Daily Reprieve

Step Five: “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

5th Step Principle: Facing the exact nature of our wrongs makes us internally aware of connective obstacles; presenting them to our Higher Power establishes thoroughness in the pursuit of release from our guilt; and expressing them aloud to another human being creates a social fearlessness in our lives. (Principles after the First Step are constructed from personal reflection and acceptance. Use my version or formulate your own.)

AA Extracted Value:  Integrity

ACA Extracted Values: Honesty & Trust

Other Extracted Values: Openness

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In this book you read again and again that faith did for us what we could not do for ourselves. We hope you are convinced now that God can remove whatever self-will has blocked you off from Him. If you have already made a decision, and an inventory of your grosser handicaps, you have made a good beginning. That being so you have swallowed and digested some big chunks of truth about yourself. ~ Alcoholics Anonymous, How it Works, page 70.

A deeply honest, comprehensive and thorough fourth step inventory, followed by a review of our inventory with our sponsor in Step Five, should reveal the truth about ourselves. This is only the starting point. We can’t change our past, but we can change our future by changing our attitudes and actions going forward. This is the purpose of the 12 Steps – to provide us with the tools to change our life for the better. Half-measures bring us nothing. We are either all in, or not in at all; It’s our choice. ~ Alex M., Practice These Principles.

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I have discovered that identifying the exact nature of my short-comings allows me to also recognize some of the specifics about other aspects of my character. I am not a walking blob of ugly transgressions. I can resist the yeast-like contamination of shame when I know what is not included in the inventory of actual guilt. I can vanquish the condemning judge when I am willing to become the objective scientist. I can turn the fungus of guilt into the penicillin of recovery. I don’t want an ambiguous, secret shame oozing out of possible misbehavior. I want the exact nature identified and severed from my valuable personality traits. I want to be free from quarantine, openly walking among my fellow humans. Let the process of recovering my true self continue.

This entry was posted on August 12, 2024 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, alcohol, alcohol-addiction, Alcoholism, health, Journal, Life, Personal, Recovery, sober, sobriety, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.