DoubleDragons

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

I am a double winner. I got sober 10 months ago. I am constantly reading on the "other side" of SR. The 12 steppers insist that steps 10-12 is what keeps them sober. So, I am paying careful attention to these last steps.

ladyscribbler

There might be something to that. I know I have considered my "emotional sobriety" at times in the face of Step 10. Those moments when I'm tempted to fly off the handle, cuss someone out, let loose my wrath, I have been able to slow my roll a little bit. I ask myself, "Will I have to make amends for this?" If the answer is yes, I ask myself, "Is it worth making amends over?"
So far the answer has been "no" every time.
OT/ One of my Alanannies has a sweet two seater canary yellow convertible with a personalized license plate that says STEP 10. I keep meaning to ask her the origin on the license plate, but I never think of it until after the meeting when I see her car in the parking lot. If I ever find out I'll post the story here.

DesertEyes

Oh goodness, I am in so many programs I'm like a quadruple winner; AA, Al-Anon, ACA, ISA. It takes too long to explain the whole list so I just say that I am an "alphabet person"

Oh, and congratulation on the 10 months, that is _awesome_

As for step 10, what is the key for me is that one little word "continued". When I first got into recovery I planned on just zipping through the steps, get myself fixed, and be done with the whole thing. That attitude did me no good at all.

This whole business of the steps does not work for me if I only apply them to a specific problem and then walk away. What has worked is to think of the steps as a way of changing _my_ attitude towards the hardships of life. If I keep this new attitude uppermost in my mind on a _continuous_ basis then my life starts to change. Nothing changes in the world, and my problems don't go away, but they get much, much smaller. Not only that, life itself becomes much easier to handle.

However, it seems that I have another "continuous" going on in my life. I continuously _forget_ that I have the tools with which to handle life. I slip back into old habits and reflexes, and after two or three days of that my emotions drift into the negative. By the end of the week you'd think I'd never been in recovery.

One of my therapists suggested that this 10 step does _not_ mean that I do the full blown inventory all the time, all I have to do is enough of the _process_ to keep from drifting away. She suggested I take a pivotal moment in my life and use that as a "connection" for that process. I chose the day I first ran away from home, that moment is permanently etched in my mind like a tatoo. It was the start of my new life, free from the chains of chaos.

Today, whenever I walk in or out of a building I use that as a reminder. As a child I walked out of a house filled with insanity. That "walking through a door" is a symbol I have chosen as my reminder of what my life is all about. It is about _not_ living in the insanity and, instead, making progress towards having a life that is healthy and free. Every time I walk in or out of a building, leaving home to go to work, arriving at work, walking into a grocery store, a doctors office, the library, etc. I take just a few seconds to remind myself of where I came from and where I am headed in my recovery.

Just a few seconds, several times a day. What that does is prevent my "forgetter" from taking over. When there's trouble at work it is _much_ easier to keep my serenity. When the docs give me bad news I can keep my balance. When I am dealing with some new ACA issue that bubbled up from the ooze I can work the whole 12 steps fairly simply. It's an old cliche, but it makes sense to me, those few seconds keep me on the "center of the path" instead of drifting off to the sides.

I do a lot of other things, too, in order to keep my recovery. As far as the 10th step and the concept of "continuous" inventory this is what works for me.

Mike