Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects - Steps Six and Seven

by Bill Pittman

Seems there was this group of Twelve Step members taking a boat ride to this island called Serenity, and it was truly a happy bunch of people.

So Mary jumped into the water and started to swim for all she was worth. She swam for quite a while and then started to sink. The members on board, now all aware that Mary was struggling, shouted, “Come on, Mary! Don’t give up! Drop the rock!” With that encouragement, Mary started swimming again, only to start sinking again shortly afterward. She was going under when she heard all those voices shouting to her, “Mary, drop the rock! Let go and drop the rock.”

Then she understood when she was going down for the third time: This thing around her neck, this was why she kept sinking when she really wanted to catch the boat. This thing was the “rock” they were all shouting about: resentments, fear, dishonesty, self-pity, intolerance, and anger were just some of the things her “rock” was made of. “God help me get rid of the rock,” she prayed. “Now! Get rid of it!”

Then, with another burst of energy, she let go. She tore the other strings off and dropped the rock. Once free of the rock, she was amazed how easy it was to swim, and she soon caught up with the boat.

Before its discussion of Step Four, the Big Book says, “Our liquor was but a symptom. So we had to get down to causes and conditions.” A thorough inventory reveals those causes and conditions; the Fifth Step allows us to share them with God and another human being, and so remove the inner pain they have caused in our past lives.

The first time I read Step Six, I thought it meant I had to arrive at some angelic state of mind in which I would become—and forever remain—“entirely ready” to have God remove all my defects.

To me, that means Step Six is not a onetime matter; it stretches over a lifetime of recovery. Even that “best possible attitude” is always just a beginning.

took out the list of defects, read it over, and asked myself two questions: Why are you holding on to these things? and What did these things ever do for you?

So I got on my knees and recited the Big Book’s Step Seven prayer, which asks God’s help in replacing our willfulness with His will for us. The Twelve and Twelve calls that replacement a “basic ingredient of all humility.”

In this ongoing process, the Program is asking us to go where none of us has ever been before—into lives of lessened fear, diminished anger, fewer resentments, and genuine self-esteem instead of self-pity.

The next two Steps begin the active, day-to-day solution, removing what blocks us from our usefulness to other people and to our Higher Power, and especially

There are four basic reasons we won’t be “entirely ready” to work the Sixth and Seventh Steps. The first is a conscious decision that we will never give up a specific character defect. Next, we blame our defects on others: people, situations, or institutions. Third, we rationalize. Our capacity to rationalize is unlimited. Before recovery we spent years on this one—throwing up barriers against unpleasant realities. Finally, it’s denial: we are totally unaware of our own contribution to our problems.

There’s not much use in doing our amends in Steps Eight and Nine if there is no sign of our willingness to chan...

Shoemaker wrote about the necessity of making daily surrenders. Yes, the Sixth Step is also about surrendering, just like the Third. But Shoemaker made one point very clear: We surrender as much of ourselves to as much of God as we understand.

Recovery works by giving us daily insight into what we can do to remove what blocks us. We

Shoemaker also passed on to the early AAs the idea that God reveals as much truth as you can live up to.

Perhaps the whole program is about Six and Seven.

We gain more understanding on how all the Steps, although ordered for a reason, need to be worked together. This prevents us from falling into the trap of understanding only just enough of the Program to make us miserable and not enough to make us happy.

The action of the Sixth and Seventh Steps culminates in dropping the rock—all the stubborn, grasping, stupid holding on to old patterns of behavior, thinking, and feeling that are harmful to our progress in recovery.

looking inward and upward, not outward and downward.

We’ll be looking at a number of ideas and examples of how men and women have made positive changes in their lives by working these Steps and by showing up at meetings to tell others of their experiences.

Of course we wanted to be rid of those character flaws and habits. So we prayed to let our defects go and humbly asked God for help. We thought we had done the Sixth and Seventh Steps, and that was that. Then, down the road, we started

Can we explain why we aren’t entirely ready? Why can’t we humbly ask? What’s in our way?

“The principles of Twelve Step recovery are the opposite of our character defects.” In recovery, we try to take the opposite of our character defects and shortcomings and turn them into principles. For example, we work to change fear into faith, hate into love, egoism into humility, anxiety and worry into serenity, complacency into action, denial into acceptance, jealousy into trust, fantasy into reality, selfishness into service, resentment into forgiveness, judgmentalism into tolerance, despair into hope, self-hate into self-respect, and loneliness into fellowship.

As the Big Book tells us, we are not destined for sainthood, and we should not be discouraged when we cannot “maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles.

“AA’s Twelve Steps are a group of principles, spiritual in their nature, which, if practiced as a way of life, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happy and usefully whole.”

this list is unknown, although it is used by many Twelve Step members:

become the person we can become, we must drop the rock—all the grasping and holding on to old patterns of behaving, thinking, and feeling that are harmful to ourselves and to others.

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Becoming entirely ready—moving into total willingness—is hard. It requires a great effort and awareness.

Step Six requires us to stop struggling. It is time to acknowledge that we need help. Not only help to stop our addiction but help in living better lives.

Perhaps it is a deep resentment, envy, or self-pity that keeps us in turmoil.

don’t have to achieve change immediately. We can work on our attitude of mind and pray about it. We

Step Six tells us to relax. We don’t do it all alone. Reflect. We turn to our Higher Power with confidence. Think of the relief that is waiting once we become entirely ready.

We all know individuals in recovery who have given up the booze or another addiction, yet they are staying dry or abstinent only by redirecting their intense inner misery into the lives of others.

For the Sixth Step, a spiritual surrender is necessary. Not a passive, waiting surrender, but an active use of the will; a total surrender of mind (thinking) and body (doing).

In the Third Step, it is the decision that is the key point—an active use of the will to turn it over, to align our will with God’s. In the Sixth Step, an even more active use of the will is required. We must act “as if” it has already taken place. We must have faith. Too many who take the Fifth Step make their confession and look around wondering where the solution lies.

must first ask, “Am I willing to believe that I can be different?”

Frequently this involves emotional pain; the pain of living the way I have been becomes greater than the fear of change.

This is a Step of surrender and trust, not self-will or self-determination. We surrender our ideas of which defects stand in the way of our usefulness to God, ourselves, and others.

is important to get over and beyond the false pride of making “getting rid of character defects” a central focus of our lives. This approach is just one more way of not living life on life’s terms. We get into life and do the best we can with what we know. When we truly know better, we are willing to change. In the meantime, we live life.

need to accept being human and fallible. Self-acceptance is more important than self-abuse.

shaming and ridiculing myself. I cannot open a flower with a sledgehammer—only

If I’m not changing my behavior because of pain, whom am I trying to impress?

God, I don’t care what I sound like, or look like, who my partners are, or where I live. I just don’t want to be like this anymore. On Your terms, in Your time, please remake me as You will. Thank You.

I find that the defects that made me an active threat to society were pretty much removed at once when I stopped my addictive chemical use.

God lets me keep the rest of the defects to remind me of my need for daily spiritual contact. They remind me that there is a God, and it isn’t me.

we must realize that we can’t change ourselves completely by ourselves or have any lasting good purpose without spiritual intervention.

Some have experienced an entire readiness as a feeling of being completely burned out or being at the end of their rope. Others have received a sponsor’s validation of readiness. Most of us experience this readiness after we have become very familiar with the feeling or experience of not being ready or not being willing to be changed.

The hole in me, the neediness, the hunger, the ache in my life that I tried to fill or stay distracted from by using addictive behavior is actually the perfectly logical result of not knowing and therefore not accepting myself as I am.