A Whole New Me

July 1977 – A.H. from Naples, FL

THE BIG BOOK says, “At some of these we balked,” and I did. Not at the first few Steps. Powerless over alcohol? Life unmanageable? Jolly correct. When you’ve lost an $800-per job with promise of unlimited advancement, plus one wife and one son, plus the last red cent of capital, plus honor and self-respect, and your kid is in therapy because he lived with Daddy–you know your life is unmanageable. You say, “God–why?” And He, like the Ghost of Christmas Future, points to a garbage can full of empties. Alcohol. Oh.

God? No problem. Always believed in Him, at least on paper.

Moral inventory? Why not? I tried, as fearlessly and thoroughly as possible, and went on to the Fifth Step. The prophesied result of the Fifth Step came to pass; the compulsion to drink left me. I was free, on Cloud Nine.

Steps Six and Seven sounded awfully easy to me after the catharsis of Step Five. Nothing to it!

Time has shown me that Six and Seven are the toughest in the program. You can’t just jot down in the calendar: “Today I finished Steps Six and Seven–Step Eight, here I come.” No way. These Steps have stingers in them.

This is heavy stuff, friend. These Steps, I found, were asking me for an awful lot more than a sleepy assent, a sort of surface-level willingness to be made perfect (or more perfect than I already was). They were asking for a whole new me. “They were reminding this alcoholic that the “prayer and meditation” lurking ahead in Step Eleven would be totally valueless if done by the old me with the old ideas and the old attitudes and the old character defects; that I had a habit of asking God for things without really wanting them or really understanding them; that what I should have been dealing with at this stage of the program was not surface-level flaws but deep-rooted defects.

In Steps Four and Five, I had played the right tune in the wrong key. I had listed and admitted a host of flaws and wrongdoings, and had not really gotten down to “the exact nature” of my wrongs at all.

And it became clear to me why this was so. I was willing to have these surface-level flaws removed: to be no longer compulsively sarcastic, to stop walking away from people who didn’t fit my notions of “my type of person,” and so on. But the character defects behind these flaws remained. I was sarcastic because I had a deep-rooted feeling of being superior to others (or, equally often, of being inferior to them). I turned away from others because I had an ego trip going that I hadn’t finished yet.

Steps Six and Seven told me to go back and do Four and Five again, this time looking for the real inside dope. What was basically wrong with this individual named Art, that made him behave this way? What was bent? Where was the root of this sickness of character?

And here I balked. I found that I didn’t really want to change, not at gut level. Later, after a refresher course in the dubious joys of alcoholic drinking, brought on by my unwillingness to work the program the AA way, I had–thank God–a second chance at the Steps. And then I understood what Steps Six and Seven were telling me about me. I was used to the old me, and to trade it away for a new one would mean starting all over again. I didn’t want to do that–the old me would do for a while longer.

So that was it. I was resisting Steps Six and Seven because I wanted to preserve the old me that I was familiar with, and feared the encounter with a new self whom I would have to meet and get to know like a stranger.

But it can be done, and it was, and the result is that sobriety has lasted well into a second year. I’m getting acquainted with this new me, and I like him because he doesn’t have to drink. Of course, the old self still lurks in dark places within and reappears from time to time. That’s what Step Ten is all about. But there’s progress. Sober progress. And that’s what AA is all about.