A Dozen Steps

Displaying Honesty and Morality To Get What We Want

by Mark on July 14th, 2008

Doesn’t necessarily work if you’re an alcoholic…

From The Seventh Step in the 12&12;

“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.”

Yeah - right. In the case of most alcoholics and also most humans, we were previously told “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.” How true! And how perverse was that thinking…

That led to others judging, then self-judging, that if we didn’t provide enough therefore we weren’t good enough. This one still haunts me with my “family.”

But the 12&12 lays it out, for me, very nicely.

First the sarcasm - “With a proper display of honesty and morality, we’d stand a better chance of getting what we really wanted.” Wrong again. There simply is no method with which to always determine we’ll be getting what we want. It truly isn’t up to us.

Then the old reality - “But whenever we had to choose between character and comfort, the character-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.”

Now, I ask you, when can you recall considering character-building when you were drinking? My answer would be - never!

Thirdly, our literature offers us what I believe becomes the answer when they tell us “We never thought of making honesty, tolerance, and true love of man and God the daily basis of living.”

When I can practice that, life is so much better!

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POSTED IN: The Seventh Step