When we first began working the Steps, some of us had too little self-esteem—an under-expression of a healthy, humble sense of self. Some of us had too much self-esteem—an over-expression of that same basic trait. Some of us suffered from both flaws.
As we work Step Ten, part of our responsibility is to be as alert as we can to any overdevelopment or underdevelopment. Then we do what we can to bring that character trait back into balance. We do this by working Steps Six and Seven—and, if appropriate, the five-Step sequence of Five through Nine—as soon as possible after sensing that imbalance. We recognize and name each flaw, and then ask our Higher Power to remove it from us.
If we do at least one thing each day to achieve better balances, then we are on the path of a balanced life. And when we discover that we can’t restore balance on our own, we ask our Higher Power to restore it for us by removing the shortcoming or character defect that unbalanced us.
When we first worked Step Four, making our first searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, we did so carefully, deliberately, and methodically. In Step Ten this process becomes more fluid and spontaneous. We have developed the discernment for spotting and identifying our character flaws. We’ve put in place an internal sensor that lights up when a shortcoming or character defect has appeared. We then use the information from this sensor to take personal inventory as soon as possible.
The Big Book summarizes this process on page 84, suggesting that we “continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear.” This is the Step Ten version of Step Four.
It’s important to draw a distinction between a flaw and the emotion associated with that flaw. In the above passage, selfishness and dishonesty are clearly flaws. (Selfishness is a character defect: an overdeveloped sense of self-interest. Dishonesty, too, is a shortcoming: an underdeveloped sense of truthfulness.) But resentment and fear aren’t flaws; they’re the primary emotions typically associated with selfishness and dishonesty.
This is a crucial insight, because the emotion we feel often points to the shortcoming or character defect that gives rise to it. So when our internal sensor picks up resentment and fear, those feelings guide us to look for the selfishness and dishonesty behind them. The opposite is true as well. When our internal sensor tells us that selfishness or dishonesty has shown up, we learn to look for resentment and fear, knowing there’s a good chance we’ll find them. One last thought on this subject: Every human being shares the same foundational character defect: an overreliance on self. This is the deeper truth of Step Three, which requires us—not once, but time and time again—to turn our will and our life over to the care of the God of our understanding. In working Step Ten, we learn from experience that overreliance on self will manifest over and over, in a nearly infinite variety of forms, guises, and situations. And when we see that happening, we also learn to address it by working Steps Six and Seven as soon as we can.
Sustainable and Unsustainable Emotions
As part of working Step Ten, we learn to pay attention to our emotions as they arise in each new moment.
When used properly, our emotions help us stay alive and healthy. Fear keeps us safe. Guilt prevents us from repeating a harmful action. Awe keeps us humble and grateful. In a balanced life, our emotions serve as valuable and faithful indicators of how we’re living and how we’re using our free will. They often also point to what we’re planning to do next—and, sometimes, to what we need to do instead.
Before we began working the Steps, we viewed our emotions as a posse of friends and a group of enemies. Our life consisted mostly of wanting to experience pleasant emotions and avoid unpleasant ones. Now, however, we realize that this was a hallmark of our lack of emotional sobriety.
We also understand that simply trying to feel good is a road that leads to relapse. In working Step Ten, we let go of the distinction of pleasant and unpleasant, and instead we focus on whether an emotion points toward a sustainable or unsustainable recovery and life. The emotions that point us toward a sustainable life are themselves sustainable. No matter how much of them we experience, they continue to support our lives. Sustainable emotions include peace of mind, connectedness, love, compassion, joy, serenity, and peace.
The emotions that lead us toward an unsustainable life are themselves inherently unsustainable. The more they grow, the more they can get in the way. The most common unsustainable emotions are the unpleasant ones: shame, guilt, remorse, resentment, anger, rage, irritability, and so on. Quite a few are forms of fear, such as anxiety, unease, panic, and terror. When we feel these emotions briefly, we pay attention to them, identify their source and whether they’re cues to some action we need to take to regain balance in our lives, and then we let them go. Treated this way, they’re not a problem. However, if we cling to them and keep feeding them, eventually they will harm us—and, often, allow us to harm others.
But there’s another group of emotions that are equally unsustainable—yet they feel pleasant, at least at first. These include arrogance, overconfidence, excessive pride, superiority, self-righteousness, and hubris. Others include the relief we feel when we avoid discovery or punishment for acting badly and the pleasure we take in someone else’s pain or failure. (The German language actually has a word for this: Schadenfreude.)
We work Step Ten with the unshakable knowledge (faith) that we can’t live a sustainable life with a primary focus on self. Knowing this, we carefully observe our own emotions on an ongoing basis. We nurture those that, in turn, will nurture a sustainable life and recovery. We also notice those that will not; we take the appropriate actions if needed and then let them go. All the while, we keep in mind that the more we sustain our recovery, the more it sustains us.
The Big Book page 68 has a reference to self reliance and how to ‘outgrow fear’ that fits well into a practical way to move toward a more sustainable way of living and sobriety:
“We reviewed our fears thoroughly. We put them on paper, even though we had no resentment in connection with them. We asked ourselves why we had them. Wasn’t it because self-reliance failed us? Self-reliance was good as far as it went, but it didn’t go far enough. Some of us once had great self-confidence, but it didn’t fully solve the fear problem, or any other. When it made us cocky, it was worse.
Perhaps there is a better way – we think so. For we are now on a different basis; the basis of trusting and relying upon God. We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves. We are in the world to play the role He assigns. Just to the extent that we do as we think He would have us, and humbly rely on Him, does He enable us to match calamity with serenity.
We never apologize to anyone for depending upon our Creator. We can laugh at those who think spirituality the way of weakness. Paradoxically, it is the way of strength. The verdict of the ages is that faith means courage. All men of faith have courage. They trust their God. We never apologize for God. Instead we let Him demonstrate, through us, what He can do. We ask Him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what He would have us be. At once, we commence to outgrow fear.”
A relevant reference from the Twelve & Twelve about ‘belief being reliance not defiance” from page 31 in Step 2 :
“When we encountered A.A,, the fallacy of our defiance was revealed. At no time had we asked what God’s will was for us; instead we had been telling Him what it ought to be. No man, we saw, could believe in God and defy Him, too. Belief meant reliance, not; defiance. In A.A, we saw the fruits of this belief: men and women spared from alcohol’s final catastrophe. We saw them meet and transcend their other pains and trials. We saw them calmly accept impossible situations, seeking neither to run nor to recriminate. This was not only faith; it was faith that worked under all conditions. We soon concluded that what-ever price in humility we must pay, we would pay.”
Another important reference is about humility and how to recognize the lack of it as we see and sense our self reliance. This is made very clear in Step 7 from the Twelve & Twelve
“Humility, as a word and as an ideal, has a very bad time of it in our world. Not only is the idea misunderstood; the word itself is often intensely disliked. Many people haven’t even a nodding acquaintance with humility as a way of life. Much of the everyday talk we hear, and a great deal of what we read, highlights man’s pride in his own achievements. With great intelligence, men of science have been forc-ing nature to disclose her secrets. The immense resources now being harnessed promise such a quantity of material blessings that many have come to believe that a man-made millennium lies just ahead. Poverty will disappear, and there will be such abundance that everybody can have all the security and personal satisfactions he desires. The theory seems to be that once everybody’s primary instincts are satisfied, there won’t be much left to quarrel about. The world will then turn happy and be free to concentrate on culture and character. Solely by their own intelligence and labor, men will have shaped their own destiny. Certainly no alcoholic, and surely no member of A.A., wants to deprecate material achievement. Nor do we enter into debate with the many who still so passionately cling to the belief that to satisfy our basic natural desires is the main object of life. But we are sure that no class of people in the world ever made a worse mess of trying to live by this for-mula than alcoholics. For thousands of years we have been demanding more than our share of security, prestige, and romance. When we seemed to be succeeding, we drank to dream still greater dreams. When we were frustrated, even in part, we drank for oblivion. Never was there enough of what we thought we wanted. In all these strivings, so many of them well-intentioned, our crippling handicap had been our lack of humility. We had lacked the perspective to see that character-building and spiritual values had to come first, and that material sat-isfactions were not the purpose of living. Quite characteristically, we had gone all out in confusing the ends with the means. Instead of regarding the satisfaction of our material desires as the means by which we could live and function as human beings, we had taken these satisfactions to be the final end and aim of life. True, most of us thought good character was desirable, but obviously good character was something one needed to get on with the business of being self-satisfied. With a proper display of honesty and morality, we’d stand a better chance of getting what we really wanted. But whenever we had to choose between character and comfort, the charac-ter-building was lost in the dust of our chase after what we thought was happiness. Seldom did we look at character-building as something desirable in itself, something we would like to strive for whether our instinctual needs were met or not. We never thought of making honesty, tolerance, and true love of man and God the daily basis of living. This lack of anchorage to any permanent values, this blindness to the true purpose of our lives, produced another bad result. For just so long as we were convinced that we could live exclusively by our own individual strength and intelligence, for just that long was a working faith in a Higher Power impossible. This was true even when we be-lieved that God existed. We could actually have earnest religious beliefs which remained barren because we were still trying to play God ourselves. As long as we placed self-reliance first, a genuine reliance upon a Higher Power was out of the question. That basic ingredient of all humility, a desire to seek and do God’s will, was missing. For us, the process of gaining a new perspective was unbelievably painful. It was only by repeated humiliations that we were forced to learn something about humility. It was only at the end of a long road, marked by successive defeats and humiliations, and the final crushing of our self-sufficiency, that we began to feel humility as something more than a condition of groveling despair. Every newcomer in Alcoholics Anonymous is told, and soon realizes for himself, that his humble admission of powerlessness over
alcohol is his first step toward liberation from its paralyzing grip. So it is that we first see humility as a necessity. But this is the barest beginning. To get completely away from our aversion to the idea of being humble, to gain a vision of humility as the avenue to true freedom of the human spirit, to be willing to work for humility as something to be desired for itself, takes most of us a long, long time. A whole life-time geared to self-centeredness cannot be set in reverse all at once. Rebellion dogs our every step at first.”
The misconception that this movement away from self centeredness will be easy or pain free is also dealt with in Step 7. This passage reminds us of how much of our progress relates to having a different relationship with pain.
“But when we have taken a square look at some of these defects, have discussed them with another, and have be-come willing to have them removed, our thinking about humility commences to have a wider meaning. By this time in all probability we have gained some measure of release from our more devastating handicaps. We enjoy moments in which there is something like real peace of mind. To those of us who have hitherto known only excitement, de-pression, or anxiety—in other words, to all of us—this newfound peace is a priceless gift. Something new indeed has been added. Where humility had formerly stood for a forced feeding on humble pie, it now begins to mean the nourishing ingredient which can give us serenity.
This improved perception of humility starts another revolutionary change in our outlook. Our eyes begin to open to the immense values which have come straight out of painful ego-puncturing. Until now, our lives have been largely devoted to running from pain and problems. We fled from them as from a plague. We never wanted to deal with the fact of suffering. Escape via the bottle was always our solution. Character-building through suffering might be all right for saints, but it certainly didn’t appeal to us. Then, in A.A., we looked and listened. Everywhere we saw failure and misery transformed by humility into price-less assets. We heard story after story of how humility had brought strength out of weakness. In every case, pain had been the price of admission into a new life. But this admis-sion price had purchased more than we expected. It brought a measure of humility, which we soon discovered to be a healer of pain. We began to fear pain less, and desire humility more than ever. During this process of learning more about humility, the most profound result of all was the change in our attitude toward God. And this was true whether we had been be-lievers or unbelievers. We began to get over the idea that the Higher Power was a sort of bush-league pinch hitter, to be called upon only in an emergency. The notion that we would still live our own lives, God helping a little now and then, began to evaporate. Many of us who had thought our-selves religious awoke to the limitations of this attitude. Refusing to place God first, we had deprived ourselves of His help. But now the words “Of myself I am nothing, the Father doeth the works” began to carry bright promise and meaning. We saw we needn’t always be bludgeoned and beaten into humility. It could come quite as much from our volun-tary reaching for it as it could from unremitting suffering. A great turning point in our lives came when we sought for humility as something we really wanted, rather than as something we must have. It marked the time when we could commence to see the full implication of Step Seven: “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.“
This article on the Dangers of Self Reliance is also a good supplement to this article:
https://gugogs.org/2023/01/05/dangers-of-self-reliance-practice-these-principles-by-ray-a/
And this article on the Inventory process and examining our fears is also an excellent reference for adding context and comprehensiveness to further examine what the core article introduces about sustainability:
https://gugogs.org/2022/11/17/4th-step-fear-inventory-practice-these-principles-by-ray-a/