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12-Step Strategies Anyone Can Use for a Better Life
These principles are about so much more than sobriety
Recovering alcoholics often say they’re lucky. To a newcomer hearing this uttered in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, it can sound ridiculous. “Lucky to be here,” one might scoff, sipping weak coffee in a bleak church basement, surrounded by disconcertingly cheerful drunks? “Ha.”
But if you follow the suggestion to keep coming back, it starts to make sense after a while. That’s because 12-step recovery doesn’t just help people to quit drinking. It offers a “blueprint for living,” a set of tools and strategies that, when practiced daily, slowly transform our lives from feeling unmanageable to something we can deal with. These tools are in the 12 steps and 12 traditions around which the Alcoholics Anonymous program is built and in the culture of recovery. These nuggets of wisdom can seem cheesy, but in practice, they’re all actually rather profound — and can become the scaffolding of a surprisingly radical new way of thinking.
In times of great uncertainty or panic, like the one we’re currently living through, these tools are especially handy. In fact, they’re all but guaranteed to make facing the unknown less scary.
