Attend a 12 Step Meeting! 12 Step Communities can be found throughout most of the World. The twelve-step program offers a set of principles and course of action for Recovery. Originally taken from the book, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism, published in 1939, the Twelve-step approach has been modified to help manage all forms of addiction. Family and friends of addicts attend Al-anon meetings to gain a better understanding of the disease from a loved one's perspective.

The 12 Steps:

1) We admit we are powerless over our dependencies and that our lives have become unmanageable.
2) We come to believe that God can restore us to sanity.
3) We make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.
4) We make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5) We admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) We are entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7) We humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.
8) We make a list of all persons we have harmed and become willing to make amends to them all.

9) We make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10) We continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it.
11) We seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as revealed through the person of Jesus Christ, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, which is the revelation of Jesus Christ, we try to carry this message to others and to practice these Biblical principles in all our affairs.