Maybe you are suffering from a physical addiction to drugs, alcohol, food, or sex. Maybe you are suffering from destructive mental or emotional habits.

Maybe life seems fine on the outside but you feel there should be something more.

If you’re ready to start a new way of life, here are the time-tested principles that have given millions of people a way out of despair, addiction, and futility.

The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (adapted for all people in all situations):

1. We admitted we were powerless over our addictions, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The Four Absolutes

1. Absolute honesty — no lying, no cheating, no stealing. In a word, in all your affairs, simply and absolutely no falsehood.
2. Absolute purity — purity of mind, purity of body, purity of the emotions, purity of heart, sexual purity.
3. Absolute unselfishness — seeking what is right and true in every situation above what I want.
4. Absolute love — loving God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.

The Ten Practical Points

1. Completely give yourself to this simple Program.
2. Practice rigorous honesty.
3. Be willing to go to any lengths to recover.
4. Be fearless and thorough in your practice of the principles.
5. Realize that there is no easier, softer way.
6. Let go of your old ideas absolutely.
7. Recognize that half measures will not work.
8. Ask God’s protection and care with complete abandon.
9. Be willing to grow along spiritual lines.
10. Accept the following pertinent ideas as proved by All Addicts Anonymous experience: that you cannot manage your own life; that probably no human power can restore you to sanity; that God can and will if sought.