We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
We admitted…
“Admitted,” is the first true word choice of the Steps (there is no choice of pronoun for “we”). We might acknowledge or especially concede, in this case, or even allow, but none of these was chosen. What’s different about admit?
Unlike the others mentioned, admit carries the meaning, “to let in.” We’re all familiar with being admitted (to the hospital, school, show); we were outside, now we’re in: we’re admitted.
In this instance, admit might be thought of as letting in the truth, the reality, of our situation, which we are somehow keeping out. This is figurative speech, of course. We are no longer referring to physical objects; there is no actual door and no person—or dog or cat—outside to let in, but it is an understandable way of describing what may be called, delusion, denial, or even psychosis. We speak and act in ways not congruent with our surroundings. We “keep out” reality.
Often, the people close to us know we have an addiction, and that our lives are no longer manageable by us. Some of them may even have the temerity to bring that to our attention. What do most of us do at some point? We deny it: it isn’t so; it isn’t true. The denial does nothing to change the reality of it: the truth is still “out there;” we just don’t let it in.
We admitted we were powerless….
Although this is equivalent to “we admitted we had no power,” there is a subtle difference in the verb choice: to have rather than to be. Native speakers of American-style English don’t generally distinguish the difference in casual conversation.
“Did you have an accident with my car?”
“Were you in an accident with my car?”
This even extends to the difference between to do and to be.
“What kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a mechanic.”
It’s arguable how much difference the average native speaker notices in many instances of have/do/be; there is no argument, however, that these are three distinct verbs and they can, and often do, delineate substantially different meanings. There are many cases where the two cannot be substituted without altering the meaning:
“I have a car.”
“I am a car.”
That a person is something, entails a sense of no separation between the person and the something; that a person has something, engenders a sense of separation, however subtle.
This was my trouble, initially, with the Steps: they made perfect sense in terms of the English language, but I did not admit their meaning.
In considering “powerless,” I’m reminded of a grade-school English quiz on which I answered a question incorrectly, and it bothered me for years. For some reason, that quiz paper kept turning up around the house, since all my tests were filed, although not in the most organized fashion.
The question gave examples of words with the suffix “-less,” then asked what the suffix meant. I answered “less than,” and I was deeply chagrined when the results were handed back to us, because I knew the right answer; in my typical (and probably nascent alcoholic) way, I’d been in too much of a hurry to get through the test. The correct answer, of course, is “without.”
“Powerless” does not mean less than sufficient power, it means without power at all.
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol….
Americans coming of age near the end of the twentieth century may find something slightly amiss, here, in the use of the noun “alcohol.” While the meaning seems completely understandable, native speakers born in the latter half of the century and into the 21st, may come to wonder why alcoholism was not the word choice.
Another AA member, who became my good friend, worked for a beer distributor. Every working day, he moved substantial quantities of alcohol from one place to another: he was not powerless to do so; in fact, he earned a living having that power over alcohol. He had done it as a drunk, and he was doing it sober. Likewise, even as practicing drunks, we find means to obtain alcohol, pick it up, hold it in a container, and drink it. It’s clear, concerning the meaning of “powerless,” that this wasn’t true about the physical substance, alcohol. What my friend and the rest of us alcoholics are powerless over is our addiction to alcohol.
I eventually discovered that the Twelve Steps had been appropriated by other fellowships, now too numerous to mention, and the only change most of them made was to the word, “alcohol,” and “alcoholics.” As time went by, I understood that the framers of the Steps didn’t mean merely the substance, alcohol, but our insatiable desire for it. Why then, use “alcohol?”
“Addiction,” as an English word, has been around since before 1600, but in the way we mean it now, it was a relatively new term—under 40 years old— and was largely confined to the medical field when Alcoholics Anonymous was written. It made good sense, at the time, not to include a word outside general use. The Twelve Steps were meant to reach alcoholics, and it was certainly best not to muddy their meaning in consideration of the intended audience. Every English-speaking alcoholic was very clear about the meaning of the word, alcohol, while “addiction” may have engendered more than a small share of confusion.
Throughout Alcoholics Anonymous, “addiction” is rarely used, and only in relation to the medical field: Dr. Silkworth uses it three times in his “Doctor’s Opinion,” and it can be found only once more, outside the personal stories, relating again to the doctor’s work in “A Vision for You.” Bill Wilson uses it but twice in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, both times referring to other than alcohol addiction.
Not including the personal stories (but including “Dr. Bob’s Nightmare”), “alcoholism” is used 66 times in Alcoholics Anonymous, and 30 times in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. That seems a very clear term to us, in our day, and to the authors, in their time: “alcoholism” is in general use and means addiction to alcohol. Why then, would Step One not say, “powerless over alcoholism?”
Coined just before the Civil War, and also springing from the practice of medicine, “alcoholism” was first used to connote only alcohol poisoning. It made its way more readily than “addiction” into general usage and its definition changed—a common occurrence in language called semantic shift—to the one we’re familiar with. Alcohol poisoning is essentially a drug overdose where the drug is ethanol. It is the stage at which blood-alcohol-content has risen to a level where basic life-support systems begin to break down: control of body temperature, heart-rate, even breathing, begins to fail as the brain succumbs. Even when death does not occur, the brain can sustain irreparable damage. This state was known in the medical field, and a physician in the mid-19th century termed it “alcoholism.”
ADDICTION (noun): compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance characterized by tolerance and by well-defined physiological symptoms upon withdrawal; broadly, persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful [Merriam-Webster]
from Latin addictiōn-, addictiō “adjudging (of disputed property), assignment of a debtor to the custody of his creditor,” from addīcere “to assign (property), hand over, give up to” + -tiōn-, -tiō, suffix of action nouns — addictus, past participle of addīcere “to assign (property), make over, hand over, surrender,” from ad- “to, toward, at” + dīcere “to speak, say” [dictionary.com]
Robert H. Smith—Dr. Bob—was born in 1879, less than 30 years after “alcoholism” was used in medicine for the very first time to mean specifically alcohol poisoning. When young Mr. Smith began medical school in 1905, it is probable the term was only just making its way toward the meaning we know, today. As a physician, Dr. Smith would not have found alcoholism to be the precise term we think of, now. While it’s only speculation, at least he among the founding members would not find the term clear enough to earn a place in the very first Step—certainly not for a man dedicated to keeping the Program of recovery simple. Most probably, he desired the clearest language possible, and alcoholism, from his training and point of view, did not have the needed clarity. The simple word, “alcohol,” certainly did.
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—….
What eventually strikes some adherents of the Program about the written First Step, at a conscious level or not, is the dash. A dash is not a common mark of punctuation, and it’s used only this once in the Twelve Steps.
It often seemed to me that the dash in Step One replaced a conjunction, that the sentence could read: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.” Some writers might even maintain that a comma is then due: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, and that our lives had become unmanageable.”
em dashes may replace commas, semicolons, colons, and parentheses to indicate added emphasis, an interruption, or an abrupt change of thought.
–grammarbook.com
Yet, a subtle disconnection seeps in with this rendering, as though our powerlessness over alcohol had little or nothing to do with our lives becoming unmanageable; we admitted these two things, but they were unrelated.
The dash can be replaced with a more common punctuation mark wherever it’s been used, and a comma seems just as suited in this case: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.” It’s grammatically correct, but something—subtly, again—has been lost. A dash can be used strictly for emphasis, especially when a simple comma will suffice. I’m reminded of my own sponsor: he might interrupt his sentence with “hey,” and just as often end it with “hear?” There’s some distinction in what he’s told me that he wants me to be aware of; he wants to know if “I got it.”
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—hey!—that our lives were unmanageable, hear?
We may be able to put these two admissions together when we first arrive or, like me, we may not. I desperately wanted my life to become manageable when I first got to AA, but I didn’t want to stop drinking. I admitted I drank too much, too often, but I was unconvinced that had anything to do with my life being a disaster. I drank too much, too often because my life was a disaster, not the other way around. AA had to convince me otherwise. Not drinking was just an experiment for me: like all the previous, countless failures to improve my lot, I was out only to prove this would be another.
Had you “forced” me, right from the start, to admit I was powerless over alcohol—that my life was unmanageable because of that, I would have had a much harder time, perhaps an impossible time. Instead, I was presented with a subtly inextricable combination of admissions: I was powerless over alcohol—that my life had become unmanageable. I wasn’t asked to admit which caused which, simply that they were both true, and not disconnected.
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
It was truer for me to say that my life had become unbearable. I don’t know that it ever was manageable. Some, like me, start a life of intoxication so early, we never attain a frame of reference for a manageable life. We never learn boundary placement: I can do something about this; I can’t do anything about that. It was the all-or-nothing syndrome for me from childhood on, and that plays havoc with one’s ability to distinguish where personal power begins and ends. Others have a frame of reference that’s been lost. By and large, as we approach the First Step, none of us has it firmly in hand.
It’s funny: the ingredients that go into the soup which is our life. (“Keep stirring the soup,” an old-timer with roots in skid-row used to say, “it gets thicker.”) It so happens, there were a lot of Italians in my family, and I was familiar with a term at an early age that sounded like “manage” with the accent on the wrong syllable (mah-NEJ). It was invariably used when the speaker had anything but control of the situation; I correctly understood it as some kind of curse word in Italian (indeed, mannaggia, is perhaps best translated as “damn”). Its etymology is allegedly unrelated to mannegiare, but it summed up my unmanageable life, nevertheless: every attempt I made to manage was damned. I was unable to accomplish any worthwhile things, things I saw others accomplish with seeming ease.
What is manageable? “That which can be handled, wielded, directed, controlled.” Manage comes to English through the Italian mannegiare which has the same meaning and is derived from Latin manus “hand.”
For me, if not for most of us in addiction, this began my disconnection from other human beings: if I couldn’t do the things they did, I surely must not be like them.
Yet, very few people seemed to “control” their lives. Events, circumstances, situations intruded on everyone we knew; happenings over which, we well understood, they had no control. The family dog got hit by a car, mom got cancer, the business dad worked for went under…. There would be nothing special about admitting that our lives had become “uncontrollable:” everyone’s life became uncontrollable. What was different was how so many people we knew handled these uncontrollable times. They certainly “managed” not to make the situation worse, which couldn’t be said for most of us in addiction.
Turmoil was an acceptable reason to become intoxicated. This may have been as close as many of us came to acting like those who managed their lives and used intoxicants: didn’t we see them do the same under extraordinary stress? Perhaps. But they were—unlike us—just as likely not to use intoxicants, and they were not beginning a spree or upping the ante of their usual abuse, as most of us were. These non-addicted people were taking a brief respite, after which they would resume “managing” the extraordinary situation as best they could. When “manageability” required that they stop being intoxicated, they stopped, unlike addicted people. The addicted had no power to stop and resume managing, even if we wanted to. Admitting that is the first step of recovery.
[viz.] Alcoholics Anonymous: “alcoholic and drug addiction”, pps.xxv, xxvii; “alcoholic addiction,” p.xxvii; “alcoholic and drug addiction,” p.162 ^
[viz.] Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions “another addiction,” p142; “dope addiction,” p155 ^