Chapter 6

INTO ACTION

(pp. 76-87)

Now that you have made your personal inventory, what should you do about it? What comes next?

Before you made your inventory, you started trying to find your spirituality and connect with a Higher Power. Part of that process was figuring out if anything was blocking you. Were there obstacles in your path? Anything keeping you from creating a relationship with God?

Making your inventory helped you find those obstacles and name them. By listing your mistakes and weaknesses, you began to see how you were keeping yourself from connecting with your Higher Power. You began to see where you were selfish and wrong.

Now, your mistakes and weaknesses are going to be removed from you. To make this possible, you must take action. You must take the Fifth Step in the program of recovery mentioned in Chapter 5: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

We know this may not be easy. Discussing our mistakes and weaknesses with another person is very difficult, but it's also very important. We may think we did enough by trying to be honest with ourselves while we made our inventory. However, making this list by ourselves is not enough. We must go further. We must talk about our inventory with someone else.

It will be easier to talk with another person about our inventory if we know why doing this is important. And the most important reason is this: If we skip this vital step, we may not be able to stop drinking.

Finish your house cleaning

Many new people have come to A.A. who wanted to keep their lives secret. They wanted to avoid discussing the truth about their lives with anyone. Even if they did everything else in the A.A. program and followed all of the other 11 Steps, these people almost always struggled to stay sober. At some point, they got drunk. They were unable to control themselves and wondered why they started drinking again.

We think the reason is that they never completed their “house cleaning.” They started to take inventory, but didn't finish the process. They thought they had gotten rid of their selfishness and fear, but they had not. They thought they had learned to be humble, but they had not. They had not learned enough about selfishness and fear because they had not told someone else their complete life story.

One reason it's hard for alcoholics to know when we have told our entire life stories is this: Many alcoholics lead double lives. We are like actors. When we are around other people, we act like a character on stage, showing them the version of ourselves we want them to see. We pretend to be people we are not so others will like us. Even when we know we don't deserve to be liked.

Leading a double life becomes harder when we go on drinking sprees. Once we get sober, we may remember how we acted when we were drunk and feel disgusted with ourselves. Realizing someone else may have seen us act this way is very upsetting. These memories are like nightmares. We may push them deep inside ourselves so we don't have to face them. Feeling this way makes us feel constantly afraid and tense, which can lead to more drinking.

Psychologists tend to agree that alcoholics struggle to be honest with themselves, and also struggle to be honest with others. Many of us have spent thousands of dollars working with psychologists, never feeling able to tell them the whole truth. We couldn't take their advice, no matter how kind they were to us. We couldn't be honest with our psychologists or anyone else. No wonder so many doctors believe alcoholics can't recover!

Find the right person

As hard as it is, we must all find a way to be entirely honest with somebody. If we want to live long or happily in this world, we must take this step. Before we do, we need to consider who we can trust to listen to our stories. Who is the best person with whom to take this step? Those of us who belong to religions that require confession might want to talk with our faith leaders. Even those of us who don't have religious connections may feel comfortable talking with faith leaders. These people often see and understand our problems faster than others do.

If we cannot or would rather not talk with a faith leader, we need to look for a trustworthy, understanding friend. Our doctor or therapist might be the right person. It might be one of our own family members, but we cannot share anything with our spouses or our parents that will hurt them and make them unhappy. We have no right to help ourselves when doing so hurts other people. The rule is we must be hard on ourselves, but always considerate of others.

Although it's necessary and important to talk about our inventory with someone, some of us may struggle to find the right person. The right person will be able to keep a secret. This person will understand why we have decided to tell them about our lives, and never try to stop us from sharing. If a person like this cannot be found, this step can be postponed. We can wait to do it until we find a person we trust. As soon as we find that person, however, we need to be ready to talk with them right away. Being unable to find the right person cannot become an excuse to skip this step.

When we have decided on a person to hear our story, we should make a plan to tell it immediately. We have our written inventory already, so we should feel ready for a long talk. Before we start our story, we should explain to our partner what we are going to do and why we need to do it. They should understand that telling this story is a matter of life or death for us. Most people who are told how important they are to our recovery feel honored. They are glad to help us.

When we're ready, we must swallow our pride and start telling our story. We share all the ugliest parts of our personalities. We shine a light on every dark or difficult experience from our pasts. Once we have taken this step and told our complete, unedited stories we feel happy and relieved. We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall away from us. We may start to feel closer to our Higher Power. Before this we may have had spiritual beliefs, but now we start to have a spiritual experience. The feeling that our drinking problem has disappeared may rise up inside of us. It feels like walking down a wide, open road hand in hand with the Spirit of the Universe.

After sharing our whole story, we go home. We look for a place where we can sit alone in the quiet for an hour. We think back over what we have done. We thank God from the bottom of our hearts for helping us. Taking this book down from the shelf, we turn to the page that lists all Twelve Steps. Carefully reading the first five, we think back to make sure we haven't skipped anything. We do this because we are building toward our own freedom. Think of it like building an arch that we will eventually walk through. Is the work solid so far? Are all the stones in the right place? Have we used too little cement for the foundation? Have we tried to make mortar without sand?

Let go of defects

If we feel that we have truly and completely finished Step Five, we take a look at Step Six. This step is, “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” Throughout this book, we've mentioned how important it is to be willing and open to spiritual change. That is especially important now. We must ask ourselves if we are ready to let our Higher Power remove all of our problems and struggles. Can God really take them all away? Every single one? If it turns out that there's something we can't let go, we can ask God to help us release it.

When we feel ready, we have completed Step Six. Then we say something like this: “My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now 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.” Then we have completed Step Seven.

Be willing, make amends

Now we need to take even more action. What we do next is related to the old saying, “Faith without works is dead.” In other words, we must do something to make things right in our lives. When we look at Steps Eight and Nine, we see that they have to do with taking steps to right our wrongs. Step Eight is, “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.” We made this list—or most of it—when we took inventory of ourselves. We looked hard at our lives and actions, and that included thinking about the people we had hurt. Once we have that list, we move on to Step Nine.

Step Nine is, “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” This is where we reach out to people we've hurt to fix the damage we did in the past. We do this to try to clear away the clutter and mess we've made by trying to run our lives by ourselves. If we don't feel ready to make amends, we work with our Higher Power until we are ready. Remember that we agreed at the beginning to do whatever it took to win our battle with alcohol.

Making amends is hard, and we may feel doubtful or afraid about this step. As we read over the list of coworkers and friends we have hurt, we may feel worried about going to some of them and talking about our spiritual experience. Luckily, we don't have to talk about God right away with everyone when we make amends. Doing that might make them unwilling to listen to us just when we are trying to make our lives better.

We should remember, though, that we want to be as helpful as possible to everyone around us. If we try talking to someone who is still angry with us or hurt by something we did, and then say we have found religion, it may go badly. Why risk making them feel put off by us? Doing that might destroy an opportunity to offer them a helpful message about recovery. But this same person will probably react well to our true wish to fix what we had done wrong. They will be more interested in our good will than hearing about our spiritual discoveries.

However, if it feels natural to mention our Higher Power, we should do it. There's no reason to hide our relationship with a Higher Power.

It can be tricky to decide how to approach someone to make amends. This is especially true if they have hurt us more than we have hurt them. We may have changed our attitude about them, since we now think of people who hurt us as sick people who need and deserve our help. But it can still be hard to make amends to them. To do this with a person we dislike, we must find a way to push through our discomfort. It is harder to make amends to an enemy than to a friend, but we grow more by making amends to an enemy. Going to them feeling helpful and forgiving, confessing how we felt, and talking about our regret are all healthy things to do.

No matter what happens, we cannot criticize the other person, or argue with them. We just tell them that we won't be able to stay sober until we have done our best to straighten out the past. We focus on changing ourselves and our lives, and never tell others what to do with theirs. When we are making amends, we don't talk about the faults of the other person. We stick to our own. And if we stay calm, are honest, and remain open, we will be happy with the results of the conversation.

Expect the unexpected when making amends

Most of the time when we make amends, unexpected things happen. Sometimes the person we are talking to admits they are wrong, too, and bad feelings that have lingered for years vanish in an instant. Sometimes our former enemies praise what we are doing and wish us well. Sometimes they offer to help us. However, it shouldn't matter if the person we're speaking with decides to throw us out of their office. We still need to do our part. We owe them amends—an honest attempt to make things right—and we cannot deny them what we owe to them. When we tell them what we are trying to do, we don't try to hide anything about our drinking. They usually know about it anyway, whether we realize it or not. We cannot worry about how long it has taken us to make these amends. Our drinking has made us slow to understand what needs doing. We must put aside our fear of being judged by our enemies because we might drink if we are afraid to face them.

We may have committed a crime that would land us in jail if the police found out. We may be unable to pay our debts. We have already admitted all of this to another person when we did Step Five. But we are sure we would end up in prison or fired from our jobs if others found out. Maybe it's a minor offense like putting personal expenses on our business credit card. Many of us have done things like that.

Maybe we are divorced and have remarried, but haven't paid alimony or child support to our ex-spouse. They may be angry; they may even have a warrant out for our arrest. That's a common form of trouble, too.

Although making amends can take many forms, we use some guidelines to make this step effective. First, we remind ourselves that we are committed to finding a spiritual experience, and we ask to be given strength and direction to do the right thing. We may lose our jobs, ruin our reputations, or even go to jail, but we are willing. We have to be. We must not run away from anything.

However, making amends involves other people. This means we must be careful not to hurt them as we work to save ourselves from alcoholism. Here's a story that shows how important it is to think of others while making amends.

A man we know got remarried. Because of his anger toward his first wife and because of his drinking, he had not paid alimony to her. She was furious. She went to court and got an order for his arrest. He had started the A.A. program, had gotten a new job, and was getting his head above water.

We thought he should be willing to turn himself in, but he disagreed. He knew that in jail, he couldn't provide for either family. We suggested he write to his first wife admitting his faults and asking forgiveness. He did, and also sent a small amount of money. He told her what he would try to do in the future. He said he was perfectly willing to go to jail if she insisted. Of course she did not insist, and the whole situation got resolved.

Before taking any action that might affect other people, we need to ask for their consent. If we have permission, have consulted with other people, asked God to help, and the action still makes sense, we must not run away from it.

This brings to mind another story. While drinking, one of our friends accepted a sum of money from a bitterly hated business rival, and didn't give him a receipt. Then our friend denied having borrowed the money, and used this incident as a way to ruin the reputation of the person who had loaned it to him. He used his own wrongdoing to destroy someone else.

Later, he felt that he could not possibly make this situation right again. If he tried to make amends to the other person, he was afraid it would destroy his reputation again, disgrace his family, and get him fired. What right did he have to involve the people who depended on him? And how could he admit that he had been so wrong?

After talking with his spouse and business partner, he decided that it was better to take those risks than to stand before God feeling so guilty. He saw that he had to trust God to guide him in this situation, or he would start drinking again. If that happened, all would be lost anyhow. He went to church for the first time in many years. After the sermon, he quietly got up and told his story to the congregation. Other members of his community were very understanding and accepting. Today he is one of the most trusted citizens in his town.

Infidelity and amends at home

Many of us have troubles with our partners and families. Maybe we have cheated on them. In this way, alcoholics may not be any worse than other people. But drinking does complicate our sexual relationships. After a few years with an alcoholic, spouses and partners get worn out, angry, and unwilling to communicate. How could they be any other way? Meanwhile, the alcoholic begins to feel lonely, and to feel sorry for themselves. They begin to look for someone else to satisfy their sexual needs. They might have a secret affair with someone because it's exciting. Or because they believe this other person “understands” them better than their spouse. Maybe they really do. But in many cases, the spouse at home has gone through hell to support their alcoholic partner.

If we find ourselves in this situation, we have to do something about it. It can be hard to know how to handle it. If we are sure our spouse does not know, should we tell them? Not always, we think. If they know generally that we've been cheating, do we tell them all the details? We definitely need to admit we've been wrong. Our spouse or partner may insist on hearing the details. We tell them we have no right to involve another person. We are sorry for what we have done and, God willing, we won't do it again. More than that we cannot do; we have no right to go further. This is the best way to handle a situation like this, we have found. If we can avoid naming the person with whom we had an affair, that's best. It prevents our spouse from blaming that other person for everything.

In some cases being more detailed may be better. All partnerships and marriages are unique. The partners involved are the only ones who can judge what will work best. Both partners may decide to forgive and forget. Both might pray about it, keeping each other's happiness in mind. When it comes to being unfaithful, we must remember that we're dealing with one of the worst human emotions: jealousy.

Even those of us who haven't cheated on our partners still have plenty to do at home. Sometimes alcoholics say that the only thing they need to do is to stay sober. Certainly we must all stay sober, or we will risk losing our homes and families. But just staying sober means we are still a long way from making amends to our spouses or parents. There are people at home whom we've treated so horribly. It is almost impossible to understand the patience of our partners and our parents who stood by us. If they had left us or thrown us out, many of us would have had nowhere to go. We might even be dead.

An alcoholic is like a tornado roaring its way through the lives of others. Hearts are broken. Sweet relationships are dead. Affection is destroyed. Selfish and inconsiderate habits keep our homes in chaos. We believe that alcoholics who say stopping drinking is enough don't understand the damage they have caused. They're like farmers who come up from the basement after a tornado to find their homes ruined. Then they say to their spouses, “Don't see anything wrong here! And isn't it great the wind stopped blowing?”

There is a long period of rebuilding ahead. We must take control. Mumbling that we are sorry won't work at all. We need to sit down with the family and talk honestly about the past, being very careful not to criticize them for their part in it. Their defects may be obvious, but it's likely that actions we took are also responsible. So we clean house with the family, and ask each morning that our Higher Power show us how to be patient, kind, and full of love.

Spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it. However, unless our families tell us they also want to live using spiritual principles, we shouldn't force them. We also shouldn't talk about spiritual matters all the time. If they are going to adopt a spiritual way of living themselves, it will happen naturally. Seeing our behavior change will convince them more than words ever could.

There may be some wrongs we can never fully right. As long as we can honestly say to ourselves that we would right them if we could, we don't need to worry about this. If we cannot meet with someone to make amends in person, we can send them an honest letter. And there may be a good reason to wait to make amends with other people. But we don't delay unless it's truly necessary. When we do speak with them, we need to be polite, considerate, and humble without being dramatic or overly apologetic. We don't need to crawl; we can stand on our own two feet.

Finding serenity

If we are painstaking about Step Nine, we will be amazed before we have made amends to half of our list of people. We will find new freedom and new happiness. We will not regret the past or wish we could forget about it. We will understand the word serenity and we will know peace.

No matter how badly we have behaved in the past, we will begin to see how our experience can benefit others. Any feelings of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and begin to take an interest in helping other people. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook about life will change. Fear of people and of money worries will leave us. We will know how to handle situations which used to confuse or worry us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these outrageous or unlikely promises? We think not! These promises come true among A.A. members every day—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always come into our lives if we work for them.

Now we are at Step Ten, which says, “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.” This means that we need to continue to make right any new mistakes we make. We found a new way of living as we cleaned up our past. Our next task is to grow in our understanding and to become more effective. We cannot do this overnight. It will happen slowly, over our whole lifetimes. We keep watching for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear. When they show up, we ask God to remove them. We talk about them with someone immediately and make amends quickly if we have hurt anyone. After that, we think about someone else we can help. Love and tolerance of others is our way of life.

At this point we have stopped fighting anything or anyone—even alcohol. By this time our sanity will have returned. We will no longer feel interested in liquor. If we are tempted, we may even pull back from liquor like we would when touching a hot flame. We are able to react sanely and normally to our lives, and find that this is happening automatically. We will see that our new attitude about liquor has been given to us like a gift. It arrives without any thought or effort on our part. That is the miracle of it. We are not fighting it, and we are not avoiding temptation. We feel safe and protected. We have not even made promises to ourselves or others about drinking. Instead, the problem has been removed from us. It does not exist anymore. We don't feel overly confident or afraid about this new state of being. It is just our new reality.

It is easy to stop paying attention to our spirituality, but we will be in trouble if we do that. We must remember that alcohol is a tricky enemy. We are not cured of alcoholism. What we really have is relief from alcoholism for that day, but this completely depends on keeping up our spirituality. Every day is a day when we must bring the vision of God's will into everything we do. We remind ourselves of Step Three, when we turned our will over to the care of God. This kind of thinking must be with us all day long. It helps us keep our will in line with our Higher Power's will.

We've already talked about receiving strength, inspiration, and direction from our Higher Power. If we have carefully followed directions, we have begun to sense the flow of spirituality into us. We have begun to develop a very important sixth sense. But we must go further and that means more action.

Step Eleven says, “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.” We should try to embrace prayer and meditation. Both of them work, if we have the right attitude and work at them. If you're not sure how to get started with prayer or meditation, we can make some helpful suggestions.

When we go to bed at night, we think back on our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest, or afraid? Do we owe anyone an apology? Have we kept something secret that should be discussed with another person? Were we kind and loving toward everyone? What could we have done better? Were we thinking about ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking about what we could do for others? When we do this review, we must be careful not to drift into worry, guilt, or negative thoughts. Doing that would limit how useful we can be to other people. After reviewing everything, we ask God's forgiveness and ask what we should change or do better next time.

When we wake up, we think about the 24 hours ahead of us. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to watch over our thinking, especially asking that our thoughts stay away from self-pity, lying, or self-serving motives. When we start the day this way, we can clear our minds and use our brains thoughtfully. Our thoughts will be on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of negative motives.

When we think about our day, we may feel confused. We may not be able to decide which course to take. If this happens we ask our Higher Power for inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision. We relax and take it easy. We don't struggle. We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while.

We used to get a hunch or an inspiration once in a while, but gradually these experiences become a regular part of our daily thinking. If we are new to spirituality, we may not feel fully inspired all day every day. Still, as time passes, we will find that inspiration will come to us more and more often.

We usually finish praying or meditating by asking our Higher Power to show us what our next step will be, and we ask that we be given what we need to take that step. We ask for freedom from a desire to control our lives, and we're careful not to ask for anything that would benefit only us. We never pray for selfish reasons. Many of us have wasted a lot of time doing that and it doesn't work. You can easily see why.

If we do morning meditation, we might ask our partner or friends to join us if that makes sense. If we belong to a religion that includes morning services, we may attend those. If not, we may choose and memorize a few prayers that focus on the ideas we've been discussing in this chapter. There are many helpful books also. We may ask for suggestions from our faith leader.

As we go through our day we pause if we feel upset or filled with doubt, and ask for the right thought or action. We constantly remind ourselves that we are no longer running the show. We say to ourselves many times each day, “Thy will be done.” We are then in much less danger of fear, anger, worry, self-pity, or foolish decisions. We become much more efficient. We do not tire as easily, because we are not burning up energy foolishly like we did when we were trying to control everything in our lives without help from a Higher Power.

It works—it really does.

We alcoholics struggle to obey rules when we are left on our own. So we let God help us find the rules we need to lead better lives. But this is not all. There is action and more action. “Faith without works is dead.”

The next chapter is all about how to practice Step Twelve.