There are two words I tried my hardest to ignore in one of the 12 Steps of recovery for the longest of time. They appear in the 6th step and are specifically the ones that say “entirely ready”. As written, the 6th Step says, “Were entirely ready for God to remove all these defects of character” and to put it quite simply, I just wasn’t entirely ready to let a few of mine go for far too many years in sobriety. But before I go into the reasons why I wasn’t, I think it’s important to clarify something when it comes to addiction and these defects of character.
The underlying problem in any addiction is never really the substance of the addiction itself; it’s actually these character defects that lie underneath it. Many who find sobriety from whatever their addiction was don’t understand that their defects of character were actually there before the addiction ever began. They were also there when it was active within them. And they were still there once they put their addiction down as well. Thankfully though, the 12 Steps can help a person to remove them, but as the 6th Step states, one must be entirely willing to have them ALL removed in the first place. I place emphasis on the word “all” because as I said already, there were a few I just didn’t want to let go of for a very long period of time.
Why I didn’t want to let go of a few of my character defects for years and years solely related to the level of benefit I kept on receiving from engaging in them. One of them dealt with my egregious sex conduct, while the other dealt with my codependency on others. In the long run, neither ever gave me any long lasting happiness, but in the short term, they did provide me a temporary level of comfort. So when I went through the 6th Step for the first time, I was enjoying a sexual affair with a married person and I was also relying upon a friend to lift my spirits up whenever I was down. The reality was I wasn’t entirely ready to let these defects of character go because I felt like I needed them for the comfort they were giving me. But eventually, each began to cause me excessive misery and suffering so much so that I almost relapsed back into several of the addictions that once had masked these character defects. It was then that I became entirely ready to remove them and I’m grateful I did.
Today, I’m not holding onto those character defects anymore nor am I still acting out in any others either. I practice the 6th Step daily to make sure it stays that way, as I never want to return to any of those days when they caused me so much pain and anguish from keeping them around. I’m so glad I learned this lesson that the success of my recovery is totally dependent on being ENTIRELY READY to remove all of my defects of character, and thankfully my recovery today definitely reflects that.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson