Recently in our local meeting we read through the chapter on Step Ten and shared our own experience with that Step. After taking us through the first nine Steps, the book's explanation of Step 10 takes us back to the reminder that sobriety is not the end goal. Here's what it says:
Sober Is Not Well
....
It is possible that, once relieved of the compulsion to act out our habit, we may feel cured and start coasting along with our tank on EMPTY. But the same personality defects that energized our addiction are still with us and, unattended, will take their toll again, sooner or later. Why are they still with us? Because they are us. Progressive victory over these defects, not their eradication, is the power of God at work in us. What we really do battle against is not other people but our old natures, the negative force within us we can obey anytime we wish, the force that is always willing and able to wrong another. This is why our program must come to fruition in our daily living or there is no recovery. (p. 130-131; final emph. mine)
I started off in SA by going to local meetings and "fellowshipping" with a group of guys after the meeting (hanging out, drinking coffee and eating pie). That was pretty much all I did for what I called "my program". I did read the SA book, and I did have some vague notion that working the Steps was what people who were serious about recovery did, but I was looking for sobriety in the easiest way I could get it, and those 12 Steps looked like really serious work, something I typically avoided. (And no kidding, they are serious work!)
Some people like to say "Step 4 separates the women from the girls and the men from the boys." There's something to that, but stopping short of working all of the Steps all of the way through to the "spiritual awakening" we are promised in Step 12 meant relapse was an inevitability for me. That's because I stopped short of the intended life-changing experience of connecting rightly with God, the Power that would keep me sober by continuing to change my attitudes and my whole life.
The problem for me early on was that any "success" in staying sober was evidence to me that I was getting it right and doing enough. I was under the delusion that I was gaining some level of control back from my powerlessness and unmanageability, and I was "measuring" that by my length of physical sobriety. I was thinking like a child, playing a child's game. ("Hey, look at that; I'm staying sober more days than I'm acting out!") That did not work.
"Sober is not well." And until I committed to working all of the Steps under the direction of a sponsor, I had not even taken Step 3! (My sponsor explained to me that Step 3 was a commitment to working the rest of the Steps.) That did eventually happen, but that was many years later after the "child's game" wasn't any fun anymore, and I was sick of myself and completely defeated in my efforts to do things my way and get "sober" without addressing the wrongs I had done to others and the character defects that kept me doing those wrongs over and over again.
The program of SA is designed to be a life-changing experience. It is in daily actions of living a new life of surrender of my whole self to God that I can be assured of his power over lust and over my character defects that so easily can drag me back down. This statement is so very true: "If I don't change, my sobriety date will."
