Working The Steps |
The following is from:
Seduction of Suicide
Understanding and Recovering
From Addiction to Suicide
by Kevin Taylor, M.D.
1stBooks Bloomington, IN
The Twelve Steps were originally formulated in 1938 by Bill W. the co-founder of
Alcoholics Anonymous. They grew out of the principles of the Oxford Group, a religious
fellowship that sponsored the first AA meetings in Akron, Ohio. The steps were first
published in Bill W's Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) and received a more detailed
treatment in his Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (1953).
The Twelve Steps provide a comprehensive and thorough approach to the problem
of addiction. Without them, recovering from suicide addiction may be impossible. Our debt
to the pioneers of AA is incalculable.
These are the Twelve Steps:
1. We admitted we were powerless over our suicidal preoccupation - that our lives had
become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we
understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our
wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them
all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would
injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as
we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to
carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this
message to those who still suffer and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over our suicidal preoccupation - that
our lives had become unmanageable.
No one wants to admit defeat. Every instinct rebels against the idea of
powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that we have become so obsessed by the idea of
suicide that only an act of God can set us right.
The word "powerlessness" sums up for us several ideas. It means that we ourselves
lack the power to make sound choices for our own lives. We were enslaved to suicide.
The fact that we became captive to suicide shows that there was something important and
powerful in our suicidal patterns which gave us some kind of "payoff". Many of us were
seeking, by trancing ourselves with suicidal activity, to shut off the world with all of its
demands. Or we masked our fear of commitment to life by thinking of death. We made use
of suicidal preoccupations to lessen our pain or enhance our pleasure.
Soon our obsession became an addiction which destroyed our ability to concentrate
on important things. One by one, all the things that make life worthwhile - satisfaction at
work, family, friends, and social activities - dropped away as suicide absorbed all our time
and attention. Some of us were caught up in the hypnotic intensity of suicidal trances.
Such experiences, exuberant at first, became overwhelmingly compelling, carrying us
along with them into prolonged bondage to our thoughts of suicide. The original quest for
distraction from life's tensions now led us off into oblivion. Control over our lives no longer
resided within us. We had lost control, whether we admitted it to ourselves or not.
Each of us, in his or her own time, finally experienced a sense of real desperation.
We began to realize that living with our addictive patterns and being controlled by them
meant that we risked losing our sanity. We stood on the edge of an abyss, and if we
slipped into it, we would lose all possibility of stability or health, forever. We decided we
had to stop.
Now we began to confront a paradox: accepting that we couldn't control our addiction is
the first step towards recovery. Most of us had tried all sorts of strategies to control our
behavior. These strategies, no matter how strong, were futile. If we had some initial
success in controlling our addictive behavior, we would become smug and conclude that
we could now manage things. This only lowered our defenses, so that we gave in to old
patterns again, often within days or hours.
Our loss of control had become an established fact. Therefore we could approach
the prospect of surrendering our suicide addiction with true humility, for we had no way of
knowing if surrender was even possible. True surrender of our suicide addiction meant
not only being willing to take ourselves out of the painful situation at hand; it also meant
being ready to be free of the whole obsession with suicide. The resolve only to be rid of a
specific painful situation, without the readiness to break the whole addictive pattern,
amounted to "going on the wagon" without truly giving up the addiction.
When we were first challenged to admit total defeat, most of us revolted. We had
approached Suicide Anonymous expecting to be taught the self-confidence to conquer
our own suicide addiction. Then we were told that, so far as suicide was concerned,
self-confidence was a liability. We were the victims of a mental obsession so powerful that
no amount of human willpower could break it. There was not such thing as personal
conquest of this addiction.
Finally, we reached a point of unconditional surrender. The proof of this surrender
was that we refrained, one day at a time, from every form of behavior we saw as part of
our addiction. We recognized that these were no-win situations. Each of us was now
willing to go to any length, a day at a time, to stay sober. We were willing to be available to
whatever might happen withing ourselves. Paradoxically, this was not willingness coming
from strength, but from the certainty of the consequences of continuing our addiction.
We were driven to Suicide Anonymous, and there we discovered the fatal nature of our
situation. Then, and only then, did we become open-minded, to listen as only the dying
can.
Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to
sanity.
As we came to appreciate the magnitude and mind-altering nature of suicide
addiction, we had to admit that we could not reshape our whole identity unaided. We felt
the need for a Someone greater that ourselves, a Something at least one step ahead of
our disease, to give us the guidance we could not provide for ourselves. But what might
that Someone or Something be?
We found the best answer to this question of faith through other Suicide Anonymous
members, people who had found faith themselves. As we listened to their stories, we
could identify with their patterns of addiction. And we could see that they were now
leading healthier lives. As living examples, they offered us the hope that the same Power
who had helped them might be available to us as well.
Contact with other recovering suicide addicts also helped us sustain our day-to-day
sobriety. As we realized how helpful this network of support was, we sensed that we didn't
necessarily need organized religion. What we needed was the spiritual guidance we could
receive from other Suicide Anonymous members. They helped us lay the foundation for
building our own faith. We could even, if we wished, make Suicide Anonymous itself our
"higher power". This was, after all, a group of people who together could solve their
problem with suicide. In this respect they were certainly a power greater than we were. We
could have faith in them. Many members crossed the threshold into faith in this way. They
told us that, once across, their faith grew wider and deeper. Relieved of the obsession
with suicide, their lives transformed, their belief in a Higher Power grew stronger and more
certain. And most of them began to call it God.
We found that true humility and an open mind will lead us to faith. Every Suicide
Anonymous meeting was a fresh assurance that God would restore us to sanity.
Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as
we understood Him.
Like all the remaining steps, Step 3 called for affirmative action to cut away the
self-will which blocked us from God. The question, as always, was "how?" There was only
one answer - willingness.
Every man and woman who had joined Suicide Anonymous had, without realizing it,
made a beginning on Step 3. Wasn't it true that in matters relating to suicide, each of
them had decided to turn his or her life over to the care and protection of Suicide
Anonymous? Each newcomer felt sure Suicide Anonymous was the only safe harbor for
the sinking vessel that he or she had become. If this was not turning one's will and life
over to a newfound Higher Power, then what was it?
What would it be like, if we were really to empty ourselves of diseases and refrain
from refilling ourselves again with anything other than God's grace? We had no idea. All
we knew was that we did not want to go back into active suicide addiction. We came to
understand that if we were unable to prescribe our own treatment for suicide addiction,
then we would be better off turning "our will and our lives over" to the God of our
understanding even if we did not know what might happen.
Having made this decision, how could we now begin our new relationship with God?
The answer was simple; what we added was prayer. We now began each day in
communion with the God of our understanding, asking for help to stay free, for that one
day, of addictive behavior. And if we were successful in not acting out by day's end, we
thanked God for helping us live another day free from bottom-line suicide addiction.
And in all times of emotional disturbance we paused, asked for quiet and simply said:
"Thy will, not mine be done."
Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
To our surprise we found that there came a point where we approached the task of
Step 4 without fear, because we had come to terms with Step 3. If God was helping us to
manage our external lives, it was easier to be open to the idea of clearing up the debris.
But how were we to accomplish such an inventory? No two people would do it exactly
alike; there was no single "right way". What we needed was to achieve some
understanding of ourselves without fear, pride or secret reservations. Furthermore, we
needed to understand the payoffs we had derived from our addictions.
Most of us found that writing down our inventory was helpful. Looking at what we had
done in black and white was an invaluable aid to honesty and objectivity. As we read our
version of what happened, we could see through our excuses and our need to blame
others.
In writing down our inventory, some of us used the guidelines in the Big Book of
Alcoholics Anonymous: resentments, fears and sex.
"Resentment is the 'number one' offender." So says the Big Book of Alcoholics
Anonymous. We also found this to be true for suicide addicts. In order to deal with our
resentments, we set them down on paper, listing people, institutions or principles with
which we were angry. When we took a hard look at why we were angry, we found that we
had seen threats to our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, or our personal
relationships.
We saw clearly, for the first time, how these resentments led only to unhappiness
and shut us off from the very contact with a Higher Power that we desperately needed for
our daily reprieve from suicide addiction. Therefore, putting aside what others might have
done wrong, we looked at our own mistakes, asking ourselves where we had been selfish,
dishonest, self-seeking and frightened. When we saw our faults, we listed them to black
and white.
Next, we reviewed our fears. We put them on paper, asking ourselves honestly why
we had them. Wasn't it because our own self-reliance had failed us so badly? We realized
there is a better way: put our trust in God, not ourselves. We were in the world to play the
role God assigns. To the extent that we do this, God will match calamity with serenity. We
asked God to remove our fears and direct our attention to what God would have us be or
do.
Sex! We reviewed our conduct carefully. Where had we been selfish? Dishonest?
Did we arouse jealousy, suspicion or anger? Who had we hurt? We put it all on paper and
looked at it. We found the acid test for each relationship: was it selfish or not? We
earnestly prayed for the right ideal and the strength to do the right thing. If sex was
particularly troublesome, we threw ourselves into helping others, taking us out of
ourselves.
If we had been thorough in our inventory, we began to learn tolerance and good-will
toward all, even our enemies. We were ready for Step 5.
Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact
nature of our wrongs.
More than most people, suicide addicts lead a double life. To the world, we present a
stage character. We take pride in our ability to keep a secret, to keep our stories straight,
to keep our feelings hidden. Such a strategy had a major payoff; we never had to deal
with the consequences of our actions. We could even deny to ourselves that there were
consequences. If ever anyone had a strong incentive to remain closed off from others, to
hide the self from view, it was us.
Step 5 was our way to become open. If we didn't share with another person what we
learned in Step 4, our sobriety was in danger. Our profound aloneness - both the root of
our disease and its consequence - could be eased only by reaching out to another
human being.
Many of us felt we needed to find just one person with whom to be totally honest.
Most of us had tried being partially honest with different people. Total honesty with one
human being was essential for humility. It was also necessary for breaking the isolation
that had blocked us from the unconditional acceptance we so desperately needed.
So we pocketed our pride and went for it, illuminating every dark part of our past.
Once done, we were relieved and excited. We could look people in the eye and begin to
have a spiritual experience. Many of us actually felt the presence of God for the first time.
Step 6: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
In the first five steps we were moving away from the active disease. Now, at Step 6,
we needed to make our first step toward rebuilding. To attribute all of our troubles to
suicide addiction would have been a serious error, for our character defects affected our
lives too. In becoming ready to give up our character defects, we were ready to give up
that part of us capable of "the con".
Our old habits had subtle payoffs which were difficult to surrender. Often victims of
emotional deprivation in childhood, we had learned to survive on anger and resentment.
Because of our inner blocks, we had become incapable of intimacy with anyone.
Slowly our attitude toward our defects started to change. We began to move from
surrender of our suicide addiction, toward surrender to a process which would prepare us
for God's work. We understood that Step 6 only asked us to get out of God's way.
Step 7: Humble asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
The whole emphasis of Step 7 is humility, and the basic ingredient of humility is a
desire to seek and do God's will. But as long as we placed self-reliance first, reliance on a
Higher Power was still impossible.
Although we had come a long way, we were still unable to shape our own lives in a
consistently positive manner without a Power to continue to do for us what we could not
do for ourselves.
So we called upon God to remove our shortcomings. When we were finally ready to
do this, many of us chose the Step 7 prayer of the Big Book: "My Creator, I am now willing
that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every
single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and to my
fellows. Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen."
Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make
amends to them all.
Learning to live in harmony with all men and women is a fascinating adventure. It is a
task we may never finish. To accomplish it, we had to repair the damage done in the past
to the best of our ability.
Using our Step 4 inventory, we made a list of all persons we had harmed, subjecting
ourselves to drastic self-appraisal. Our list was often a long one, since we realized that
our character defects - especially our selfishness and anger - had affected most of our
relationships.
The problem now was to determine exactly what harm we had done others. A sort of
generalized apologetic air was nowhere near enough: we had to see exactly how we had
harmed others and how we could set that wrong to rights.
First, we stopped looking at the harm done to us. Regardless of what damage we'd
suffered, we could not change another person. The only sins we could deal with were our
own. So we closed the books on "wrongs done to us" and set out on our journey.
The prospect of amends could be terribly frightening. We could not imagine finding the
courage to tackle some of the things we had done to others. So we simply asked God for
the willingness to do so. We realized that if fear or pride kept us from making amends, we
would go through life avoiding those we had harmed. We knew intuitively that there would
be no real freedom in the future without taking full responsibility for our destructive
behavior in the past.
Asking honestly what types of harm we had done, we considered the physical,
mental, emotional or spiritual damage that we had done to ourselves or others. We had,
for example, been abusive to our mates, blaming them for our own behavior, loading them
with all the responsibility for our family life, and frequently taking out our anger on them.
We had made their lives hell, and they had suffered real and lasting damage. We had
neglected our children, depriving them of our love and care - and of course, they'd
blamed themselves for our failure. And then there was the dreadful damage we'd done to
ourselves, body and soul. Even if we could not imagine how we could possibly make
amends for this sort of terrible injury, we wrote down what we had done, doing our best to
be specific about the injury. Without precise knowledge of what we had done to ourselves
and others, we realized that we had no chance to stop harming ourselves and other
people in the future.
In time we found that our commitment to recovery had moved beyond simple survival
to a higher plane, one born of a sincere desire to right the wrongs we had done during
our active addiction.
Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to
do so would injure them or others.
Step 8 would be meaningless unless we put it into action; it is the preparation for
Step 9 - a plan of action, but not the action itself. And the action had to be carried out,
wherever possible.
In working Step 9 we cleaned up our past to the best of our ability. We did our
honest best to make amends to people we had harmed. We prayed to be freed from the
bondage of self, so we could free others in our lives from the pain our deception had
caused.
The most important amends we made were those that were made face to face. As we
looked at what we had done, it was clear that many on our list had gone on with their lives,
burdened and twisted by the distortions of reality that we had inflicted on them. What we
had to do for them, then, was to relieve them of the guilt that we had loaded on them and
that they had accepted. We'd convinced ourselves and them that the problems had
somehow been their fault - that they could have saved us from ourselves. We had to set
the record straight, for their sakes, but also for ours.
It wasn't always simple. Some people had gone beyond our reach, either through
death or disappearance. Others no longer wanted to hear from us under any
circumstances. In some situations, full disclosure could only bring more harm, and we
could make only partial restitution. In other cases, restitution had to be deferred till the
time was right. And sometimes, we had to accept that we could never make direct amends.
While face-to-face was the best way, there were some people who we could not meet
directly. In such cases, we wrote letters laying out the past frankly and fully and asking for
forgiveness. If we had no way to make amends directly, all we could do was to say an
honest prayer, admitting our wrongs and asking God to set the old wrongs to right on our
behalf - and then we had to let the past go, trusting in the knowledge that we would be
willing to make amends if we could.
In time we found that page 83 of AA's Big Book expresses a great truth:
If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are
half-way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not
regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we
will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our
experience will benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We
will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away.
Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic
insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to
baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong
promptly admitted it.
Once we cleared away the old wreckage as best we could, we focused on clearing
away the current mess, one day at a time. "It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are
disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us." During such a
disturbance, a quick spot check proved to be very helpful. When we felt flooded by anger
or fear, checking our own spiritual condition gave us much-needed perspective. We hung
onto the knowledge that our daily reprieve from suicide addiction was contingent on
maintaining our spiritual lives. We learned that our character defects, outrageous in the
past, continued in milder form, and that we had to recognize them, realize that they were
part of us, and keep them in check. This required our making frequent appraisals of our
shortcomings during the day and then doing our best to set them right as they happened.
Most of us found ourselves setting aside daily times for prayer and meditation to review
the past 24 hours. Where had we been selfish and self-centered? Had we harmed others,
and if so, who, how, and when? But self-examination aside, most of us learned to spend
prayer time simply thanking our Higher Power for the day, its gifts, our accomplishments -
even for our own failures.
In all of this we focused only on our own faults. We learned slowly that our own
actions were the only ones that we could change - that we had always been, and forever
would be powerless over the deeds of others.
Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious
contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will
for us, and the power to carry that out.
By now we were convinced that spiritual reliance upon God was necessary for our
relationships with others, at work and at home, and for all our daily endeavors. Therefore
we found ourselves increasingly praying for God's guidance in all matters, big and little,
spiritual and worldly.
We came to need prayer as much as we need food and water, for prayer sustained
our very souls. Without it we suffered. The only requirements for our prayers were
unselfishness and sincerity. We wanted to become channels of God's will, not our own will.
In order to become channels of God's will we had to keep our own wills out of the way. To
this end we stopped praying for specific answers to specific problems. "Thy will, not mine,
be done." became the basis for our prayers and conscious contact with God. Saying this
prayer enabled us to clear a channel choked up with selfishness, self-centeredness,
anger or simple misunderstanding. Using it more and more frequently during each day, we
learned the power of prayer in all situations and in all circumstances.
After prayer comes meditation. Once we talked to God, we must listen carefully for
answers. Setting aside time each morning, we reflect upon the upcoming day, we read
favorite meditation passages, and we made ourselves be still in God's presence, listening
for His word. We found, curiously, the more we sensed God's guidance, the less we
seemed to need to make demands upon God. Asking (or secretly desiring) for
thus-and-such to happen, we learned, only served to distort God's message. Prayer isn't
a matter of making requests or bargaining for specific outcomes, and the more we learned
to pray, the more we came to rely on God's will, not on what we wanted to see happen.
But when we were clear and open channels, focused solely on knowledge of God's
will for us, intuitions came to us during these times of meditation and throughout each
day. A word from another person, a thought popping into our minds, an idea for action
emerging as we worked on our problems - all were likely to be knowledge of His will for us.
The more open our channels, the more frequent the answers.
In time, we realized that "we intuitively knew how to handle situations that used to
baffle us."
Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried
to carry this message to those who still suffer and to practice these principles in
all our affairs.
In Step 12 we reached out to fellow suicide addicts still in distress. In so doing we
asked no reward for ourselves. Having worked all the steps, we found ourselves deeply
involved in a new state of consciousness, an awareness that life is full of meaning after
all, and that it is both a responsibility and a joy to spread that understanding to others.
We found ourselves fully, delightedly aware that we had been given a great gift: a
second chance at life. Looking at newcomers who still doubted themselves, we could
remember having been were they were now and really see the change in ourselves.
This brought us to the second part of Step 12: carrying the message. We learned that we
had to give it away in order to keep it. And who better to give it away to than fellow
suffering suicide addicts?
We attended Suicide Anonymous meetings and listened, providing support by our
very presence. WE talked when our turn came; we chaired meetings, organized eating
meetings, and signed up for the phone list. When ready, we sponsored others in Suicide
Anonymous. Here we experienced the kind of giving that asks no reward. Paradoxically,
we found no greater satisfaction and no greater joy than that which we received in our
selfless giving to others.
But could we actually carry the Suicide Anonymous spirit into our daily work? We
discovered a wonderful feeling that we did not have to be seen as special or distinguished
among our fellows in order to be useful and happy. We no longer needed to dominate
those around us in order to bolster our sense of self-importance. Our goal was to live
usefully and walk humbly with God. As long as we practiced the principles of these steps,
we attained our goal - one day at a time.
© 1stBooks; Bloomington, IN; Seduction of Suicide Understanding and Recovering From
Addiction to Suicide; Kevin Taylor, M.D.
Seduction of Suicide
Understanding and Recovering
From Addiction to Suicide
by Kevin Taylor, M.D.
1stBooks Bloomington, IN
The Twelve Steps were originally formulated in 1938 by Bill W. the co-founder of
Alcoholics Anonymous. They grew out of the principles of the Oxford Group, a religious
fellowship that sponsored the first AA meetings in Akron, Ohio. The steps were first
published in Bill W's Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) and received a more detailed
treatment in his Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (1953).
The Twelve Steps provide a comprehensive and thorough approach to the problem
of addiction. Without them, recovering from suicide addiction may be impossible. Our debt
to the pioneers of AA is incalculable.
These are the Twelve Steps:
1. We admitted we were powerless over our suicidal preoccupation - that our lives had
become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we
understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our
wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them
all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would
injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as
we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to
carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this
message to those who still suffer and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over our suicidal preoccupation - that
our lives had become unmanageable.
No one wants to admit defeat. Every instinct rebels against the idea of
powerlessness. It is truly awful to admit that we have become so obsessed by the idea of
suicide that only an act of God can set us right.
The word "powerlessness" sums up for us several ideas. It means that we ourselves
lack the power to make sound choices for our own lives. We were enslaved to suicide.
The fact that we became captive to suicide shows that there was something important and
powerful in our suicidal patterns which gave us some kind of "payoff". Many of us were
seeking, by trancing ourselves with suicidal activity, to shut off the world with all of its
demands. Or we masked our fear of commitment to life by thinking of death. We made use
of suicidal preoccupations to lessen our pain or enhance our pleasure.
Soon our obsession became an addiction which destroyed our ability to concentrate
on important things. One by one, all the things that make life worthwhile - satisfaction at
work, family, friends, and social activities - dropped away as suicide absorbed all our time
and attention. Some of us were caught up in the hypnotic intensity of suicidal trances.
Such experiences, exuberant at first, became overwhelmingly compelling, carrying us
along with them into prolonged bondage to our thoughts of suicide. The original quest for
distraction from life's tensions now led us off into oblivion. Control over our lives no longer
resided within us. We had lost control, whether we admitted it to ourselves or not.
Each of us, in his or her own time, finally experienced a sense of real desperation.
We began to realize that living with our addictive patterns and being controlled by them
meant that we risked losing our sanity. We stood on the edge of an abyss, and if we
slipped into it, we would lose all possibility of stability or health, forever. We decided we
had to stop.
Now we began to confront a paradox: accepting that we couldn't control our addiction is
the first step towards recovery. Most of us had tried all sorts of strategies to control our
behavior. These strategies, no matter how strong, were futile. If we had some initial
success in controlling our addictive behavior, we would become smug and conclude that
we could now manage things. This only lowered our defenses, so that we gave in to old
patterns again, often within days or hours.
Our loss of control had become an established fact. Therefore we could approach
the prospect of surrendering our suicide addiction with true humility, for we had no way of
knowing if surrender was even possible. True surrender of our suicide addiction meant
not only being willing to take ourselves out of the painful situation at hand; it also meant
being ready to be free of the whole obsession with suicide. The resolve only to be rid of a
specific painful situation, without the readiness to break the whole addictive pattern,
amounted to "going on the wagon" without truly giving up the addiction.
When we were first challenged to admit total defeat, most of us revolted. We had
approached Suicide Anonymous expecting to be taught the self-confidence to conquer
our own suicide addiction. Then we were told that, so far as suicide was concerned,
self-confidence was a liability. We were the victims of a mental obsession so powerful that
no amount of human willpower could break it. There was not such thing as personal
conquest of this addiction.
Finally, we reached a point of unconditional surrender. The proof of this surrender
was that we refrained, one day at a time, from every form of behavior we saw as part of
our addiction. We recognized that these were no-win situations. Each of us was now
willing to go to any length, a day at a time, to stay sober. We were willing to be available to
whatever might happen withing ourselves. Paradoxically, this was not willingness coming
from strength, but from the certainty of the consequences of continuing our addiction.
We were driven to Suicide Anonymous, and there we discovered the fatal nature of our
situation. Then, and only then, did we become open-minded, to listen as only the dying
can.
Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to
sanity.
As we came to appreciate the magnitude and mind-altering nature of suicide
addiction, we had to admit that we could not reshape our whole identity unaided. We felt
the need for a Someone greater that ourselves, a Something at least one step ahead of
our disease, to give us the guidance we could not provide for ourselves. But what might
that Someone or Something be?
We found the best answer to this question of faith through other Suicide Anonymous
members, people who had found faith themselves. As we listened to their stories, we
could identify with their patterns of addiction. And we could see that they were now
leading healthier lives. As living examples, they offered us the hope that the same Power
who had helped them might be available to us as well.
Contact with other recovering suicide addicts also helped us sustain our day-to-day
sobriety. As we realized how helpful this network of support was, we sensed that we didn't
necessarily need organized religion. What we needed was the spiritual guidance we could
receive from other Suicide Anonymous members. They helped us lay the foundation for
building our own faith. We could even, if we wished, make Suicide Anonymous itself our
"higher power". This was, after all, a group of people who together could solve their
problem with suicide. In this respect they were certainly a power greater than we were. We
could have faith in them. Many members crossed the threshold into faith in this way. They
told us that, once across, their faith grew wider and deeper. Relieved of the obsession
with suicide, their lives transformed, their belief in a Higher Power grew stronger and more
certain. And most of them began to call it God.
We found that true humility and an open mind will lead us to faith. Every Suicide
Anonymous meeting was a fresh assurance that God would restore us to sanity.
Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as
we understood Him.
Like all the remaining steps, Step 3 called for affirmative action to cut away the
self-will which blocked us from God. The question, as always, was "how?" There was only
one answer - willingness.
Every man and woman who had joined Suicide Anonymous had, without realizing it,
made a beginning on Step 3. Wasn't it true that in matters relating to suicide, each of
them had decided to turn his or her life over to the care and protection of Suicide
Anonymous? Each newcomer felt sure Suicide Anonymous was the only safe harbor for
the sinking vessel that he or she had become. If this was not turning one's will and life
over to a newfound Higher Power, then what was it?
What would it be like, if we were really to empty ourselves of diseases and refrain
from refilling ourselves again with anything other than God's grace? We had no idea. All
we knew was that we did not want to go back into active suicide addiction. We came to
understand that if we were unable to prescribe our own treatment for suicide addiction,
then we would be better off turning "our will and our lives over" to the God of our
understanding even if we did not know what might happen.
Having made this decision, how could we now begin our new relationship with God?
The answer was simple; what we added was prayer. We now began each day in
communion with the God of our understanding, asking for help to stay free, for that one
day, of addictive behavior. And if we were successful in not acting out by day's end, we
thanked God for helping us live another day free from bottom-line suicide addiction.
And in all times of emotional disturbance we paused, asked for quiet and simply said:
"Thy will, not mine be done."
Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
To our surprise we found that there came a point where we approached the task of
Step 4 without fear, because we had come to terms with Step 3. If God was helping us to
manage our external lives, it was easier to be open to the idea of clearing up the debris.
But how were we to accomplish such an inventory? No two people would do it exactly
alike; there was no single "right way". What we needed was to achieve some
understanding of ourselves without fear, pride or secret reservations. Furthermore, we
needed to understand the payoffs we had derived from our addictions.
Most of us found that writing down our inventory was helpful. Looking at what we had
done in black and white was an invaluable aid to honesty and objectivity. As we read our
version of what happened, we could see through our excuses and our need to blame
others.
In writing down our inventory, some of us used the guidelines in the Big Book of
Alcoholics Anonymous: resentments, fears and sex.
"Resentment is the 'number one' offender." So says the Big Book of Alcoholics
Anonymous. We also found this to be true for suicide addicts. In order to deal with our
resentments, we set them down on paper, listing people, institutions or principles with
which we were angry. When we took a hard look at why we were angry, we found that we
had seen threats to our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, or our personal
relationships.
We saw clearly, for the first time, how these resentments led only to unhappiness
and shut us off from the very contact with a Higher Power that we desperately needed for
our daily reprieve from suicide addiction. Therefore, putting aside what others might have
done wrong, we looked at our own mistakes, asking ourselves where we had been selfish,
dishonest, self-seeking and frightened. When we saw our faults, we listed them to black
and white.
Next, we reviewed our fears. We put them on paper, asking ourselves honestly why
we had them. Wasn't it because our own self-reliance had failed us so badly? We realized
there is a better way: put our trust in God, not ourselves. We were in the world to play the
role God assigns. To the extent that we do this, God will match calamity with serenity. We
asked God to remove our fears and direct our attention to what God would have us be or
do.
Sex! We reviewed our conduct carefully. Where had we been selfish? Dishonest?
Did we arouse jealousy, suspicion or anger? Who had we hurt? We put it all on paper and
looked at it. We found the acid test for each relationship: was it selfish or not? We
earnestly prayed for the right ideal and the strength to do the right thing. If sex was
particularly troublesome, we threw ourselves into helping others, taking us out of
ourselves.
If we had been thorough in our inventory, we began to learn tolerance and good-will
toward all, even our enemies. We were ready for Step 5.
Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact
nature of our wrongs.
More than most people, suicide addicts lead a double life. To the world, we present a
stage character. We take pride in our ability to keep a secret, to keep our stories straight,
to keep our feelings hidden. Such a strategy had a major payoff; we never had to deal
with the consequences of our actions. We could even deny to ourselves that there were
consequences. If ever anyone had a strong incentive to remain closed off from others, to
hide the self from view, it was us.
Step 5 was our way to become open. If we didn't share with another person what we
learned in Step 4, our sobriety was in danger. Our profound aloneness - both the root of
our disease and its consequence - could be eased only by reaching out to another
human being.
Many of us felt we needed to find just one person with whom to be totally honest.
Most of us had tried being partially honest with different people. Total honesty with one
human being was essential for humility. It was also necessary for breaking the isolation
that had blocked us from the unconditional acceptance we so desperately needed.
So we pocketed our pride and went for it, illuminating every dark part of our past.
Once done, we were relieved and excited. We could look people in the eye and begin to
have a spiritual experience. Many of us actually felt the presence of God for the first time.
Step 6: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
In the first five steps we were moving away from the active disease. Now, at Step 6,
we needed to make our first step toward rebuilding. To attribute all of our troubles to
suicide addiction would have been a serious error, for our character defects affected our
lives too. In becoming ready to give up our character defects, we were ready to give up
that part of us capable of "the con".
Our old habits had subtle payoffs which were difficult to surrender. Often victims of
emotional deprivation in childhood, we had learned to survive on anger and resentment.
Because of our inner blocks, we had become incapable of intimacy with anyone.
Slowly our attitude toward our defects started to change. We began to move from
surrender of our suicide addiction, toward surrender to a process which would prepare us
for God's work. We understood that Step 6 only asked us to get out of God's way.
Step 7: Humble asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
The whole emphasis of Step 7 is humility, and the basic ingredient of humility is a
desire to seek and do God's will. But as long as we placed self-reliance first, reliance on a
Higher Power was still impossible.
Although we had come a long way, we were still unable to shape our own lives in a
consistently positive manner without a Power to continue to do for us what we could not
do for ourselves.
So we called upon God to remove our shortcomings. When we were finally ready to
do this, many of us chose the Step 7 prayer of the Big Book: "My Creator, I am now willing
that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every
single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and to my
fellows. Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen."
Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make
amends to them all.
Learning to live in harmony with all men and women is a fascinating adventure. It is a
task we may never finish. To accomplish it, we had to repair the damage done in the past
to the best of our ability.
Using our Step 4 inventory, we made a list of all persons we had harmed, subjecting
ourselves to drastic self-appraisal. Our list was often a long one, since we realized that
our character defects - especially our selfishness and anger - had affected most of our
relationships.
The problem now was to determine exactly what harm we had done others. A sort of
generalized apologetic air was nowhere near enough: we had to see exactly how we had
harmed others and how we could set that wrong to rights.
First, we stopped looking at the harm done to us. Regardless of what damage we'd
suffered, we could not change another person. The only sins we could deal with were our
own. So we closed the books on "wrongs done to us" and set out on our journey.
The prospect of amends could be terribly frightening. We could not imagine finding the
courage to tackle some of the things we had done to others. So we simply asked God for
the willingness to do so. We realized that if fear or pride kept us from making amends, we
would go through life avoiding those we had harmed. We knew intuitively that there would
be no real freedom in the future without taking full responsibility for our destructive
behavior in the past.
Asking honestly what types of harm we had done, we considered the physical,
mental, emotional or spiritual damage that we had done to ourselves or others. We had,
for example, been abusive to our mates, blaming them for our own behavior, loading them
with all the responsibility for our family life, and frequently taking out our anger on them.
We had made their lives hell, and they had suffered real and lasting damage. We had
neglected our children, depriving them of our love and care - and of course, they'd
blamed themselves for our failure. And then there was the dreadful damage we'd done to
ourselves, body and soul. Even if we could not imagine how we could possibly make
amends for this sort of terrible injury, we wrote down what we had done, doing our best to
be specific about the injury. Without precise knowledge of what we had done to ourselves
and others, we realized that we had no chance to stop harming ourselves and other
people in the future.
In time we found that our commitment to recovery had moved beyond simple survival
to a higher plane, one born of a sincere desire to right the wrongs we had done during
our active addiction.
Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to
do so would injure them or others.
Step 8 would be meaningless unless we put it into action; it is the preparation for
Step 9 - a plan of action, but not the action itself. And the action had to be carried out,
wherever possible.
In working Step 9 we cleaned up our past to the best of our ability. We did our
honest best to make amends to people we had harmed. We prayed to be freed from the
bondage of self, so we could free others in our lives from the pain our deception had
caused.
The most important amends we made were those that were made face to face. As we
looked at what we had done, it was clear that many on our list had gone on with their lives,
burdened and twisted by the distortions of reality that we had inflicted on them. What we
had to do for them, then, was to relieve them of the guilt that we had loaded on them and
that they had accepted. We'd convinced ourselves and them that the problems had
somehow been their fault - that they could have saved us from ourselves. We had to set
the record straight, for their sakes, but also for ours.
It wasn't always simple. Some people had gone beyond our reach, either through
death or disappearance. Others no longer wanted to hear from us under any
circumstances. In some situations, full disclosure could only bring more harm, and we
could make only partial restitution. In other cases, restitution had to be deferred till the
time was right. And sometimes, we had to accept that we could never make direct amends.
While face-to-face was the best way, there were some people who we could not meet
directly. In such cases, we wrote letters laying out the past frankly and fully and asking for
forgiveness. If we had no way to make amends directly, all we could do was to say an
honest prayer, admitting our wrongs and asking God to set the old wrongs to right on our
behalf - and then we had to let the past go, trusting in the knowledge that we would be
willing to make amends if we could.
In time we found that page 83 of AA's Big Book expresses a great truth:
If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are
half-way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not
regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we
will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our
experience will benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We
will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away.
Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic
insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to
baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong
promptly admitted it.
Once we cleared away the old wreckage as best we could, we focused on clearing
away the current mess, one day at a time. "It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are
disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us." During such a
disturbance, a quick spot check proved to be very helpful. When we felt flooded by anger
or fear, checking our own spiritual condition gave us much-needed perspective. We hung
onto the knowledge that our daily reprieve from suicide addiction was contingent on
maintaining our spiritual lives. We learned that our character defects, outrageous in the
past, continued in milder form, and that we had to recognize them, realize that they were
part of us, and keep them in check. This required our making frequent appraisals of our
shortcomings during the day and then doing our best to set them right as they happened.
Most of us found ourselves setting aside daily times for prayer and meditation to review
the past 24 hours. Where had we been selfish and self-centered? Had we harmed others,
and if so, who, how, and when? But self-examination aside, most of us learned to spend
prayer time simply thanking our Higher Power for the day, its gifts, our accomplishments -
even for our own failures.
In all of this we focused only on our own faults. We learned slowly that our own
actions were the only ones that we could change - that we had always been, and forever
would be powerless over the deeds of others.
Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious
contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will
for us, and the power to carry that out.
By now we were convinced that spiritual reliance upon God was necessary for our
relationships with others, at work and at home, and for all our daily endeavors. Therefore
we found ourselves increasingly praying for God's guidance in all matters, big and little,
spiritual and worldly.
We came to need prayer as much as we need food and water, for prayer sustained
our very souls. Without it we suffered. The only requirements for our prayers were
unselfishness and sincerity. We wanted to become channels of God's will, not our own will.
In order to become channels of God's will we had to keep our own wills out of the way. To
this end we stopped praying for specific answers to specific problems. "Thy will, not mine,
be done." became the basis for our prayers and conscious contact with God. Saying this
prayer enabled us to clear a channel choked up with selfishness, self-centeredness,
anger or simple misunderstanding. Using it more and more frequently during each day, we
learned the power of prayer in all situations and in all circumstances.
After prayer comes meditation. Once we talked to God, we must listen carefully for
answers. Setting aside time each morning, we reflect upon the upcoming day, we read
favorite meditation passages, and we made ourselves be still in God's presence, listening
for His word. We found, curiously, the more we sensed God's guidance, the less we
seemed to need to make demands upon God. Asking (or secretly desiring) for
thus-and-such to happen, we learned, only served to distort God's message. Prayer isn't
a matter of making requests or bargaining for specific outcomes, and the more we learned
to pray, the more we came to rely on God's will, not on what we wanted to see happen.
But when we were clear and open channels, focused solely on knowledge of God's
will for us, intuitions came to us during these times of meditation and throughout each
day. A word from another person, a thought popping into our minds, an idea for action
emerging as we worked on our problems - all were likely to be knowledge of His will for us.
The more open our channels, the more frequent the answers.
In time, we realized that "we intuitively knew how to handle situations that used to
baffle us."
Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried
to carry this message to those who still suffer and to practice these principles in
all our affairs.
In Step 12 we reached out to fellow suicide addicts still in distress. In so doing we
asked no reward for ourselves. Having worked all the steps, we found ourselves deeply
involved in a new state of consciousness, an awareness that life is full of meaning after
all, and that it is both a responsibility and a joy to spread that understanding to others.
We found ourselves fully, delightedly aware that we had been given a great gift: a
second chance at life. Looking at newcomers who still doubted themselves, we could
remember having been were they were now and really see the change in ourselves.
This brought us to the second part of Step 12: carrying the message. We learned that we
had to give it away in order to keep it. And who better to give it away to than fellow
suffering suicide addicts?
We attended Suicide Anonymous meetings and listened, providing support by our
very presence. WE talked when our turn came; we chaired meetings, organized eating
meetings, and signed up for the phone list. When ready, we sponsored others in Suicide
Anonymous. Here we experienced the kind of giving that asks no reward. Paradoxically,
we found no greater satisfaction and no greater joy than that which we received in our
selfless giving to others.
But could we actually carry the Suicide Anonymous spirit into our daily work? We
discovered a wonderful feeling that we did not have to be seen as special or distinguished
among our fellows in order to be useful and happy. We no longer needed to dominate
those around us in order to bolster our sense of self-importance. Our goal was to live
usefully and walk humbly with God. As long as we practiced the principles of these steps,
we attained our goal - one day at a time.
© 1stBooks; Bloomington, IN; Seduction of Suicide Understanding and Recovering From
Addiction to Suicide; Kevin Taylor, M.D.
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