“Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.’s remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking.”
The first type of rock-bottom is the recognition that one needs help: the circumstance might be grave or trivial. The rock-bottom is not the circumstance but the recognition.
Once one starts investigating Twelve-Step recovery, the precise circumstance the response to which was the desire to seek help becomes irrelevant.
What matters is the diagnosis of having alcoholism, which has to do with the facts of powerlessness and compulsion, not quantity or consequences.
The second type of rock-bottom is the recognition one must take the Steps and do so promptly—or else.
Again, this has to do not with the stage of progression but the fact of the condition.
If you jump out of a high window and you’re at an early stage of the fall, you’re as much in need of a miracle as someone about to hit the ground below.