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Faith Facts Friday With Fiona

by | Sep 19, 2014 | 12 Steps

Written By: Fiona Stockard

The Big Book Broken Down – Part Five

Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who help each other to recover from alcohol and drug addiction. It was founded in June of 1935, just celebrated its seventy-ninth anniversary, and boasts over two million members.

AA’s central text is the Big Book. With a sponsor and a Big Book, AA members work the twelve steps, and “recover from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body” (title page).

Big Book

Today, I’ll be breaking down chapter five, How It Works.

 

How It Works

This chapter opens with one of the most famous lines from The Big Book. “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program…” (58).

Starting out with a bang! I love this quote. I also love the story behind it. Rumor has it that Bill W. was asked, years after writing The Big Book, if there was anything he’d have changed. He responded by saying he wanted to change “rarely” to “never.” That’s been my experience. If you’re committed to working the twelve-steps, you don’t fail. I didn’t and I was as big a f**k up as they come!

 

The Third Step

How It Works then talks about Step Three. They use a wonderful metaphor comparing alcoholics to directors. We want to direct this play (or movie!) called life. We want everyone to do exactly what we say. Wouldn’t life be wonderful then?

The problem here is that people don’t do what we want. Guess what? They don’t have to! In fact, it’s pretty selfish for us alcoholics to want them to! How It Works addresses this selfishness. The chapter states,

“Selfishness – self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt” (62).

That’s one of my favorite passages from The Big Book. It describes exactly how I lived life! I was driven by fear and other negative emotions/needs. I hurt people. I hurt people and they hurt me back. I thought they hurt me for no reason. I couldn’t see my part in anything!

The twelve-steps, including steps three and four, showed me my part. They showed me how selfish I really was. Guess what? I was pretty damn selfish! Luckily, there were more steps and these (specifically eight and nine) helped me to change.

But back to step three. My sponsor explained the third step very simply. She told me it was just a decision to complete the rest of the steps. She told me that by working the remaining steps, I’d have turned my life and will over to God as I understand God.

Simple enough. How It Works then moves on to step four.

 

The Fourth Step

“Next we launched out on a course of vigorous action, the first step of which is a personal housecleaning…” (63).

The important words here are “vigorous action.” My sponsor explained that the first three steps weren’t action oriented. They were two conclusions (I’m an alcoholic. I can’t get better on my own) and a decision (going through with the remaining steps). But step four? Step four was about action.

How It Works describes how to properly write a fourth step. It’s not an autobiography. It’s four charts: my resentments, my fears, my sexual and romantic history, and the harms I’ve caused others. Simple as that.

There’s an example chart, breaking down how my charts should look, on page 65. I highly recommend checking it out! It shows how to write the cause of various resentments, fears, etc. It then shows how to list and examine my part in these fears, harms, etc.

Remember, us alcoholics are selfish! We need to be exposed to exactly how we’ve triggered resentments and the like, if we’re going to understand our part in the suffering of others.

How It Works continues, to the end of the chapter, with information and tips for writing out your fourth step. Pages 64 to 71 of The Big Book are, hands down, some of the most informative writing I’ve ever read. They explain the weird inner workings of alcoholics. They explain things I thought no one would ever understand.

One of these, and one of my favorite quotes, comes towards the end of the chapter:

“Suppose we fall short of the chosen ideal and stumble? Does this mean we are going to get drunk? Some people tell us so. But this is only a half-truth. It depends on us and on our motives. If we are sorry for what we have done, and have the honest desire to let God take us to better things, we believe we will be forgiven and will have learned our lesson. If we are not sorry, and our conduct continues to harm others, we are quite sure to drink” (70).

That’s deep! That passage explains the real meaning of “progress not perfect.” It says guess what, I’m never going to be perfect. I’m going to fall short of who I want to be, and who God wants me to be, but that doesn’t mean I have to drink or drug.

No, just because I fall short doesn’t mean I’m a failure. As long as I keep trying to do better, I’ll be okay. As long as I keep trying to grow as a person, I’ll be okay. As long as I keep trying to put God as I understand God first, I’ll be okay.

Privacy vs. Secrecy: What’s The Difference?

by | Jul 2, 2014 | Addiction Articles, Recovery

Written By: Katie Schipper

Privacy vs. Secrecy & How They Relate To Honesty

The Importance of Honesty

Honesty, Open Mindedness, and Willingness – if you’re in any sort of twelve-step recovery, you’ll hear about these virtues over and over. All three are vital, but honesty in particular presents many road bumps to the addict or alcoholic.

The most obvious and undeniable fact about addiction is that in order to maintain the lifestyle of a junkie or boozehound, we have to be in a perpetual state of denial. Denial is the ultimate act of lying to ourselves. So, right off the bat, honesty is a virtue that throws some curveballs.

If a woman in early-recovery is willing to be honest, it doesn’t so much matter whether she’s actually honest. As long as her intention is to be honest, she’s on the right track. To put it another way, when she’s first getting sober, the woman in early-recovery is still going to be in enough denial to not even recognize that she’s still lying to herself and others, but if her aim is to practice honesty, then in time, and with help, the practice of honesty will grow and progress. In order to become willing, she must first distinguish the differences between privacy and secrecy.

privacy vs. secrecy

Read about the importance of accountability

Privacy Or Secrecy – Which One Keeps Us Sick?

With that mouthful about honesty being said, there’s another big concept in recovery we need to look at – the idea that secrets keep us sick. This concept, coupled with the necessity of honesty on the spiritual plane, stirs up a whole debate on secrecy vs. privacy.

For a group of people who’re notoriously secretive, always to our own detriment and demise, what does privacy even mean? In a program that demands “rigorous honesty,” are we expected to share all the details of our private life? How far do we take the spiritual inventory that we do during our fourth and fifth steps?

Read more about the Fourth Step

Being Open to Truth and Honesty

The difference between privacy and secrecy is often subtle and sometimes blurred. The problem of distinguishing the two is that intention plays as much of a role as the actual practice of being honest.

To give an example, imagine a woman in early recovery (or any point in her recovery) who goes to the store and decides to steal lipstick. She may do this for a variety of reasons, but ultimately she knows and understands that stealing is wrong. At this point, she can go two ways. She can keep this secret out of shame. She can hold on to it, believing that in keeping the secret she’s minimizing the act of stealing and therefore doing herself a favor. Or she can, knowing from past experiences that keeping things like this hidden leads to worse shame and secrecy, share what she did with someone. Maybe she’ll tell multiple people. Maybe she’ll bring the lipstick back.

The key lies not in who, or how, she tells, but rather in the fact that she’s willing to achieve truth and honesty over secrecy. By this line of thinking, privacy is how the woman recognizes what she did is wrong, but not shameful, unless it’s left to fester in some corner of her mind. This is the same corner where everything she believes she shouldn’t have done goes to rot.

Secrecy, on the other hand, is the belief that we can do things that are so shameful that we must, at all costs, keep them to ourselves.

When looking at privacy vs. secrecy, we see that privacy is the recognition that we have a right to a personal life, but that there’s no shame in our actions. Privacy is when we’re willing to fully accept who we are, in all areas, without feeling compelled to hide some part of ourself. We might not talk about our battles with depression and anxiety to everyone we meet. Most likely, we aren’t going to broadcast our sex life or relationships everywhere (unless you’re a special breed of Facebook over-sharer!), but knowing that none of this carries any shame allows us to live a private life without the mask of secrecy.