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Our common welfare should come first; personal

recovery depends upon A.A. unity.

For the individual to recover, the group and the Fellowship must stick together.

Not especially known as “joiners” in our drinking days, “We alcoholics see,” says Bill W., in the first appendix of the Big Book, “that we must work together and hang together, else most of us will finally die alone.”

Warped by years of self-centeredness, this is difficult for many of us to grasp at first. “The concept of a ‘common welfare’ was totally alien to me,” writes Kathleen D. in this chapter’s story “A Thousand Angels.” “To be expected to put the needs of others in front of my own was almost laughable,” she writes. Yet, motivated by desperation, she reached out. “I made a decision to accept this Tradition the same way I accepted the truth of the First Step, not because I fully understood all the implications and recognized their validity, but because I was desperate and I believed these were the only things that could save me.”

Crossing the threshold into AA brings a deep satisfaction for many of us, and the knowledge that at last, we belong.

“I began to get a glimmer of the miraculous promises available to me by putting common welfare first,” says Ed C. of Bowling Green, Kentucky, in the article “Only Natural.” “Instead of feeling diminished by being only a small part, I began to feel like I’d found a home, a place where I belonged after a lifetime of isolation and being fatally unique.”