Meditation for September 15th, 2016
The 12 Steps
You have probably heard of the 12 steps because of that smug fraternity brother who shows up to make amends for sleeping with your girlfriend at the time and to try and sell you a reverse mortgage. They 12 steps have revolutionized the self-help movement since its inception in the lay 30s.
They were invented by a failed stock speculator Bill W. and a depressed proctologist Dr. Bob who had used the Oxford Groups’ 6 steps to sober up. The Oxford Group was a Christian Nazi sympathizing group that tried to live a pure life. The alcoholics made the steps 12 and wrote a book about it and life was never the same for drunk drivers again.
Bill went on to try LSD and study beta-carotene deficiency to try and find an easier way to quit drinking then work the 12 steps while sleeping with newcomer women and Dr. Bob never stopped being depressed and died not wanting any more literature to be published. AA is still around with millions of members and now there are hundreds of ____ Anonymous meetings using the 12 steps to quit addictions and solve life problems.
What are the steps? Here at the David Everett Fisher Addiction Center, we have studied and broke down the steps for you to try and do at home.
1. We admitted we were powerless (usually over something like alcohol, but let’s face it, you are a powerless piece of shit no matter what you do), your life has become unmanageable.
Admitting you have a problem is the only way you will k ow that you need help. The biggest reason people walk around this earth acting like a turd basket is because they think they are doing fine. You can tell them over and over again that they suck at life, but until they know they suck at life, there is little they will do to change.
You got to know you suck to want to change. Having a miserable life helps with that. If you want to help someone get better, give them as many consequences as you can to hurry up the process.
This also means that it isn’t you fault, you are powerless. You didn’t treat people like shit because you were an asshole, you treated people like shit because you were powerless. You are no longer responsible for anything you’ve done up to understanding you were powerless
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Since you are a powerless, useless sack of rotten garbage, you’re going to need a higher power.
This can be anything, even a door knob, but unless you are the world’s biggest dummy, and you understand that the door knob only works at the discretion of the person using it, a door knob is not a fucking power greater than you.
It has to be a God, any God, but a God. You are such a low bottom sucking piece of shit that you need a faith in a mythological creator that has some kind of care for you to help you to become a member of society instead of sucking from the teat of society.
Sanity is base on you not making the decision to use the thing you are powerless over and that is destroying your life instead of having faith in God. This isn’t the sanity that comes from not having mental illness because God can’t fix that, He can only fix addictions – unless you have to teach a lesson by dying.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our liver over to he care of God, as we understood Him.
So now you believe that this Fod will restore you to sanity, you are going to have to decide to let you life and will be taken care of by this deity.
It’s not the act of turning your will and you life into the care of God because that would be too easy and God would have to be a lot more invested.
A lot of people do prayers, but the gist is, “Help me, weirdo! I can’t, so can you, I’ll have faith you will even though there is no proof you will or can.”
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
This is the famous set up step. You are going to write down how big of a piece of shit you are. How many people were you mad at? How pointless was the anger?
You write down all the things you are scared of and then how terrible you were in the dating world.
This is now on paper you horrible monster.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs.
Now read how much of a horrible monster you are.
Murder that person so they never tell anyone else.
Repeat steps one through five.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Now to go on, you will need to complete this set up step by being entirely ready to think God will and want to remove all the bastard parts inside of you.
Are you ready to never ever lie? Even if it’ll save a babies life? This is where we become less of an idiot and more of a shiny moral light that floats in and out of other people’s lives.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
The key word is humbly, worm. This where we use self-flagellation and other forms of pain to dehumanize ourselves enough for God to remove the parts of us that He seems unnecessary. Sometimes it is our intolerance of Johnny Depp and other times it is the removal of our thumbs to make us into a talking animal.
8. Made a list of all people we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
You were probably starting to feel better about yourself, but now we have to revisit the shit sandwich department: you. You have just ran through this life a juggernaut that won’t acknowledge other’s feelings or boundaries. You stayed on your phone, but expected stellar service from the barista making your pumpkin spice latte. You just woudn’t admit you never liked Nirvana and didn’t understand the allure, but you still wore the shirt and have all their records. You lied, cheated and stole.
You murdered.
Write that down you cretin.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so will injure them or others.
Now go and tell them what you’ve done. Make the relive the horrors of your former terrible self. They don’t know if you’ve truly changed as you promise to never act like that again. You’re just saying you were wrong and maybe writing a check.
You walk away whistling from the freedom you feel while they remember the day you fucked them over.
Some people don’t even know you did something, like stores. You are literally ruining the little trust someone may have had for their fellow human.
All so you don’t have all the guilt and remorse hanging off of your horrible sick body. Great job.
10. Continues to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
You are still a piece of shit. Now keep writing those mistakes down, the fucked up things you keep doing to others.
If you are a powerless worthless jerk, then you absolutely cannot risk being wrong. Admit every mistake immediately. This might take all the confidence out of how people feel about you, but at least you won’t be wrong anymore.
Don’t argue anything in the off chance you are wrong. You might have all the facts and the passion to argue some point, but if you are at all wrong you will find yourself at step one, loser.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our concience contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge for us and the power to carry that out.
This is the hippy dippy step that allows you to constantly change religions and do yoga and pay thousands of dollars on Buddhist retreats.
The fine print, or the part you probably ignore, that you only pray for His will for you.
I mean some people have stated that their God has told them to run for president or to kill off all the Jews, so careful what God ask from you.
The word sought at the beginning of the 11th step is a verb, and a verb requires action. So that means you gotta really act out those prayers and meditations.
12. Having had a spiritual experience as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all of our affairs.
While the second and third steps, the fourth and fifth steps, the sixth and seventh step, and the eighth and ninth steps are one step split in half, this step is three steps in one: be magically changes, help others, and be perfect all the time.
When Bill W. was on belladonna and recovering from a binge as a late stage alcoholic, he had an instant religious experience – or he was fucking high, but now this is the expectation that you will have this after working the 12 steps. AA does have an appendix about its okay to just be a mediocre chump, which they refer to as an educational variety spiritual experience for all the people that didn’t have any experiences.
Like most religious cults, the big part is spreading the good news. Now that you’re all spiritual you can now get to other alcoholics. If you want to stay off the things you’re powerless over you’ll need to spend the rest of your life helping others. Don’t worry about enjoying anything except hanging out to pieces of shit like you were about how cool you are now.
You supposedly learned all these great new principles that you get to use as your personality now. You won’t make anymore mistake because you won’t be using your old shitty personality that you had before beginning at step one, you will have perfect, moral principles.
Here are things that the 12 step can help you quit:
Alcohilolism
Narcotics
Heroin
Weed
Cocaine
Meth Amphetamines
Porn
Sex
Debt
Over eaters
Under eaters
Co dependency
Emotions
Relationships
Cluttering
Being a child of an alcoholic or two
Food
Neurotics
Nicotine
Online gaming
Gambling
Knitting
Watching Roseanne
Netflix
Ice cream
Workaholics
La Croix
Sleeping in
Lack of ambition
Graffiti
Rock collecting
Facebook arguments