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August 3 - August 4, 2023
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.” We realize some of the things we’ve been doing to protect ourselves have been hurting us and possibly others.
7. “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.” From my experience, humbly seems to be the key here.
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.” This is a simple Step in a simple program. Sometimes the simplest things help us feel happy.
10. “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”
We keep our eyes on ourselves. We continually and regularly evalu...
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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 others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”
An alcoholic doesn’t need forgiveness; they need treatment. We don’t need to forgive the alcoholic, at least not initially. We need to step back so they can’t keep stomping on our toes.
Forgiveness comes in time—its own time—if we’re striving to take care of ourselves. Don’t let other people use this principle against us. Don’t let other people badger us into forgiving. We can dole out forgiveness based on good decisions, high self-esteem, and mindfulness. If we’re taking care of us, we will understand whom to forgive and when it’s time to do that. While we’re at it, don’t forget to forgive ourselves.
As the disease pushes more, we give in more until we’re tolerating things we said we would never tolerate and doing things we said we would never do.3 Later, this process of “increased tolerance” of inappropriate behaviors may reverse. Suddenly, we may become totally intolerant of even the most human behaviors. In the beginning, we make excuses for a person’s inappropriate behavior; toward the end, there is no excuse.
We need boundaries. We need to set limits on what we do to and for people. We need to set limits on what we will allow people to do to and for us. The people we relate to need to know we have boundaries. It will help them and us.
