fights, anger, and rage. It’s what disrupted my entire life. And for most of it, I tried to maintain at least a certain percentage of it because I was too afraid to allow a Higher Power the ability to run the show.
It took a lot more of me getting broken before I was finally able to say I was done. But when I did, and when I finally admitted my own self-will had gotten me nowhere, I sought out in every way I could in my own life how to live in God’s will. Since then, it’s like I suddenly have understood the language constantly being spoken at all of the recovery meetings I attended. It was almost as if I had a universal translator that helped me to really get why recovery works. And the more that I have stayed with God’s will and done my best to remove my own will, the more I have found these Promises to be coming true.
By living in self-will I remained addicted to so many things and because of that I couldn’t find any new freedom or happiness in life at all. I still regretted the past and wasn’t able to shut the door on a single thing. I was anything but serene and peaceful and continued to go down and down on the depression scale. None of my experiences were helping anyone and instead were causing pain and hardship for those around me. I felt useless and lived in self-pity constantly. I was extremely selfish and self-centered and had no interest in anyone else but myself. I became self-seeking to the max with everyone and everything as I developed a ‘life sucks’ mentality along with a very bleak outlook on just about everything. My fears grew everyday of what people thought of me and eventually I became jobless and directionless. I fell into the same pitfalls again and again and soon I was doing nothing more than trying to play God rather than seek God.
I do my damnedest today to live differently by seeking God’s will instead. And it’s working. Every one of those promises seems to hold some level of truth now in my own life and it’s getting better everyday. Because of this, I can say today that I know 12 Step Recovery really does work and the promises can and will come true. It just takes work. It takes removing self-will. And it takes walking through fear and trusting that God’s will is a whole heck of a lot better than any second I might have ever lived in my own self-will.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
