Only Step Seven–humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings–mentions humility specifically, yet all of the Steps seem to have an element of it. Some Steps require a big helping of humility to get going on the Step in the first place (for example, admitting we are powerless or that we are insane). Or, as a result of taking the Step, we experience a major reduction of ego (as when we have taken a moral inventory, shared it with another person, or made amends).
I understood early in sobriety that humility played an important role in keeping us sober, but I needed basic training in the concept. I’d never given humility a thought before I arrived at the doorstep of AA, and I certainly had no life experience to draw upon.
I heard some catchy definitions of the term at meetings, such as “Humility is being right-sized.” I also looked up humility in the dictionary. My old college dictionary defined it as “the quality or condition of being humble; modest sense of one’s own importance, rank, etc.” The synonyms given were “lowliness,” “meekness,” and “submissiveness.” Good grief! Was this something I really had to have?
My first major breakthrough in understanding humility came through an understanding of the opposing concept, false pride. That was another term I heard frequently at meetings, but which just baffled me. Pride I understood; it was the “false” part I didn’t get. That is, until I found myself in the middle of a major episode of it.
I’m a lawyer by profession. At one time in my career, I was a partner in a firm of sober lawyers that established itself in one of the most elegant law offices in the city of Seattle. We ordered a custom build-out of our office suite on the fifty-fifth floor of a fifty-six story building with sweeping views of Puget Sound. We purchased expensive furniture and artwork to impress our clients, and we hired a large staff.
Unfortunately, we had the cart before the horse. We were just starting out and had incurred these expenses without the cash flow to pay for them or the rest of our staggering overhead. To make a long story short, the firm went belly up, and the partners scattered, trying to stay sober and hold our individual practices and finances together. You might think I would have understood false pride from this experience alone, but I did not. More had to be revealed.
I ended up a few years later in a three-room office in one of Seattle’s older buildings, with a staff of one secretary. As I was preparing to take a deposition one day, the opposing lawyer, who always dressed expensively, arrived with her client, an orthopedic surgeon. Remembering my previous gorgeous office with views of the water, I felt embarrassed that she and her client would see my modest quarters and think me unsuccessful and perhaps incompetent as well. I realized to my chagrin that I was more concerned about how they would judge me than I was about the work I had to do for my client.
Then and there I understood false pride. My fear of being inferior made me want to puff myself up and look good. I wanted to appear well-to-do and successful, even though I was at that time still recovering from a financial disaster and trying to get back on my feet.
I soon began to see my false pride at work all over the place. Every time I went to a meeting and didn’t want to be called on after hearing an eloquent speaker, I was suffering an attack of false pride: I didn’t want to merely share my experience, strength, and hope–I wanted to sound witty or intelligent or serenely sober.
When I was having one of those negative, depressed days we AAs sometimes have, false pride would keep me from calling one of my sponsees to chat or sharing my state of mind at a meeting where there were newcomers. After all, I had some time under my belt and should be a model of sobriety for women newer in the program. And shouldn’t a person have all the answers after more than a decade of sobriety?
Although I was gaining in my understanding of false pride, humility still didn’t truly resonate with me until I was invited to lead a retreat on the Twelve Steps for a group of lawyers in Oregon. In the months preceding the retreat, I vacillated between opposite ends of the spectrum of grandiosity. Some days I was thrilled, thinking that I must really be somebody in AA and have something important to say or I wouldn’t have been invited. Other days I experienced abject terror, convincing myself that I knew almost nothing about any of the Steps (except maybe Step One) and would either have to cancel, do a great job of faking it, or be utterly humiliated.
As I was driving to this event, still undecided about how I should present myself, I experienced a startling revelation: I should be exactly who I was at that moment–not how I would like that group of lawyers to see me, not how I hope to be when I had another ten years of sobriety, and not how I would appear behind false humility, i.e., presenting myself as knowing absolutely nothing about the Steps.
Who I was at that moment was just a member of AA who had been sober for a few years and tried to apply the Steps in her life with varying degrees of success. I had quite a bit of solid experience to share on some of the Steps, and much less to say about others. I finally understood what humility is: it is being myself exactly as I am right now.
The retreat came off pretty well. I did not become a guru, nor did I fall completely on my face. I shared what I knew about the Steps as honestly as I could, and miraculously, wherever there was a gap in my understanding or experience, the other participants filled it with their experience, strength, and hope. And isn’t this how it always works in every meeting of AA? We do together what none of us can do alone.
I wish I could say that all these experiences permanently deflated my ego, but that would just be trying to puff myself up again. While I now recognize false pride more quickly when it shows up, and genuinely want the freedom from self that humility can bring, I still fight the urge to look good or sound important. Gratitude is a big help here.
I try to remember sometime during every day, in as much detail as possible, what my life was like during the last days of my drinking. I visualize myself sitting on the couch in the dark in my apartment, with the blinds drawn and the phone unplugged, draining a bottle of cheap red wine, and wondering how I was going to get through another day. I try to re-experience the feelings of desperation and loneliness I felt then, and gratitude flows instantly. I am a drunk who has been spared the last ravages of alcoholism and who has a very good life today. Do I really need to look any better than that?
The other thing I try to do to keep my grandiosity in check is to ask my Higher Power, during the moment of silence at the beginning of each meeting, to help me to stay myself: “If called on, please let me say only what I need to say in order to stay sober and, if it be thy will, let this be useful to others.”