The twelve steps:
- Admit you have a problem.
- Admit you need help from a higher power. This need not be the Judeo-Christian God.
- Make a decision to turn your life around through help from the above higher power.
- Make a detailed personal moral inventory. As in write it down, and actually analyze yourself, item by item.
- Admit to yourself and to another human being the exact nature of your wrong.
- Become entirely ready to have your higher power remove your shortcomings.
- Humbly ask your higher power to remove said shortcomings.
- Make a list of every person you have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them.
- Make direct amends to the people on the aforementioned list.
- Continue to take a detailed personal inventory to root out your shortcomings.
- Seek through prayer and/or meditation to improve your relationship with your higher power as you understand it, asking only for knowledge of its will and the power to realize it.
- Carry the message to other sufferers of your affliction, and live out the spirit of the 12 steps.
People criticize 12-step programs as being a kind of psychological cult, and they do make some valid points, but the program is a proven method for many people to get off and stay off alcohol and drugs, and generally change their lives for the better.
I see it as a kind of prosthesis for the soul: Through the abuse of drugs, the addict has burned out their soul and lost control over their own life, becoming a machine for the consumption of more drugs. Like getting a synthetic heart, attending a 12-step program replaces the lost soul with an inferior model that doesn't do everything the original did and requires constant maintenance to keep in working order.