I was at a conference recently where more than one speaker glibly said they were powerless over everything.
This sounds ever so spiritual, but it's not.
First of all, it's untrue. The fact of saying so shows the individual has power, at least, over their vocal cords and the production of sound.
Now, I'm sure the individual might promptly retort, 'Well, I don't mean literally everything ... you know what I mean.'
Actually, I don't:
It's well established that many people in AA have a sketchy understanding of alcoholism and an even sketchier understanding of the programme. It does not help the cause of carrying the message to deliberately say something other than what one means and to hope that the other person pieces together the message. Why not simply say what you mean?
So, if the individual does not really mean they are powerless over everything and does indeed have the power to think, walk, speak, eat a doughnut, attend a conference, and mount the podium, what is the assertion?
Here lies the rub.
Sometimes people will attempt to specify this further, saying they're powerless over people, places, and things, but this is patently untrue. The world is testament to the fact that people have power over all three. If they didn't, no one could direct, affect, hurt, or help another; the world would appear untouched by human hand; every physical object would be precisely where it was before a human being found it, dug it out, and turned it into a spearhead.
Now, there is a degree of powerlessness over such things. If I wish Susan to sing an aria from The Magic Flute, and she cannot or will not, I am, in this respect, powerless over her. I can wish and exhort all I want, but the needed power is not there: sing she will not. Similarly, I cannot change the road layout in Hackney, and I cannot turn my left hand into a frog.
But the power of powerlessness in Step One really lies in its constraint. In saying I am powerless over alcohol, to amplify, over whether I have the first drink and over how much I then drink, I am saying something very specific, and contrasting alcohol to literally everything else (save other addictions, which represent only a tiny proportion of the facts, phenomena, entities, events, processes, and circumstances of the world).
In saying I'm powerless specifically over alcohol, I am saying I lack power in a manner I do not lack power with other things.
To say I'm powerless over everything dilutes the point.
If Bobby says to every woman, 'I love you', the fact he says this to Janet lacks any meaning in reality (although she might not apprehend this if she is unaware of his universal declarations). If he says, 'I love you' only to Janet, the statement starts to bite: it has real meaning because of its constraint.
I am powerless over alcohol, to have real meaning, must entail I am powerless over alcohol in a manner in which I am not powerless over other phenomena, over people, places, and things, over my beliefs, thinking, and behaviour.
It's a singular statement, and a terrifying one. If universalised to all phenomena, the terror is obscured. The truth becomes like Waldo in Where's Waldo. The truth is there, but its presence is obscured, hidden by a bodyguard of lies and half-truths.
Alcohol etc. is raised above the mob in Step One, singled out, spotlighted, for a specific reason: my relative powerlessness over many other things (the past, the truth, whether Arthur turns up on time) pales into insignificance compared to this cardinal horror: if I am prey to my impulses, I could lift a drink to my lips and never return to sobriety.