The AA Promises: All Twelve, What They Mean and Where to Find Them
The AA Promises are a short passage from the Big Book describing what recovery gives back. Members quote them constantly, many groups read them aloud, and almost nobody can say where in the book they actually are. For help finding AA meetings near you, call (866) 920-0628.
Read more: The 3rd Step Prayer in AA: The Words and What It Asks
The Twelve AA Promises in Full
They are usually numbered twelve, though the passage runs as continuous prose in the book rather than as a list:
- We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
- We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
- We will comprehend the word serenity.
- We will know peace.
- No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.
- That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.
- We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
- Self-seeking will slip away.
- Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
- Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.
- We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
- We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
The passage closes with a line members quote as often as the promises themselves: that these are not extravagant promises, and that they are always materialised if worked for.
Where the Promises Are in the Big Book
Chapter 6, "Into Action", pages 83 and 84. They arrive in the middle of the instructions for making amends, which is not an accident of layout.
This is the detail most articles leave out, and it is the one that changes how the passage reads. The Promises are not a preface or a closing benediction. They sit inside the hardest practical work the book asks for.
Why They Are Called the Ninth-Step Promises
Because of where they sit. The amends described on those pages are the ninth step, so members call these the ninth-step promises to distinguish them from other passages.
That distinction matters because these twelve are not the only promises in the book. There are further passages elsewhere describing what changes, including ones tied to the tenth and twelfth steps, and long-time members will sometimes point that out when the famous twelve get treated as the whole story.
What They Actually Describe
Not that life becomes easy, and not that circumstances improve. Read closely, every one of the twelve describes a change in the person rather than a change in their conditions: freedom, serenity, the loss of self-pity, the end of fear about people and money.
That is why members say the promises are coming true rather than that they have arrived. The passage describes a direction, and the book is explicit that they materialise if worked for.
When Meetings Read Them Aloud
Many meetings close with them, and some open with them. In a lot of rooms they are read by whoever is chairing, straight from the book, at the point where the meeting turns from business to sharing.
They come up most in step meetings working the ninth, and at sobriety anniversaries, where the passage does the job a speech otherwise would.
If They Have Not Come True for You
This is a common and rarely discussed experience, particularly early on. The book ties the passage to painstaking work through the steps rather than to time served, and members who feel nothing has changed are usually pointed back to the step they are on rather than told to wait.
It is also worth saying plainly that the Promises are a description of what members have found, not a guarantee anybody issued. Nobody in AA is in a position to promise you an outcome.
Reading Them With Other People
The passage was written to be worked, not admired. Hearing it read in a room by people at different distances from it does something that reading it on a screen does not.
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