FoƛnƊơƴiƕnƙ of RecƕƜƥƲy I am a recovering alcoholic with 3+ years of for the first time I was without that voice in sobriety. At this stage I do these actions to my head that constantly obsesses about a maintain my sobriety: drink. This allowed me to focus on recovery. 1. I am completely honest with my sponsor and send her my 10th step daily I did almost everything my sponsor 2. I do Gratitude list daily exchange with my suggested because I was desperate and it accountability partner was pointed out to me that clearly my way 3. Whenever I feel uncomfortable or irritated didn’t work. Willingness and Action are so I do a spot check inventory and send it to important in recovery. Without them, it my sponsor would be impossible to stay sober. Having 4. I attend 2 meetings a week the willingness and taking action will get 5. I get together with my friends in recovery you through the stepwork and keep you in 6. I do service whenever I can. service. In AA I learnt about Acceptance and to see my part in things, which then taught The foundation of my recovery is an me to let go of anger and resentments and acknowledgment that I cannot do it on my to forgive. The 10th step inventory has own and that my Higher Power is with me become a daily routine every night, and it always. has given me so much more self awareness. Through my 10th step email to ~E my sponsor each night, it got me thinking more about others, and it really helped me to become aware of each day that goes by. AA has gifted me with a solid foundation The serenity prayer became my go-to, and a that I never knew I needed. I drank because I prayer I love and still use today. Meditation never knew how to handle the came a year plus into my sobriety and has uncomfortable and unpleasant emotions now become a huge part of my life. Having and situations. And then it became the one quiet time to tune in, feeling connected to a thing that I relied on for everything. The higher power, has filled that gaping hole that more I drank the more disconnected I was, I always tried to fill with alcohol etc. and the more I could only rely on Alcohol. It was a vicious cycle that I did not know how The Big Book and the program of AA really to get out of. I guess we all have to hit our does equip us with a basic toolkit for life. own rock bottom before you get desperate Not just to survive but to thrive. enough to surrender. That was my story at least. The desperation led to surrender ~C which removed that mental obsession and

I was talking to a friend recently and he intimated that he often struggled with some mental health issues and it was only recently that he was able to finally start articulating some of those struggles with his close friends. He also mentioned that it took him many years of trying to stay in control of the situation before he finally arrived at the point where he had to grudgingly accept that he really needed some professional help because it was beyond his ability to achieve any lasting resolution or healing around those issues.

result. Make those amends, and others will forgive you on your terms. Have 3 service positions and you’ll have three times the opportunity for people to praise you for being a good AA boy scout.

At some point along the way, with the gradual increase in pride and arrogance, came more experiences of friction, discontent and judgement with the world and others around me, both in the program and outside. I started to lose that conscious contact with my Higher Power and that interior freedom and ease of being comfortable in my own skin that came with it. And the hardest thing about it was that I felt I could not let anyone know what I was experiencing.

That conversation made me start to think a little bit about one of the foundations of recovery that today I seem to take for granted, but that was previously so crucial to me, especially from my second year of recovery onward. In the early days of my recovery, when I had finally surrendered and accepted what I needed to do and poured all my energy and focus on going to any lengths for sobriety, I found myself starting to experience all the promises of the steps.

Here I was, a rock star in local AA recovery, and if God forbid, anyone knew that I was constantly restless, irritable and discontent, what would they think about my recovery program?

The shame of appearing less than was something that would take a much longer time for me to work through and release. Eventually it got bad enough that one day the thought popped into my head about contacting an old fling I had had awesome sex with a long time ago.

My life started to be put together in a new way, relationships and friendships started to heal, and I began to experience life in a charged and electrifying, life-giving way. Flush with that growing experience, my ego slowly, subtly, but surely, started to re-grow and insidiously hijacked a lot of my ways of looking at the world and the way I worked the program of AA.

I was attached at the time, but I didn’t realize that I was careening down a slippery slope toward a potential relapse, so entranced I was by the intensity of the experience I had had with this friend of mine. Also, though I couldn’t see it at the time, I was actively trying to think myself out of my resentments and discontent, and it wasn’t working.

A speaker in AA I once heard described the steps of AA as the tools that are meant to lead you to an experience of one’s Higher Power and all the accompanying transformation and healing are by-products of that conscious contact. In my experience though, once the ego started to reassert itself, the focus of the steps became less about leading me to my Higher Power, and more about me exercising my will over the world as My Higher Power. My way of interacting the world became less unconditional and more transactional. Do this step, and you’ll get this

They often say in AA that you have to act your way into a new way of thinking, that it is impossible to think your way into it (which should have been obvious to me from my days of active alcoholism, but as they say, we often grow at the speed of pain).

Eventually, I ended up having that booty call, and the overwhelming sensation of guilt and shame that I had woke me up to the space where I could see that something was seriously wrong and that I was completely off the beam and it finally forced me to confess to my sponsor and a couple of fellows I was close to that I needed help and very quickly. They helped me to see what was missing from my program.

normalize the struggle of acceptance. It takes the shame of being less than, and releases it so that we become comfortable with being as we are. We see ourselves on a journey of growing towards, rather than running from.

Another by-product of this is that I have become a much more compassionate and gentle soul when working with others. The militancy of my earlier days in recovery, in sponsoring, often drove away a few who could not handle the hard edge of “suit up and show up”, “sit down and shut up and open your ears”.

As it turns out, in the 10th step where it talks about the spot inventory, I was doing all of it faithfully except the little pesky bit about, “We discuss them with someone immediately” where my brain usually skips a beat and moves on to making amends and being of service. Little did I realize it, but that action of telling on myself, about being accountable, is the thing that helps me to process resentments and shame and get perspectives that help me to release them from my being, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. So once I started to incorporate it into my life rigorously, my conscious contact came back in short order. Since then, it has become an integral part of my program, so much so, that it is fairly instinctual now.

While my sponsor at the time often pointed out that I had no power to make anyone get clean and sober, nor the power to make anyone relapse, it was often countered by the observation that for newcomers, the gentleness of the practice of the welcome in the Third Tradition is often the only living embodiment of the Big Book that they have the ability to read at that point, before deciding whether or not AA is for them.

There is a popular saying: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Once I started to become much more comfortable with telling others about my flaws and petty thoughts and actions, I started to become more accepting of newcomers who often had these character defects on full display and heaps of shame to go with them. That allowed me to hold space for them, and eventually make them feel like AA was a place they could come back to when they were ready to do the work to recover and heal.

What I have since realized as I have grown more in the journey and in recovery and been able to experience is that the act of telling on myself humanizes me and helps me to become more fully me: where I’m at. A lot of early recovery is about the visceral coming to terms with our limitations, but what takes longer to heal is our acceptance that this is the way it has to be, moving forward. Many a time the ego rebuilds itself, because there’sa deep seated hunger in us to try to prove that maybe we aren’t really the train-wrecks that our past actions had brought us to the space of being; that our flaws and character defects are things that can be worked out to our own timetable.

Most of all, these days, telling on myself helps me to rest easier at night, so I can meet the next day with more peace and grace than I can doing it all on my own. It helps me to become part of the human race, and for that, I am truly grateful.

How often have I heard the need to be better coming from an intense space of shame in the rooms. Telling on ourselves helps us to