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12 Step Program

How Gentle is a 12 Step Program?

Being gentle and being kind, especially to oneself, are in many ways at the heart of recovery from alcoholism but often get overlooked by a more macho do-or-die culture. Early Recovery It is probably fair […]

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12 Step Program

Gods Will or My Will?

Many people in recovery struggle with the idea of God at all, and find it even more difficult to approach or deal with the issue of what is God’s will for them as a person. […]

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12 Step Program

What is Emotional Sobriety?

Emotional sobriety is a phrase that was used by Bill Wilson in a Grapevine article, entitled The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety, published in 1958, some 20-plus years after he got sober. Originally a letter to […]

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12 Step Program

Al-Anon

Al-Anon is perhaps the 12 step fellowship most closely associated with Alcoholics Anonymous. In the early days of AA virtually all members were men, and their wives would go with them to meetings and normally […]

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12 Step Program

12 Step Programs

This can be a slightly confusing term for some people. It originates from the organisation Alcoholics Anonymous, which developed a recovery program based around 12 specific steps, which are really statements of experience of what […]

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12 Step Program

What is an Inner Voice?

When people talk about an inner voice in the context of spirituality, they are normally referring to an inner intuitive sense of direction in their life. This sense of there being an inner world, and […]

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12 Step Program

Acceptance and Surrender

It has become almost something of a cliche in society nowadays to use the adage that you cannot cope with a problem unless you first admit it. Not that this is a new or novel […]

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12 Step Program

The Need to Question Gratitude

Quite often in an AA meeting or similar, you will hear someone announce themselves as my name is so-and-so and I’m a grateful alcoholic/ addict, or I’m a grateful recovering alcoholic/addict. Equally, you are quite […]

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12 Step Program

The Myth of Tough Love

Tough love is one of those expressions that has crept into the vocabulary of mental health and 12-step recovery in recent years. It sort of implies that an action or directive is being given or […]