What Is A 12-Step Rehab Program?
The 12-step recovery program has been around for more than 70 years and is the most common method of treatment and support used in the addiction field today. In its pure form it has helped millions of people recover from addiction, but in recent decades addiction has been erroneously redefined as an incurable brain disease and therefore many 12-step programs tell their clients that relapse is a part of the recovery process. They have also resorted to prescribing lots of drugs to people to cope with the symptoms of recovery. The result has been that the success rates for these types of programs have fallen dramatically.
Here is a version of the basic 12 Steps:
Step 1 - We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable.
Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
Step 4 - Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Step 6 - We're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
Step 8 - Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Step 9 - Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Step 10 - Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.
Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.