The Twelve Steps

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If you want what we have and are willing to make the effort necessary for you to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps. Here are the steps we took which made our recovery possible.

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1. We admitted we were powerless over mood-changing and mind-altering chemicals, and that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other chemically dependent persons and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

 

There is one thing more than anything else that will defeat us in our recovery. This is an attitude of indifference or intolerance towards spiritual principles. Although there are no musts in CDA, there are three things that seem indispensable. These are honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness to try. With these we are well on our way.