"Step 10 Is For Us"

[janbear]

"Step 10 Is For Us"


In the 12-Step programs, our goal is sane and balanced living, and the program is a strategy designed to help us achieve this aim. The Steps are markers along the path, even though we each move independently and make our own choices. To stay on the path, we have to pay attention to how we progress. We still need to be teachable. We need to give ourselves permission to claim our progress and validate our feelings. At the same time, we need to remain as objective as we can about how our behaviors match up with our recovery goals.

Developing the habit of constructive self-reflection does, admittedly, take practice. But once we accept the idea that this act of self-discipline is not intended as torturing self-attack, then we can begin to view Step 10 as an act of self-protection and personal care. Choosing to keep up a discipline we have taken on voluntarily builds self-respect and deepens self-trust. We come to experience ourselves as persons capable of commitment, which is a big factor for building confidence and personal security. Instead of a dreaded and dreary bout of self-attack, the reparenting we give ourselves in Step 10 gives us clarity about our own motives and keeps us focused on our goals. Getting realistic about ourselves usually makes us less sensitive to the critical feedback we receive from others, too.

---from Pocket Guide to the 12 Steps by Kathleen S., page 99-100

[shrubbery]

Last night as I was getting ready to "call it a day" and was making my daily inventory prior to falling asleep, the phone rang. I was down on my knees at the moment; I just started doing this again - but usually in the bathroom while in the shower - so the joints do not hurt as much. Anyway, it was the first of three phone calls from friends and a sponsee.

Each of them had something to say about how I had handled myself during the day when they witnessed something go "weird". I knew that to myself I had just recited the NA third step prayer and done my best to support my HP in getting the work done. Regardless, those moments seemed so insignificant to me that I had not even listed them in my gratitude or defect list for the day.

But to each of the callers it was something that they had been working on in their journey. They remarked that they saw grace in my approach to anger, openmindedness in my reflection upon my inability to offer advice when it was asked of me -rather just giving an example of my life experience and how things had worked out for me. And in the third call the person persisted that he owed me a big debt because he realized how deeply he had stung me with his response (crosstalk) about something I had shared in honesty and hopefully anonyminity. He repeatedly tried to explain that others in the group had spoken to him about his anger, distain, and verbal assault of me.

Rather than argue with him, I had instead waited until the sharing session was over and then thanked him for his outlook, caring to tell me his opinion, and the experience he had shown in how he responded to the subject. It was about how in the 7th step in NA it says we may be helped by others who see our defects of character and want to help us /free us from the slavery to impulses, obsessions, and shortcomings. I have repeatedly asked my predecessors (people with 25, 24, 18 years clean ... I have 15 yr, 7 months) how many times they are willing to mention something to a friend that may be harming that friend, or limiting their recovery and all of these people said that over a 6 month period they would never bring such a subject up more than 3 times.

Long story short, my flaws today might not be something someone else with less time would even consider major, but they are the things that I do deal with in my 10rh step about 2-3 times every month or two. I had no hope that in the third step I could become perfect. In fact I once asked someone if there would ever be a chance that I could spend a day without needing to do a 10th step; and he laughed so hard - snot flew out of his nose and his eyes teared over and he almost fell laughing off of his chair.

But it was two years ago I did spend a day without doing a 10th step. I had an esophagus problem and was hospitalized and kept sedated for over 26 hours unconscious, and since I was already in a state of HP will I went guietly off to sleep with the medication in the IV.

Basically the tenth step is for me the real growth to tolerating myself, being in the right frame of mind for the upcoming day, "shaking it off" ... with the knowledge that I will never be perfect.

Whenever someone confronts me and I feel anger or mistrust, or even the beginnings of resentment I think of two ducks arguing. They float up to each other bump chest to chest smack bill to bill and head. At some point without a seeming resolution they then turn in opposite directions and paddle off. Finally they shake their feathers, head, flap their wings and then take off in opposite directions of each other. They live in a constant state of we with their flock, one leads the triangle for a short time and the next and then the next, none of them is the supreme duck the PERFECT DUCK. I might never get everything right in my daily journey but I have learned to shrug off the little and big things and thank my HP for another day clean shared with others.

Love and Peace