[.uk] The Narcotics Anonymous Step Working Guides (ISBN 1557763704)

A "guide" to the 12 steps:
This book can be a bit overwhelming at times, but so is recovery at times. I work the steps with my sponsor and depend on this book as a guide on how to work each step. It's very detailed, which I found very helpful, especially on the 4th and 5th step. Very helpful getting started on each step, and very helpful to deal with each step completely. Just remember, it's a guide, get what you can out of it, if your still confused, call your sponsor. This is my first time in a 12 step program, so this book has been a great help on what to do, having had no prior experience working the steps.

Excellent guide for working the 12 steps...:
A long awaited guide to working the twelve steps of Narcotics Anonymous. At times can be repetitive (the questions); however, this is not such a bad thing when dealing with addiction! The guide is extremely thorough. A great guide written by addicts, for addicts, to working the steps with their sponsor in recovery.

Best recovery book for study available:
This a great workbook for those recovering addicts wishing to recover from any sort of addiction .This book is a vital tool in working the steps I also recomend the It Works How and Why book because it is the other tool in the recovery of addiction. This book was written by other addicts who know about recovery

Cut your hair, take a shower, lose the punk clothes.:
The truth is that a newly-sober alcoholic named William Griffith Wilson -- a down-on-his-luck former Wall Street hustler who put on airs of having once been a prosperous stock broker -- just sat down, in December of 1938, and wrote up twelve commandments for the new religious group that he and fellow alcoholic Doctor Robert Smith had started. Those commandments were simply a repackaged version of the practices of a cult religion that was popular at that time, something called "The Oxford Group", or "The Oxford Group Movement", and later, "Moral Re-Armament" -- a religious cult that was created by a deceitful fascist renegade Lutheran minister named Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman -- a nut-case who actually praised Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. Bill Wilson described the writing of the Twelve Steps this way: Well, we finally got to the point where we really had to say what this book was all about and how this deal works. As I told you this had been a six-step program then. The idea came to me, well, we need a definite statement of concrete principles that these drunks can't wiggle out of. There can't be any wiggling out of this deal at all and this six-step program had two big gaps which people wiggled out of. Notice how Bill Wilson considered his fellow alcoholics to be a bunch of cheaters who will "wiggle out of this deal" if they can get away with it -- which Bill won't allow. And note how Bill Wilson made himself the leader who was entitled to dictate the concrete terms of other people's recovery programs. Also notice how Bill Wilson considered 'spiritual development' to be a business deal, with a contract that you can't wiggle out of, something like selling your soul in trade for sobriety. Nowhere in the Twelve Steps does it say that you should quit drinking, or help anyone else to quit drinking, either. Nowhere do the words "sobriety", "recovery", "abstinence", "health", "happiness", "joy", "love", or "love", appear in the Twelve Steps. The word "alcohol" was only mentioned once, where it was patched into the first step as a substitute for the word "sin" -- Bill Wilson wrote, "we are powerless over alcohol and our lives have become unmanageable", instead of the Oxford Group slogan, "we are powerless over sin and have been defeated by it". And then the phrase "especially alcoholics" was patched into the 12th step as a suggested target for further recruiting efforts: "...we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics"... (But regular non-alcoholic people were still fair game for recruiting into Bill's "spiritual fellowship"...) The Twelve Steps are not a formula for curing or treating alcoholism, and they never were. The Twelve Steps are not "spiritual principles" and they never were. The Twelve Steps are cult practices that work to convert people into confirmed true believers in a proselytizing cult religion, just like Frank Buchman's so-called "spiritual principles" did. 1. The Twelve Steps do not work as a program of recovery from drug or alcohol problems. The A.A. failure rate ranges from 95% to 100%. Sometimes, the A.A. success rate is actually less than zero, which means that A.A. indoctrination is positively harmful to people, and prevents recovery. Some tests have shown that even receiving no treatment at all for alcoholism is much better than receiving A.A. treatment: One of the most enthusiastic boosters of Alcoholics Anonymous, Professor George Vaillant of Harvard University, who is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (AAWS), showed by his own 8 years of testing of A.A. that A.A. was worse than useless -- that it didn't help the alcoholics any more than no treatment at all, and it had the highest death rate of any treatment program tested -- a death rate that Professor Vaillant himself described as "appalling". While trying to prove that A.A. treatment works, Professor Vaillant actually proved that A.A. kills. After 8 years of A.A. treatment, the score with Dr. Vaillant's first 100 alcoholic patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking. (Nevertheless, Vaillant is still a Trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he still wants to send all alcoholics to A.A. anyway, to "get an attitude change by confessing their sins to a high-status healer." That is cult religion, not a treatment program for alcoholism.) The A.A. dropout rate is terrible. Most people who come to A.A. looking for help in quitting drinking are appalled by the narrow-minded atmosphere of fundamentalist religion and faith-healing. The A.A. meeting room has a revolving door. The therapists, judges, and parole officers (many of whom are themselves hidden members of A.A. or N.A.) continually send new people to A.A., but those newcomers vote with their feet once they see what A.A. really is. Even A.A.'s own triennial surveys, conducted by the A.A. headquarters (the GSO), say that: 81% of the newcomers are gone within 30 days, 90% are gone in 3 months, and 95% are gone at the end of a year. That automatically gives A.A. a failure rate of at least 95%. But the GSO does not count all of those people who only attend a few meetings before quitting -- they don't qualify as "members". (That amounts to "cherry-picking".) If we included them, then the numbers would be much worse. First there is the propaganda technique of "everybody's doing it": "AA or a similar Twelve-Step program is an integral part of almost all successful recoveries". That is a complete falsehood. The vast majority of the successful people recover without A.A. or any "support group". It's what "everybody" is doing. Then they use the propaganda techniques of use of the passive voice and vague suggestions: "It is widely believed that not including a Twelve-Step program in a treatment plan can put a recovering addict on the road to relapse." It is widely believed by whom? And what do those unnamed people know? What are their qualifications? Are they doctors? Medical school professors? Or salesmen for a 12-Step treatment center? Why should we care what some unnamed invisible fools allegedly believe, anyway? The authors also use the propaganda technique of fear-mongering: you will be "on the road to relapse" -- you will probably die -- unless you practice Bill Wilson's Twelve Step cult religion. And then the fluff-headed Pollyanna attitude is outrageous: Just going to the wonderful A.A. meetings is supposedly all that is needed to fix some alcoholics. But since A.A. has a zero-percent success rate above and beyond the normal rate of spontaneous remission, that cannot possibly be true

Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path!:
Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob are co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the forward to the 3rd edition of the book by the same title it states: Alcoholics Anonymous is not a religious organization. Neither does A.A. take any particular medical point of view, though we cooperate widely with the men of medicine as well as with the men of religion. Alcohol being no respecter of persons, we are an accurate cross section of America, and in distant lands, the same democratic evening-up process is now going on. By personal religious affiliation, we include Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus and a sprinkling of Moslems and Buddhists. More than 15% of us are women. At present, our membership is increasing at the rate of about sever per cent a year. So far, upon the total problem of several million actual and potential alcoholics in the world, we have made only a scratch. Upon therapy for the alcoholic himself we surely have no monopoly. In the forward to the 3rd addition it states: In spite of the great increase in the size and the span of this fellowship, at its core it remains simple and personal. Each day, somewhere in the world, receovery begins when one alcoholic talks with another alcoholic sharing experience, strength and hope. And finally, in the foreward to the First Edition it states: We, of Alcoholics Anonymous, are more than one hundred men and wormen (1939) who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. To show other alcoholics precisely how we hve recovered is the main purpose of this book. For them, we hope these pages will prove so convincing that no further authentication will be necessary.