White Light

We finally met about the 12th step yesterday in our Step Group. It's been an amazingly powerfully healing journey. I look at the growth in the 4 women around me and I know I'm growing too. Getting ready to meet, I rediscovered a tool just when I needed it. I've been spinning for days and not realizing why. I'm finding that my feelings are a barometer for how my partner is doing. She's been working through something major and hadn't been ready to share it with me. My codie powers picked up that something was wrong, but the powers are a bit warped, so how it gets interpreted in my brain is that something must be wrong with me. Anyway, once I used this 12 step tool, I was able to get myself much better centered. And then, not so coincidentally, as soon as I felt more centered, my partner felt able to share what's been going on inside her. Wow! Yet again, it works when I work it.

Here's the tool, modified from from The 12 Steps- A Way Out.

Write a clear concise statement about a situation or condition that's really bothering you and bringing up big feelings (resentment, fear, sadness, or anger.) Then apply the principles of all 12 steps to work through the situation.

Step 1: Write about how this situation is demonstrating your powerlessness and your life's unmanageability.

Step 2: Ask yourself how your higher power can restore you to sanity. My response was that my higher power could help me focus on me.

Step 3: Write an affirmation about how you're now choosing to turn the situation over to your higher power. (Mine was "I now decide to turn my frustration and anxiety over to God.")

Step 4: Write down what character defects are surfacing. For me, it was control and fear of abandonment.

Step 5: Admit your wrongs to God, to yourself, and to another person. I used the exercize the book taught us in Step 5. First, I looked in the mirror and said it out loud to me. Then, I virtually, put God in a chair and said it out loud to God. Then, I told my partner.

Step 6: Write about your willingness or lack thereof to have God remove the character defects that have surfaced. I wrote that I am willing because I do want to stop spinning in response to her feelings and actions.

Step 7: Write a prayer humbly asking God to remove the shortcomings you just identified. Here's mine: God, please help me to keep the focus on me and to take care of myself. Help me to give A time and space to work through her own stuff.

Step 8: Make a list of those you've harmed. Mine was me and A.

Step 9: Describe how you intend to make the amend. What I wrote was that I needed to tell her that I've been getting all enmeshed again. When I told her and showed her my work, she said that she thought that I was supposed to actually amend something. Hmm. Guess I'm working on that living amends thing of changing my behavior.

Step 10: Look back over your work and see if anything else surfaces.

Step 11: Pray or meditate and then write about your higher power's will for you in this situation. I wrote that God wants me to have peace.

Step 12: Write about whether you sensed a spiritual awakening and your understanding of who's in charge, you or God. The book suggests that good indicators of who you see in charge are your attitude and emotions. I wrote that I did sense a spiritual awakening and that God is in charge, because I'm calmer and more focused on me.

This was such a powerful exercize for me. I want to make a little card to carry around with the book's version of this exercize. I'd like to try to remember to practice these principles in all my affairs. This, for me, was a very concrete way of doing that.