Letting Go and Letting God

Step 6: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Step 7: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

In this first series of articles for Good News, we are exploring the 12 Steps that originated with the recovery fellowship Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and are now a part of so many recovery programs in one form or another. Since I first began working these steps through AA’s sister fellowship, Al-Anon (for codependency), and subsequently also worked them to recover from my own addiction to alcohol, I’ve been sticking pretty closely to the traditional AA format, although these articles are written from a personal perspective of having been there and done that, not from any particular sense of expertise on my part. The 12 Steps are still working me, even though I have not found it necessary to take a drink of alcohol for more than a decade now.

Having completed an honest moral inventory of ourselves, and having shared this inventory with God and another human being (see the November 2007 through January 2008 issues of Good News), we are now ready to approach Steps 6 and 7. These steps have often been referred to as “the pick and the shovel” in our recovery. I think of them as the open doorway to a completely new way of living, to a place where we can finally become an honest version of ourselves, develop a sense of purpose, and live that purpose to the fullest. These stepping stones bring us within reach of the shores of the land of milk and honey.

The process of letting go and letting God (do for us what we cannot do for ourselves) really began in Steps 2 and 3, where we “came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” and became willing to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a God of our understanding. I like to think of those steps as reaching the doorway marked “loving life” and allowing within ourselves the mustard seed of hope that life, joy, and sanity really are possible and really do lie behind that door. Then we crack that door open with the 4 th and 5 th steps.

In working the 4 th Step, getting our resentments – the stuff of our addictive lives – down on paper and sharing them with God and another human being, we began to see patterns of behavior, ways of responding to life that simply do not work in our favor. In some cases, we could see that these patterns are, in fact, deadly (like binging, purging, starving ourselves, or masking our fears and hurts with booze or drugs). We may have come to the honest realization that we have been too chicken to put a gun to our temples, but we were trying through some of these methods to excuse ourselves from life. Sometimes those patterns involved other people, people who enabled our addictive behaviors, people who played destructive games with us, people who hurt us or were deeply wounded by our behavior. These destructive patterns were not pleasant to look at, but we discovered in sharing them with another human being, that we are not alone in the way we think and react to people and circumstances. We may feel lost, but we are clearly not alone.

So what happens now? What do we do to rid our lives of the destructive patterns of behavior? If we have not been able in the past to make or stick to good resolutions that will build a future, how can we now make new decisions, establish new patterns? Alone, we can’t.

The good news is that we are not alone. For each of us there is a higher power – some of us call that higher power God, some think of a higher power as the Creative Force behind the universe, some as Love. For each of us, the relationship with a higher power is unique – in this facet of our lives, uniqueness is a good thing, because the relationship with a higher power must be deeply personal. We must each welcome a relationship with a higher power who is a best friend, an unconquerable ally, a warrior for our good, a loving mentor, someone who believes that we can accomplish anything, someone who wants only the very best for us, for our lives. It is essential that this higher power is never one human being, although for some of us whose patterns have included negativity around the concept of God (as others understood Him), we may need for a time to look to a group people whose lives clearly demonstrate the joy of recovery. In any case, we must come to a place where we realize that we were created in love as an expression of love.

In preparation for the 6 th Step, we first take an honest look back at our work around Steps 1 through 5. Are we absolutely convinced that we are powerless over the behavior or substance of our addiction and that this powerlessness has made our lives unmanageable? Have we allowed the seeds of faith and hope into our lives? Have we thought about what sanity looks like – developed a vision for our lives that we resonate with joyfully? Have we been completely honest and thorough with our 4 th Step inventory and in sharing that inventory with another human being? Have we held nothing whatsoever back? If the answer to any of these questions is no, we need to ask our sponsor to revisit the step(s) with us to arrive at a resounding “yes.”

At the resounding “yes,” we are ready to open the door wide with Steps 6 and 7. These steps will continue working in us for the rest of our lives, picking away at the hard deposits in our spirits that keep us from a living, working relationship with a loving higher power, and shoveling away the garbage we have accumulated, leaving in its place a bright and sunny spiritual house within us. The first time we take them, we are simply allowing God in to get to work, simply believing that we want to get rid of the darkness, that God can help us to do that, and welcoming that work within ourselves.

Note that Step 7 begins with the word “humbly.” What is humility? It is neither pride nor thinking less of ourselves (false pride) – rather it is letting go of a pattern in which the entire world revolved around us and our needs and our problems. We simply cease to think only of ourselves. We become a part of a loving universe in which “the love we take is equal to the love we make” (thank you, Beatles). This is one of the new patterns that will replace the old patterns of “I,” “self,” and “me” (the “ism” in words like “alcoholism”).

And why is it that both “defects of character” and “shortcomings” are mentioned? Both thwart the purpose for which each of us was born: to be of maximum service to God and our fellow human beings. The first is overt, the second covert. The first is something we do to ourselves and/or others; the second is something we have omitted doing that should have been done. Together they form the shackles of our spirits, the shackles that would drag us down into darkness and an early grave, never having risen to the heights for which we were intended, never having truly tasted and felt deep, abiding joy in life.

The final part of the Steps 6 and 7 process is to develop a personal prayer to speak over our lives that follows the example provided in the book Alcoholics Anonymous:

My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen.

And so it is. Rise up. You are now in the eternal companionship of a higher power who wants only your highest good. Steps 8 and 9 will begin the cleansing process, the restoration to life, but know that life will begin to improve from this moment on.

Blessings!

Lynnie

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