If you’re looking up what powerlessness means in AA, you might be sitting with Step 1 and not quite buying it. Or maybe you’re past the alcohol part.
You’ve put it down, and you’re starting to notice that the rest of your life still isn’t working.
The fights with your spouse. The way traffic ruins your morning. The teacher, the boss, the politician you can’t stop thinking about.
That’s exactly the place Bill C. talks about on his second visit to Sober Speak.
Bill got sober on March 27, 1985. He’s 72 years old. He’s been around AA long enough to be honest about the parts that don’t get said out loud.
He came on the podcast to walk through Steps 1, 2, and 3, and what he said about Step 1 alone is worth sitting with for a while.
“When You Take the Alcohol Away, Now What’s My Problem?”
Bill said something near the start of his interview that stopped me cold.
When you take that alcohol away from me, now what’s my problem? I just solved it, right? I’m not drinking.
That’s the joke a lot of people in early sobriety figure out the hard way. You quit the thing that was destroying you, and instead of relief, you find a person you don’t know how to live with.
Bill puts it this way. He got sober at 37 with the emotional development of a 16-year-old.
And not the honor student kind. The kind with a problem with authority.
Most of us started drinking right when we were supposed to be growing up.
Bill watches his younger kids, the ones who didn’t develop alcoholism, and he sees them work through ordinary teenage messes, learn from them, and come out the other side as functioning adults.
People with alcoholism, he says, skip that part. We just drink through it.
So the work in sobriety, the actual work, isn’t staying away from a drink. It’s catching up on the growing up we never did.
Step 1 AA: Powerlessness Doesn’t Stop at Alcohol
The line that surprised me most in his interview was about how Step 1 keeps getting bigger the longer you stay sober. That widening is what a lot of people in long-term recovery call emotional sobriety.
After some years sober, I realize that I am utterly powerless over pretty much absolutely everything. It isn’t just alcohol.
He told a story about himself at 14 years sober. He got pulled over by a cop and told the officer he had no right to insert himself into his life, and that maybe he should find a job that contributed to society rather than detracting from it.
The cop put his hand on his gun.
Bill, sober almost a decade and a half, an “official AA guru” by his own description, had to walk back to his truck and make amends to a cop who’d just considered shooting him.
He laughs about it now. But the point isn’t the story.
The point is that he was sober. He was working the program.
And he was still acting like a 14-year-old who thought he was right and the world was wrong.
When I think I’m right, I’m right. And I suffer because of that.
He says the source of all the suffering in his life is his inability to accept things exactly as they are.
Not the people. Not the situation. Not the way the universe operates.
He fights it, and he loses, and he calls the suffering that comes from that fight a resentment.
The Lion and the Lamb: Accepting Things as They Are
Bill has an analogy I haven’t been able to shake.
The lion comes across the lamb and eats it. That’s what lions do.
We look at that, and we say it’s wrong. That’s not fair. The cute little lamb didn’t deserve it.
So we sit down with the lion and try to reason with him, and the lion just eats the lamb.
So we invent hope. Someday, things will be right. Someday the lion will lie down with the lamb.
Bill says that if that ever happens, the lamb will be nervous for eternity.
It’s the nature of the lion to eat the lamb. There’s no morality in nature. Things just are.
What he’s getting at is this. Hope, as most of us use it, is a way of saying that the present moment is wrong and should be different.
And as long as we believe that, we suffer. Every minute of every day, we suffer.
Step 1, the way Bill walks through it, is the doorway out of that. Not because anything changes. Because we finally stop demanding that it does.
“I Wouldn’t Have Risen From the Ashes If There Weren’t Ashes to Begin With”
Bill spent a long time regretting his first 37 years.
The drinking. The mental institutions. The bad decisions.
Three marriages. Four kids, one who doesn’t speak to him.
A real life, as he puts it. Not a clean one.
But somewhere in there, he stopped wishing it had gone differently. He looked back and saw that the disaster was what made the recovery possible.
Every saint you ever read about was always a bad dude in the beginning. Then something happened.
Something happened to Bill on March 27, 1985, and his life started. Everything before that was the kindling.
What He Says About Step 2 Is Worth the Listen
Bill’s full episode walks through Steps 1, 2, and 3, and the section on Step 2, the God problem, is worth an hour of your time on its own.
He talks about being embarrassed for the people who used the word “God” in meetings, and how a sponsor who was “one of those God people” walked him into something he couldn’t reason his way out of.
He brings in Alan Watts and the idea that real faith is not knowing, and that’s okay. Somehow it lands in a way that doesn’t feel like religion at all.
Listen to the full episode here.
If you’re stuck on Step 1, if powerlessness feels like a word someone is trying to hand you and you don’t want to take it, you’re in good company.
Bill spent decades figuring out what it actually meant. He’s still figuring it out.
The reason this Step is first isn’t that it’s the easiest. It’s because nothing else opens until it does.
You don’t have to believe it yet. You just have to be willing to look at it.
Sober Speak was founded by John M. as a place for honest conversation about recovery, the kind of talk that happens in meetings but rarely makes it online. New episodes drop every Friday, featuring people sharing their experience with the 12 steps, sobriety, and the work of staying well.
You can listen on Podbean at soberspeak.podbean.com, or find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.