Continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear. When these crop up, we ask God at once to remove them. We discuss them with someone immediately and make amends quickly if we have harmed anyone. Then we resolutely turn our thoughts to someone we can help. Alcoholics Anonymous Page 84
The immediate admission of wrong thoughts or actions is a tough task for most human beings, but for recovering alcoholics like me it is difficult because of my propensity toward ego, fear and pride. The freedom the A.A. program offers me becomes more abundant when, through unremitting inventories of myself, I admit, acknowledge and accept responsibility for my wrong – doing. It is possible then for me to grow into a deeper and better understanding of humility. My willingness to admit when the fault is mine facilitates the progression of my growth and helps me to become more understanding and helpful to others.
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the longer I’m sober, and the more I practice steps 10, 11, and 12 the easier it is to admit when I’m wrong. I feel so much better taking responsibility for my actions and admitting if I’m wrong and also accepting things when I’m right without an ego. God lets me know when I’m out of line and helps me correct things.
jim
Early on when trying to embrace this step I would think of a couple of images to help me out:
Throughout the day I would thing of a sort of meter that was keeping my emotional seismic pulse. It had a needle in the middle that was drawing a line that was going up and down indicating my emotional levels. When I was having a disturbance I would see the seismic needle swinging up and down wildly. I would then ask God to help me calm the quake within and I could take the actions outlined in the step.
For the end of the day I thought of the sort of testing that we would do daily on the complex production machines at work. We had to stop production and test the every 24 hours to be certain that they were functioning properly. I thought of continuing inventory like a chart with high and low control limits and my emotions, instincts, and conduct plotted on it. I could see where my stormy emotions were trending towards the high or low limits and know exactly what to ask God to help me bring back to within the proper tolerances.
At this time I wasn’t a very spiritually minded person so these mental images taken from my material world helped me to build the motivation that I needed to put this step into practice effectively.
Thanks be to God.
Bob S.