How to Write Step One

A colleague who lives a few towns away wrote to ask me to guide her on Step One. She’s not a newcomer, and had worked the steps before, but wanted another go and possibly to uncover some new layers.

Here’s what I wrote back:

Week One: Get a spiral notebook and on page one write:

“I am powerless over…”

And start making a list—include everything from the weather to your car, your boss, to friends and men to your hair—you name it.

Repeat that on a new page for seven nights. More things will show up each time. Just do it quickly for maybe two to five minutes. Don’t think just write.

Week Two: 

Now write about addictions: “When I was drinking/eating/using…I was powerless over…”: (another fast list each night)

Then, “and still today I am powerless over…”

During these two weeks you pray daily for complete honesty with yourself. Ask God to nudge you about those things you and denying or trying to not see.  After that, call your sponsor and have a chat—or have coffee with a recovering woman and share your lists.

Laughter guaranteed.

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I write more about working the steps in later recovery in the book: Out of the Woods--A Guide to Long-term Recovery, published by Central Recovery Press.

The Step Five Promises

One of the things that I love about twelve-step recovery is that the learning never stops. There is a just layer after layer of personal growth of course, but there is also layer after layer of understanding the program and how our healing happens.

Consider this: I attended that great Big Book Step Study a few weeks ago and learned a new way to work steps six and seven. It turns out they are not passive—not the “wish and go” steps as I’d treated them before.

Then too, at that same workshop, I learned about The Step 5 Promises. Yes, I always knew—and heard read—The Promises that we can read after Step Nine –we read them at one of my regular meetings. But did you know there are changes promised to us after Step 5 as well? Well, maybe you did.

But take a look at page 75 in your Big Book. On that page, right after a description of how to do a fifth step comes this promising paragraph:

“Once we have taken this step, withholding nothing, we are delighted. We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall away from us. We begin to feel the nearness of our Creator. We may have had certain spiritual beliefs, but now we begin to have spiritual experience. The feeling that the drink problem has disappeared will often come strongly. We feel we are on the Broad Highway, walking hand in hand with the Spirit of the Universe.”

Those are eight more promises that we can start to experience even before we get to Step Nine. Isn’t that great incentive to work the steps. It is inspiring me. I especially want those “fears to fall away”. So I’m digging deeper.

Working the Steps?

Today’s meeting was about the steps. Surprising sometimes that in all of this AA-ing and meetings we forget that it is about these 12 steps. We say we “do” them, and we “work” them and we have instructions—sort of—in the Big Book.

But what has been your experience of working the steps? Did you do them once? Is it ongoing? Are you of the school that says we do Step One once? Or every day? And how about Step Four? I’ve done several 4th step inventories but some people say you do Step Four once and Ten through Twelve after that to keep things in line and sober.

And from this far out—or into the woods- what do you now say to newcomers who ask when they should start working the steps?