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STEP ONE

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

Bill W.'s description of Step One in the “Twelve and Twelve” is rife with metaphors. There's “John Barleycorn,” the personification of the grain barley and the alcoholic beverages that are made from it—beer and whiskey. There's the image of the “lash of alcoholism” driving drunks into AA, and the “life preserver” that the dying seize with fervor.

Perhaps the most important metaphor is the image of the “taproot”: “The principle that we shall find no enduring strength until we first admit complete defeat is the main taproot from which our whole society has sprung and flowered.”

According to an online encyclopedia, a taproot is a large root that grows straight downward and forms a center from which other roots sprout laterally. “Plants with taproots are difficult to transplant … and uproot.”

Admitting defeat is the taproot of the rest of the program, the one Step that AAs must take 100 percent before continuing with the rest of the program. Some AAs realize their lives are unmanageable and that they can't handle alcohol years before entering the program. Others accept the first or the second half of the Step before taking it in its entirety.

“When I first came to AA I was told that I should not bother to try and find out why I became an alcoholic, but rather I should accept my alcoholism as a fact and begin to do something about it,” writes the author of a 1966 Grapevine story. An earlier piece in 1944, calls the admission of unmanageability and powerlessness the “first success on the road to well-being.”

On the following pages, AAs talk about Step One.