Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

STEP TWELVE

After we come into A.A., if we go on growing, our atti-
tudes and actions toward security—emotional security and
financial security—commence to change profoundly. Our
demand for emotional security, for our own way, had con-
stantly thrown us into unworkable relations with other peo-
ple. Though we were sometimes quite unconscious of this,
the result always had been the same. Either we had tried to
play God and dominate those about us, or we had insisted
on being overdependent upon them. Where people had tem-
porarily let us run their lives as though they were still chil-
dren, we had felt very happy and secure ourselves. But when
they finally resisted or ran away, we were bitterly hurt and
disappointed. We blamed them, being quite unable to see
that our unreasonable demands had been the cause.

When we had taken the opposite tack and had insisted,
like infants ourselves, that people protect and take care of
us or that the world owed us a living, then the result had
been equally unfortunate. This often caused the people
we had loved most to push us aside or perhaps desert us
entirely. Our disillusionment had been hard to bear. We
couldn't imagine people acting that way toward us. We had
failed to see that though adult in years we were still be-
having childishly, trying to turn everybody—friends, wives,
husbands, even the world itself—into protective parents.
We had refused to learn the very hard lesson that overde-
pendence upon people is unsuccessful because all people
are fallible, and even the best of them will sometimes let us
down, especially when our demands for attention become
unreasonable.

As we made spiritual progress, we saw through these fal-