Your Brain on AA

This Companion and Guide is the result of requests to provide a simplified overview of the contents found in Your Brain on AA (YBOAA). Hence, I have used flow charts highlighting the key issues regarding each of the twelve step discussions found in YBOAA to do this. In addition, I personally wanted to provide some important new information that would compliment the contents of YBOAA so I used this opportunity to include that material as well. This rather recent and very important information deals with the human brain and the critical issue of human relationships including how and why we go about joining with or avoiding others. I believe that this information, if understood and applied to the working of the Twelve Steps, can make a major contribution to the realization of a truly comfortable life without reliance on alcohol, drugs, rationalizations, and other forms of fear-based coping mechanisms and habits. My motivation in writing YBOAA was not to provide a somewhat interesting little book containing some little known tidbits about human beings and their brains. My motivation was based on my hope that this information, when understood in all of its ramifications, will offer the reader a new way of thinking about what is going on as he or she is involved with working and practicing the steps, going to meetings, participating in the fellowship, and engaging in sponsorship, both as a sponsor and a sponsee. I wanted to present and explore reasons why belief in a power greater than oneself is both critical in its nature and equally available to believers and atheists. Therefore, I chose to discuss a power that produces both sudden and unexplainable freedom from the desire to drink and use, and the seemingly incremental emergence over time of the same freedom. I offered examples from the field of medicine where this has occurred with diseases other than alcoholism.