“Step Seven: Humility”

(This blog is seventh in a multi-part series, “Thoughts On The Steps”. This series is not a guide on how to work steps; steps can only be worked under the guidance of a sponsor. The twelve-step program is a spiritual program; it teaches us how to live a spiritual life. Working each of the steps gives us the chance to practice a spiritual principle. Whatever your particular fellowship, the Steps are the same, as are the spiritual principles behind them. These are my thoughts on the steps and on those principles.)

Step Seven: Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

Just as the fourth step leads to the fifth, the sixth leads directly to Step Seven. Working the seventh step isn't the ultimate lesson in Humility, but it is a great way to practice it. Many in recovery end up memorizing the seventh step prayer. I tend to paraphrase and say my own version: dear God, I'm fucked up and I can't fix it by myself. Whatever version of the prayer you use, it's a prayer asking for help.

In the first three steps, we faced up to some important truths: we admitted our powerlessness over our disease and asked for help in getting clean and sober. In steps four, five, and six, we expanded our focus. We looked at ourselves and the way we've dealt with life. Now, in Step Seven, we ask for help again to make even greater change. We ask to be transformed. We seek to truly leave behind the people we used to be and live life differently.

As people who suffer from the disease, we are often self-centered. We can be raging egomaniacs, or deeply insecure, or both at the same time. In either case, we are obsessed with ourselves, our view of the world. We need practice in accepting life on life’s terms--taking the world as it is instead of how we would have it be. We get frustrated because others don’t do the things we think they should, or say the things we wished they would. We are constantly struggling against a world that is not the way we would have it be.

Practicing Humility helps us to remember that nowhere is it written that reality must comply with our wishes. This is not our world, it is God’s world. We did not create it. 99.997% of the forces at work in it are beyond our control and out of our sphere of influence. We are just a single character in a story with a cast of trillions. Try standing out under a clear sky at night. Count the stars. There’s something about us humans. We experience our consciousness, our own lives, so intensely it’s difficult to remember that there is much, much more out there besides ourselves.

We all have character defects. We all have our issues, things we’re working on, trying to improve on. It’s the recognition of those defects that is important, the fact that we try to improve them that is key. We acknowledge the harm they cause us, the harm they cause others, and we make a decision to let go and stop doing harm.

We need the help of our higher power to change. Being in meetings can help us to learn how others have dealt with similar situations. We can take that knowledge and apply it to our own life. But we don’t live in the rooms. Out there, out in the world, we don’t have a group of fellow addicts or alcoholics to lean on. In the moment, as we live our lives, we can’t turn to the group and ask for help or advice. But we can turn to our higher power. That force greater than ourselves is always with us, always available for guidance and support. All that is required of us is to have the Humility to ask for help.