A Poster Person for the 12 Steps

There is no one person who can represent the widely diverse population engaged in the dynamic flux of working the Steps and achieving sobriety or not.  It's also very hard to predict who will make it and who won't.  The very one who appears most likely to succeed sometimes just can't do it, no matter what.  The one you think doesn't have a remote chance, does it!

People say a person has to want sobriety, it can't be mandated.  This isn't true.  I've met many a recovered person who was ordered by a court of law to go to treatment or go to prison.  Fast forward years later, they kept going to meetings and staying sober long after fulfilling the court's mandates.

The #1 common factor of everyone who relapses:  THEY STOPPED GOING TO MEETINGS.

Sobriety does not appear to rely on beauty, intelligence, power, background, education, money, social status, what a person has or has-not.  Once I met a homeless individual who was illiterate, stuttered, of short-stature and ooogly.  He'd been abused as a child and had long term mental challenges resulting from being hit on his head so many times.  So not only did he live with mental illness he also was a chronic alcoholic and couldn't stop drinking.  He kept relapsing every few days until finally he was told he had to go to treatment.  I didn't believe it was possible for someone as messed-up as him to be able to get sober.   Anyway, he went.  28 days later he completed treatment.  I didn't recognize him. Now he had excellent eye contact, a spring in his step, a ready smile and a conversation.  He ironed his clothes before putting them on.  His vocabulary changed to where he didn't cuss as much and when an inappropriate word slipped out he was quick to apologize.  While at the treatment facility he met a sponsor who had a few more days of sobriety.  His sponsor was available day or night and came to pick him up to go to meetings.  Although he still couldn't read the Big Book, "Alcoholics Anonymous", he listened carefully while others read.  This made all the difference in the world.  He looked like a person on a mission, like he had purpose.  A changed man.

He didn't stay sober.  He relapsed and went back out into the streets but there will forever be a memory imprinted he had sobriety for a while and maybe one day he can make it back in out of the cold hell of addiction. Or maybe not. I've heard it said, "I know I got one more drunk in me but I don't know if I have one more sobering up."

 If I ever met a person who had very good reasons and excuses for not being able to get sober it was him.  He gave me a great gift of seeing with my own eyes the remarkable, miraculous transformation possible even for someone with not just one but multiple major challenges.  He also taught me I really don't know who will or will not achieve sobriety so it's important to keep an open mind and to keep my hand stretched out, ready to help because, you never know, it might save a life...my own.  That's what Bill W. learned.  He kept failing to sober up drunks but he did succeed in staying sober himself by enlarging "his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice for others..." page 15, BB "Alcoholics Anonymous".  It saved the day.


I am responsible.  When anyone, anywhere, reaches out for help, I want the hand (of the 12 Steps Fellowships I belong to) always to be there.  And for that: I am responsible.