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I know you must be wondering, what’s this Alcoholic Leadership…???

Its all about taking leadership over alcohol and not letting that bottle take over us. We had an excellent session this morning in our counselling class by Mr.Vincent representing AA (Alcoholic Anonymous, a world wide organisation), Bangalore. He shared his personal life experiences on his 25yrs of addiction and how he poured alcohol completely out of his life 15yrs ago. Since then from 1995, he is very instrumental in working with AA, Bangalore reaching out to alcoholics and their families to get out of alcoholism.

AA defines alcoholism as “A physical allergy, coupled with mental obsession, leading to spiritual bankruptcy”.

Alcoholism by itself is a deadly disease that succumb mankind to a lowest level in life. I personally knew few of them in my family and friends, who are alcoholics leading a miserable life.

Its not that they wish and happy to lead life in a miserable way, but they’ve no other choice as they are programmed to the core with the barrels of alcohol that have gone in all through these years. Even if they badly want to come out of that misery, they will not able to do so, as things have gone out of their hands and mind. Hands starts shaking and shivering without that peg in the morning, mind is out of control fantasizing that one day every thing will be alright. Most importantly they make a promise every day not to drink, though they very well knew that their day is going to end up drinking anyway.

AA is an excellent self help group that has made a remarkable change in thousands of lives all over the world. Here is their famous twelve step program to overcome addiction.

THE TWELVE STEPS PROGRAM OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

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

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

In these days of widely accepted social drinking, its very very important to be aware that, alcoholism starts with a very first drink in some point of time in our life. I am not here to say don’t drink, it is absolutely an individual’s choice to make. All I would like to request is