Step 10: Admitting Wrongs

Step Ten isn’t easy, and it isn’t easy for two reasons. First, because most of the time we operate on autopilot; we aren’t paying attention to what we do, we just do it. Second, because admitting mistakes as we make them requires not only a very keen sense of observation and awareness but also a deep humility to free us from the need to protect our image of ourselves. (Recovery–The Sacred Art, p140)

To effectively pay “attention to what we do,” It turns out that continuing to take personal inventory as we did in Step 4 now must for us addicts (and those – as we’ve noted in this series – “merely” addicted to control) become a daily practice. The AA Blue Book puts it optimistically: “What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.” (AA, p85) And this maintenance of our spiritual condition Richard Rohr frames not so much as an exercise in conscience, but one of consciousness: “Consciousness is not the seeing but that which sees me seeing. It is not the knower but that which knows that I am knowing. It is not the observer but that which underlies and observes me observing.” (Breathing Underwater, p85) As Rami Shapiro suggests, “The key to step Ten is to be able to observe our actions even as we are doing them.” (Recovery, p147) 

So in adopting this mindset as both a a life-long and a moment-by-moment spiritual practice, “[w]e have entered the world of the Spirit. Our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness. This is not an overnight matter. It should continue for our lifetime.” (AA, p84) Bill Wilson expands on this in The Twelve Steps and The Twelve Traditions: “For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching becomes a regular habit, until he is able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong.” (p88) 

And what we find in this habitual, “self-searching” observation and consciousness is that, as Wilson in the 12X12 puts it: “It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us.” In fact, this becomes a spiritual break-through: “Step Ten makes it clear that the problem is us, and for this we should be eternally grateful” … grateful not only because it’s a break-through, but also because it’s a break out! … “Addictions are enslavements, they lock us into fixed emotional cages and isolate us from others and from our true selves.” (Recovery, p146) 

Grateful also because, as Rohr recognizes, "the mystics and saints emphasized detachment so much … Without it, people could not move to the soul level, [discovering] their own soul – which is their deepest self – and yet has access to a Larger Knowing beyond themselves.” (BU, p86) This is precisely where our True Self meets “Larger Knowing,” where Soul touches Spirit, the place that Thomas Merton in his transcendent “Fourth and Walnut” passage calls “le point vierge,”: “a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion … which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.” (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p155) A thought that Bill Wilson – as was his always-practical style – puts more bluntly: “As an insurance against ‘big-shot-ism’ we can often check ourselves by remembering that we are today sober only by the grace of God and that any success we may be having is far more [God’s] success than ours.” (12X12, p92)

This humble ”remembering,” this right-sizing of our ego in the process of a continuing our Step Ten “personal inventory” is crucial now to helping us “promptly” admit when we are wrong: “From this most positive and dignified position you can let go of, and even easily ‘admit your wrongs.’ You are being held so strongly and so deeply that you can stop holding onto, or defending, yourself.” (BU, p90) It provides us with “a willingness to admit when the fault is ours, and an equal willingness to forgive when the fault is elsewhere.” (12X12, p91)

So, in intentionally developing our consciousness, we become more empathetic, compassionate and loving. Rohr states that “[w]henever we do anything stupid, cruel, evil, or destructive to ourselves or others, we are at that moment unconscious and unconscious of our identity. If we were fully conscious, we would never do it. Loving people are always highly conscious people. To rely on any drug or substance [Author’s note: or any behavioral compulsion!] is to become unconscious.” (BU, p91) We are graced to no longer be unconsciously running from the pain we’ve caused others or ourselves.  

And, as Wilson promises, “the pains of failure are converted into assets. Out of them we receive the stimulation we need to go forward. Someone who knew what he was talking about once remarked that pain was the touchstone of all spiritual progress.” (12X12, p93) As Dr. Gerald May prescribes in his classic Addiction and Grace: “If we can both accept and expect this pain, we will be much better prepared to face struggles with specific attachments. We might even come to see it as birth pain, heralding the process of our delivery from slavery to freedom.” (p180) Or, as Wilson concludes: “An honest regret for harms done, a genuine gratitude for blessings received, and a willingness to try for better things tomorrow will be the permanent assets we shall seek.”

So, after tending to our own consciousness in Step 10, next month, in Step, 11 we’ll explore how we came to improve our “conscious contact with God as we understood [God]”!