A Program For You: A Guide To the Big Book's Design for Living

by Anonymous

Overview

A Program for You leads each of us--newcomer or old-timer--to a deeper understanding of recovery as a way of life.

A Program for You leads each of us--newcomer or old-timer--to a deeper understanding of recovery as a way of life.

A Program for You clears our way for discovering positive, powerful answers to these questions. In the years since 1939, the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, has guided millions in their search for a design for healthy living free of addictive behaviors. Now, two program old-timers share their years of intensive study of the Big Book, revealing the vitality of its message for those of us reading it today.This celebration of the basic text of Twelve Step recovery breathes new life into the Big Book's timeless wisdom. Thoroughly annotated line and page, written with down-to-earth humor and simplicity, and providing a contemporary context for understanding, A Program for You helps us experience the same path of renewal that Bill W. and the first on hundred AA members did.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592857982
Publisher:	Hazelden Publishing
Publication date:	10/23/2009
Series:	A Program for You
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Hazelden Publishing respects the wishes of authors who choose to remain anonymous.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction--How This Book Can Help
Alcoholics Anonymous, which is most often just called the Big Book, was first published in 1939. Since then it has sold millions of copies throughout the world and, for over six decades, has helped millions of people recover from alcoholism.

The two of us who wrote this book believe firmly that there are no better tools for recovery than the Big Book and the Twelve Steps that the Big Book offers and describes. We know this to be true in our lives, as well as in the lives of thousands of alcoholics we've met and talked with over the last three decades. We have also heard of thousands of more people with other addictions and compulsive behaviors who are finding that these same tools can change their lives. The Big Book isn't hard to read; it's written in plain, everyday language, and every word of it is practical and down-to-earth. It's not a book of theory or philosophy. It offers a clear, step-by-step approach for your recovery. It enables you to really and fully understand the problem of alcohol addiction; it presents a clear, practical solution to the problem; and it shows you how to implement that solution in your own life through the Twelve Step program of action it describes.

Though the Big Book is easy to understand and follow from the first page to the last, we've found that lots of people have managed to misunderstand and misuse it. Some of them just skim parts of the book or skip over them entirely. Some start in the middle of the book instead of the beginning. Some people disregard or ignore some of the Twelve Steps. Others don't read the Big Book carefully, and they misunderstand or misinterpret what the authors are saying. Still others bring in all kinds of other ideas that aren't found anywhere in the Big Book. And some people in the Alcoholics Anonymous fellowship and other Twelve Step programs haven't read the Big Book at all.

We think it's strange that the fellowship, as it has grown over the years, has gotten away from the very thing that it started with. But we see a great trend in the past few years of going back to the Big Book. We want to help that trend continue.

We've written this book for two reasons: first, to help people get everything out of the Big Book that we believe its author intended; and second, to bring people back to what we think the Big Book actually does for all of us who are in recovery. Because of the guidance of the Big Book and the grace of the Higher Power we've found through it, neither of us has found it necessary to take a drink in over twenty years. We want to help you understand for yourself what the Big Book really says, means, and can offer you. It doesn't matter whether you've been in the AA fellowship or other Twelve Step recovery groups for thirty years, two weeks, or not at all--the Big Book can enhance your life and your recovery. We've been studying and talking about the Big Book for most of our years of sobriety, and by now we've read it dozens of times. But every time we look at it we get more out of it.

You can use A Program for You by yourself, or as part of a Big Book study group of your own. All it takes to start a study group are two or more interested people, a copy of the Big Book, and a copy of A Program for You.

Ideally, we'd like you to read Alcoholics Anonymous from cover to cover, or at least through page 164, before you follow along using our book. If you prefer, though, you can just read a chapter or section of the Big Book at a time as we go through it with you. But it's absolutely essential that at some point, you get a copy of the Big Book and read it carefully from the beginning to at least page 164. We want to help you to understand the Big Book more thoroughly--we don't want to replace it! Be sure to read the book in the sequence in which it was written, and don't skim or skip over any sections. The Big Book was put together in a certain way, and for you to get the most out of it, you need to use it in the way it was meant to be used.

Whenever we refer to a section or passage in the Big Book, we'll indicate what chapter, pages, and (when appropriate) lines we're talking about:

A Program for You actually began not as a book, but as a workshop, and before that as a study group. Both of us had an interest in studying the Big Book for many years, and when we first met in 1973 we decided we'd get together regularly to study it. After a while, other people started asking if they could join us; we said sure, and pretty soon we had a group going. The group kept growing, people began to hear about us, and in 1977 a fellow in Oklahoma invited us to talk to the Alcoholics Anonymous group he was in. We did, and he made tapes of our talk. Pretty soon, copies of these tapes started making their way around the country. And soon we were being regularly asked to do weekend workshops on the Big Book. We've done hundreds of them by now--in most major cities in the United States, and in many other parts of the world.

Both of us are members of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, but in writing this book we aren't speaking for anyone except ourselves. We don't consider ourselves to be the gurus of the Big Book, and we're not claiming to be experts on anything. We're just two old alcoholics who have studied the Big Book for a long time and want to share with others what we've learned. Feel free to agree or disagree with anything you read in this book. In fact, we recommend that you pay no attention to anything we say that can't be reconciled with the book Alcoholics Anonymous, since our purpose is to help you understand that book better.

The better you do understand the Big Book, the more it can help you in your own recovery. We hope that A Program for You will show you just how helpful the Big Book can be.

We believe the Big Book can change your life just as dramatically as it did ours.