Shaping of Principles

While early AA members were going through the personal and group experiences that eventually produced the Steps and the Traditions, they had no idea that they were shaping principles destined to hold good for the million-plus AA members of 1981. In writing the Steps, they simply looked back and figured out what they had done right. They arrived at the Traditions mostly by the reverse route--looking back, seeing where they had gone wrong, and then setting a course in the opposite direction.