Take a step back. Examine your life and be honest. Can you control your drinking or are you in the words of this step "powerless over alcohol."
Alcoholics are good at lying to others and even better at lying to themselves. The fact that you can stop for a while must be weighed up against the truth of what happens when you take the first drink. I could stop for months at a time, but when I stopped in at the pub for "one quick beer" before I went home, I was unable to stop until I was completely toasted. I could stop for months at a time, but I was and am an alcoholic.
Despite years of agnosticism, I have concluded that the only option is to step over the precipice and believe that you will be supported by whatever God or Gods there are.
Again, take a leap of faith, step off the edge of the cliff and into the realm of faith. Whatever understanding you need, God will give you. The only way of approaching faith is to surrender intellect.
It is not important that your perception of God match anyone else's perception. It may be difficult, for example, for someone subjected to years of abuse by their father to think of God as a father. That doesn't matter. Define God in the way you wish to. Only turn your lives over to him or her.
Don't stop now. This is necessary. It acts as an unburdening of all the things you have kept secret for so long. As difficult as this may be, it is one of the most important steps in overcoming your addiction.
To understand this step, it is necessary to understand the disease of alcoholism. It is a disease which works on three levels. These are the physical, the mental and the spiritual. To confess to God helps remove the spiritual disease and to confess to another human being eases the mental anguish. It also says to us that after years of
avoidance we are now going to stop lying to ourselves and to others and to make the necessary behavioural changes to overcome our alcoholism.
Do not pay lip service to this stage.
I feel that this step is perhaps the most difficult and certainly the most intimidating.
It is necessary for us to continuously monitor ourselves for faults because
the two biggest dangers to an alcoholic are guilt and resentment. An additional danger is to become complacent. This step asks us to continue to live with humility and a knowledge of our frailties.
As a method of conducting this step try the following way of taking personal
inventory:
This may not work for you, but try it. The lovely part of this is that it
also incorporates the 11th step. It is through God as we understand him/her that we find our strength
to stay sober and to change the old habits that came so close to destroying us.
This step is vital as it shows us what we were and it is in serving that we
find redemption.
Step 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.
This is without doubt the most important step and really the simplest, yet we balk at it. Why? We initially shared with society the idea that an alcoholic was a bum, a hobo. Many
alcoholics may become that, but they were alcoholics before they were hobos. We aren't like that so how can we be
alcoholics?
Step 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Ah!! For the agnostic or the atheist, this is a difficult step. It requires us to suspend intellectual faculties and cynicism. My feeling is that my intellect and scepticism didn't help me avoid booze.
Step 3. Made a decision to turn our will and out lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
How do I understand God? I have been agnostic for years, despite having been brought up in a religious environment. If a God exists and he/she/it is omnipotent, how can I comprehend this being?
Step 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
This is so difficult. After years of conning ourselves and others, we now have to shift away from this mind set and examine ourselves warts and all, and they aren't very attractive. Yet it cannot be escaped. To change our dependency on alcohol, we need to change ourselves, this cannot not be done without ruthless self examination.
Step 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
It's easy enough to admit your faults to God, who can be viewed in abstract terms. It's more difficult to admit them to yourself, but to someone else! No way! Stop, let me off!
Step 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
This seems easy, but there must be a word of caution here. The words are easy, but behind the words must be an earnest desire for the removal of these flaws in our self.Step 7. Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings.
Here again sincerity is paramount. This is a final admission that we have shortcomings.
Step 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
There are probably so many of these. When you have completed the list, go back and add other names. There are certain to be those you have either forgotten or avoided.
Step 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure others.
Stop! I want to get off again!!
Step 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
Step 11. 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.
Step 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
