Early AAs Take Stock

One of the AA pioneers' many gifts to alcoholics was identifying the early warning signs of the illness and sparing them what Bill W. called "that last ten or fifteen years of literal hell the rest of us had gone through." "By going back in our own drinking histories," he explained in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, "we could show that years before we realized it, we were out of control, that our drinking even then was no mere habit, that it was indeed the beginning of a fatal progression."