Introduction to 12 Step Guide

i would like to add some sentences to introduction to Guide to 12 Steps.
Liana.
FOREWORD


Dear members of the LAA fellowship, this “Twelve Steps Guide” is the result of long-term work of our group consciousness and experience of working the Steps.


We, the participants in the process of creating the “Steps Guide” - have walked the path of recovery with the help of our sponsors, steps, traditions and other tools of recovery.


Those Twelve Steps of LAA intended for people whose lives have already been or are being influenced by addiction to love, fantasies and daydreaming. These twelve statements are the cornerstone of our program - they remarkably serve us in attaining our goal - to find serenity, peace and freedom from love addiction, regardless of other methods developed by psychiatrists, treatment programs and other social organizations.


The Twelve Steps of LAA are the heart of the program, where people, addicted to love relationships, find a new way of life by attending “step study meetings” and drawing on the experiences of their fellow travelers. The unity of our community serves us as a support on the path to gaining freedom and faith in a bright future, the future without the shackles of addiction. It is impossible to help people who are still suffering, without this unity of our community,

The twelve Steps are spiritually oriented, but they are not based on any religious tradition. The concept of "God" does not refer to a specific human being, power or concept. Here we mean the concept of "God, as each of us understands it" or "The Higher Power, as each of us understands it."

And therefore, those who do not belong to any particular faith are maybe agnostic find in the program a calm, satisfying path in their life, if they have the courage to believe in a certain Power that is more powerful than their own power.

These 12 Steps have been studied and practiced by members of our LAA community for some years, and many of us have found this guide to be much more helpful than just being able to cope with addiction, unreasonable thinking, confusion in ours thoughts and feelings, and insanity of wrong decisions and fantasies.

Those Steps become our way of life, always helping us in all situations. How we absorb and use these Steps depends on how well they help us. In this book we share our experiences, adding reflections and stories from our lives to each Step. These are just examples from our life, but there are so many such stories. These experiences of other people help us to believe that recovery is possible.

With love and support, LAA Literature Committee.


Introduction.

All of this was started by the first members of the LAA, who understood the need to change their lives, their thinking and gain the wisdom of sanity, and do not seek to change the behavior of others. We all got together, talked about our love experiences, trying to help each other to find the right solution. This is a story how the LAA community was born out of a natural need to share with each other the experience of overcoming their love fantasies and illusions.

While this guide was being compiled, working Steps in the small groups step by step, it became more and more clear that all 12 Steps of the program reveal its main directions:

- tracing the signs of addiction in ourselves, understanding the uncontrollability of our life and the presence of this addiction in us is OUR EXPERIENCE,
- using various tools of the program (steps, principles and traditions) is OUR STRENGTH and COURAGE TO CHANGE,
- the results of using the tools of the program on the path to the healing are OUR HOPE and FAITH in healing.

By working through this guide, you can see addiction as a disease or unreasonableness or poor mental health.

For many of us, the awareness and acceptance of this fact has become very useful and even necessary for understanding the manifestations of insanity and tracking the symptoms of this addiction,

as well as self-study of the Steps using all the tools that provide us with our program for recovery. In addition, such an approach for many of us ensures the continuous fulfillment of our powerlessness in the face of the consequences of this serious illness. It helps us to get on the path to recovery (healing). This approach helps us to move forward. We begin to learn how to live and recover by relying on our LAA program.



Addicted to love, we acknowledge that we will not become in control of our lives and relationships without the help of our fellow travelers, sponsors, Steps, Traditions, etc. We are working hard to find the source of our hope for a happy and free life through our shared decision: to complete the LAA program and the 12 Steps. We do not need to understand how and why these Steps work, it is enough just to believe that it worked for those who walked the steps before us, and therefore will help us too. And those are not empty hopes - we can see many of us who have found Solutions and for whom the Promises of the Program have become reality. Their pain from addiction is gone. We are filled with faith and hope that the spiritual principles of the steps work, they bring us recovery from addiction and sanity, and help us ultimately find serenity and fill our lives with acceptance, joy and love.