Every person in the AA program who's successful is living proof that he or she does have power over addictive drugs and alcohol- the power to stop.

Although you may have never sat down and defined what your philosophy is, it is fully operative and working in your life at all times. It deals with what you believe about the world in which you live, about its people and events, about how you affect them.

What determines each person's state of happiness or unhappiness is not the event itself, but what the event means to that person.

The moment you make the internal changes necessary to obtain your goal, the outside world changes instantly.

You can be happy if you are willing to let go of your past and leave yourself unencumbered so you can fly freely.

How do you change what you believe when your experience has convinced you otherwise? By creating a new experience. The best way for you to get that new experience is to change your response to what happens. By the natural law of cause and effect, that new response will create new results, which you will then experience as a new reality. To reach the goal of happiness, act as though the following statement is already true: Everything that happens to me is the best thing that can happen to me.

Alcohol and drugs are not the problems; they are what people are using to help themselves cope with the problems. Those problems always have both physical and psychological components- anything from anemia, hypoglycemia, or a sluggish thyroid to attention deficient disorder, brain-wave pattern imbalances, or deep emotional pain.