Daily Reprieve

Step One: “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.”

1st Step Principle: We will find enduring strength only when we first admit complete defeat over our isolated, obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior. (Adapted from 12 Steps & 12 Traditions, top of page 22)

AA Extracted Value: Honesty

ACA Extracted Values: Powerlessness & Surrender

Other Extracted Values: Acceptance

There’s a strange kind of grace hidden in Step One. It doesn’t feel like grace at first — it feels like hitting the wall. Like losing. Like failure.

But somewhere beyond that first sting, there’s relief. There’s a softening.

For so long, I fought life on my own terms — isolated in my obsessive thoughts, driven by compulsions I couldn’t control, believing if I just tried harder, thought smarter, did better, I could fix it. I could fix me.

But Step One doesn’t ask me to fix anything. It invites me to admit the truth: I can’t.
I am powerless.
My life, left to my own devices, becomes unmanageable.

It’s easy to think of “powerlessness” as weakness, but in recovery, it’s something far more beautiful. It’s honesty. It’s finally telling the truth about my limitations, my fears, my illusions of control. It’s putting down the exhausting armor of pretending.

Admitting defeat feels shameful to the old parts of me that were raised to equate strength with independence. But real strength — enduring strength — comes when I surrender. When I let go of the desperate need to be in charge, to know the answers, to wrestle my pain into submission.

Surrender is not about giving up. It’s about opening up.

It’s about saying: I don’t have to do this alone. I was never meant to.

ACA teaches me that powerlessness and surrender are vital values — not things to fear, but things to lean into. They are the doors through which acceptance enters. And with acceptance comes a gentler, wiser way of living.

Today, I am willing to lay down the endless battle against myself and against reality.
Today, I am willing to be honest about where I am powerless.
Today, I surrender my isolated, obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior.
Today, I accept life as it is, not as I demand it to be.

And maybe — just maybe — in that surrender, I will find the strength I have been seeking all along.

This entry was posted on April 28, 2025 at 1:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, Alcoholism, Journal, Life, Mental Health, Personal, Recovery, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.