Let Go and Be Free Podcast: Episode 46 (Exploring Step 7 of the Twelve Steps of Adult Children of Alcoholics)

In today's episode, I discuss the seventh step from Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families World Service Organization's 12 Steps.

Step 7: Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

I know that this step, that mentions "God", might be offputting to many people, so I wanted to share this article:

There is a lot that we can learn from step 7 as it's the point at which we are willing to admit that we need hep from others. Expressing vulnerability is not easy, so let's dive right in and discuss step 7 from a different perspective.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Let Go and Be Free podcast, a podcast for those who grew up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional family. I'm your host, Ron Vitale, author of the Let Go and Be Free: 100 Daily Reflections for Adult Children of Alcoholics series. If you'd like to learn more, feel free to visit, letgoandbefree.com. And with that, let's get on with the show.

Hello, and welcome to this week’s show. I wanted to focus on a review, and a discussion of step seven of the 12 steps, adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families 12 steps. So to start off, I guess, if you're new to this podcast, I recommend that you go back and listen to the previous episodes, which we've gone through the first six steps. And for this episode we're going to discuss again, Step seven. And Step seven is also a bit of a doozy that can be a bit challenging for some people. So Step seven is a read it twice, humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.

So again, I'll read that humbly asked God, to remove our shortcomings. Now, if you are new to this podcast, I do want to point out that I have gone through the various interpretations and discussed the seven steps from a point of view in which if you do not believe in God, there is lots of room, in my personal opinion for the 12 steps in which you do not have to have the word God in the steps like if you personally do not believe in God, I don't think that that's necessarily a barrier for you from getting help in going through the 12 steps. And you might say, Well, isn't that, you know, the purpose of these steps is to focus with a higher power and focus on God. Yes, there is an interpretation for that.

But I've also seen other interpretations, which basically say, you can remove the word God, and you could use something more generic, such as higher power, or you could use something like the universe or reality. You don't necessarily have to focus on God. In this particular step, it is a little bit more challenging, because again, you're asking someone outside of yourself to remove your shortcomings.

And that might seem really paradoxical. Like, wait a minute, you're saying one thing, no God, and then you're saying another and you're reading the step? And you're have to ask some other spiritual higher being to save you. Like, I don't get that that doesn't make any sense. And I hear you on that. And I wanted to break down and interpretation. And one thing that I found in some research, and something that I'm going to put in the show notes, is, there is an article that I came across that is see the title of it here, the 12 steps for atheists, atheists, it's not necessarily the God you think.

So that article, I will post in the show notes for this episode. And just give a little bit of breakdown of what I've learned from this, and from other interpretations that I've read, you know, over the last so many decades that I've been following the 12 steps is that when you look at the word God, one interpretation is that, as someone who grew up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional family, we take on the hyper responsible role, you know, especially if that was our comfort level of the world falling apart, you know, around you, and you found that your quote, unquote, superpower is to come in and save the day. You know, you're the hero that's going to fix everything that's broken, and the world's falling apart. You're going to hold it all together, through sure we're sure we'll creativity pulling your bootstraps up, whatever you need to do, you're going to make it happen.

And you pride yourself on that, that you're just like, Yes, I did all these great things. I saved all these things. And unfortunately, when you were young, that may have worked really well for you, where you were able to, you know, survive and get through the challenges is that as you got older, you found that that way of acting is not necessarily very effective for you. You can't go around and save other people, you can't save family members, you can't save a spouse, you know, you're only responsible for yourself. So in one level, if we think about things from the 12 step perspective, often, many of us treated ourselves acted as though we were God, we were the ones that were saved the day, we will come in and fix whatever needs to be fixed, when you know, let's say an alcoholic parent would come in off, you know, drinking spree and be a mess, you know, you were the one that would come in and clean things up and help and do everything you could to make sure that the household or your siblings were okay. And again, in, you know, in the past that may have served you well, because you needed to find a way to survive an unhealthy environment, a dysfunctional environment.

But the challenge is, that may not be helping you today, you can't save other people, you can't turn around and say, Well, you know, what I'm going to, you know, fix my spouse, or save my kid or whatever, you don't just put in a person's name there. And I think, if we're all honest with ourselves, those of us who grew up in an alcoholic family, there is that part of, we wanted to fix things, we wanted things to be right, we wanted things to go, quote, unquote, normal. And the only way we knew how to do that was to fill in a gap of void in which our parent or parents may not have been there for us, either emotionally, or physically, or psychologically, or whatever, they could have been too wrapped up in their own struggles with addiction. And, you know, it is not necessarily just one parent, it could be, maybe one of your parents struggled with addiction. And then the other parent was so wrapped up in trying to, you know, save the rest of the family, that their entire energy was trying to take care of their spouse and save that person. Whereas, maybe you were not receiving the emotional care and concern that you needed as a kid, or your siblings dealt with the same thing.

And so you grew up, essentially not having, you know, parents that would help guide you and teach you healthy ways of conflict resolution, problem solving, you know, simple things that we find extremely difficult. So, getting back to this step, it can be a bit of a challenge. And looking at it and saying, Wow, this is kind of weird, like, I'm going to humbly ask God to remove, you know, my shortcomings, what does that mean? breaking it apart, what I've always liked to do is, for me, in looking at this step, I look at it as I realized that I need help, that I can't solve everything in my life.

Without help, I need an interaction with people, with places with experiences, I cannot, like wall myself off from the world and be like, You know what, I'm not going to learn anything, I'm not gonna grow, I'm gonna grin and bear it, and I'm just gonna solve all these problems, and everything's gonna be great. That does not work. It might seem to work for a short amount of time. But then what happens is, when life does throw a couple curveballs at you, it's, you know, these coping mechanisms, which we think we have to be able to resolve problems really aren't that helpful, you know, at the end of the day, and what is helpful is, again, working with a network, having a toolkit of help, I've said this before, and I'll say it again, it's really important to have a couple close friends in your life that you can trust, who will not judge you for things that you say things that you feel that you're able to talk with them.

This could also translate into maybe you have a therapist that you've gone to over the course of, you know, the last so many years, or maybe you go on a weekly basis to the adult children of alcoholics meetings, and you find that to be of help. The purpose in my opinion of the step and again, this is my personal interpretation. You might hear other interpretations held by different groups, different people. I'm just giving what has worked for me. When I look at this, and it says humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. I look at it as there is some One, there is something beyond myself, that I need help to be able to overcome my shortcomings. And that might be learning new skills through a therapist, it might be, again, going to those a COA meetings, it's not just me pretending that I'm quote unquote, God, and then I can solve all my problems, and everything is great. And I don't need any help and get away from me, I'm fine. That type of mentality, that, that blindness essentially allows us to stay trapped in an environment of dysfunction.

So in, you know, contemporary America, it is seen as weakness to admit vulnerability. However, I would pause it and say that, in the right circumstances, meaning with those people that you trust, it is important to build intimacy, and strengthen relationships, to share a vulnerable part of yourself and say, internally, like, I need to find a way to overcome some problems that I have, how do I do that. And instead of thinking that, you know, everything, that you can solve everything on your own, you can then flip that around and say, you know, what, I do need help, I need to learn a better way, instead of doing everything the way I have been.

And that's not getting me to where I want to be in life. I need to find other skills, other tools, other ways of communicating. And I think the challenge with this is that, you know, there are so many ingrained behaviors, you know, just just imagine yourself in an argument with someone, typically, you will react a certain way. It's like the fight or flight, depending on, you know, whatever you grew up with, you might have just withdrawn and deny that there's any issue and don't want to talk about something, close off your feelings and be like, you know, what, I'm done with this, and run away, or shut yourself down. So even if the person is in the room with you, you're so shut down, that you're not even willing to listen, to come to the table to be able to discuss an issue or a problem. Or on the other hand, you may have just your instinct is, you know, put on a strong defense, and you lash out, yell back, fight, you know, fight or flight flight.

And so your instinct is, well, I'm going to bolster myself up, make myself loud, and I'm going to, you know, put this fake facade around me that nobody can get through my armor. Because I want to make certain that nobody hurts me, even though I am going through some difficult times, I'm going to focus on being external, and take my anger and shove it out there. And that's going to be this force field around me. Both options for problem solving, are not helpful. They may have allowed you to survive and cope through difficult times. But how often did they actually solve a problem, you can't bend someone's will, to your own, you know, through whatever anger or withdrawal mean trying to where someone down. True communication comes through listening, conversation, empathy, compromise, and love.

And that can be really difficult because those of us who grew up in alcoholic and dysfunctional families, we may have only seen the screaming the yelling, the slamming of doors, fistfights you know, overturned tables and chairs, the someone storms out and never comes back.

Or storms out comes back later. And there's no resolution to the conflict. It's just ignored. It's buried. It's like, you know, you're just supposed to pretend that the difficult argument didn't happen, and get back into the normal thing of things. Or someone just gives you you know, just real fake, I'm sorry. And then expect everything's supposed to go back to normal again, those challenges, because all of us are going to have issues in life. No matter if we're at work in our relationships, friendships, siblings, if we're married in dating, it doesn't matter. We're going to have challenges that come up in our lives. And if we're not But, I guess skilled and effective ways of communicating and effective ways of labeling internally and understanding what is a healthy behavior and what is dysfunctional, that's going to get us into all sorts of trouble. You know, so with this step seven, humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. It could simply be humbly ask reality, or humbly ask, you know, others, to help us remove our shortcomings.

And that doesn't mean that they're going to come in, and you do no work. You know, you don't come in and be like, oh, please save me I'm, you know, broken, and I need to be helped. You know, I don't see this step that way. My interpretation is, you're willing to do the work, you're willing to learn. And basically, unlearn unhealthy behaviors and replace them with healthier behaviors. So that way, when you get into an argument, or dealing with money, or discussions of losing one's job, like whatever life throws at you, you then have the means to be able to effectively handle those problems, instead of reverting back into the dysfunction, dysfunctional patterns that you've learned when you were a kid. Or you might still be in that mode, and you're still living in those situations, just perpetuating an unhealthy environment, dysfunctional environment. And that might be extremely frustrating. Because you might want to change, you might want to do something from a different perspective, but you don't know how, or you don't know where to go to, or, you know, it's not, it's not something that many people don't talk about these kind of problems, you're just supposed to magically know how to solve these things. You know, especially, you know, me living in America.

Like I said earlier, it's not popular, to say, I need help, or I'm not sure how to solve this problem, or to say, you know, I'm going to start therapy, or I'm going to, you know, go to a COA meetings, the good news is, you know, in the last, I'd say, My journey has been close to more than 25 years at this point. On that journey, I do see that there has been a change and a shift in which therapy going to therapy isn't seen as the oh, there's something wrong with you, you know, people would used to label you as like, what are you crazy? You know, I had family members that would say things like that, you know, to me, what are you going to go go to a head shrink, like, I mean, just horrible things to say. And in reality, what you were trying to do is, you're trying to find a way to help solve your own problems and become a better person.

So that way, when I mean better, better at solving problems better at handling anxiety, worry, stress, instead of replicating dysfunctional behaviors, learning ways of processing one's emotion, in a healthy way, and then emulating healthy behaviors as you go through your life. And that's something that if you never learned any of that, growing up as a kid, where you were in a family where no one talked about feelings, or people would blow up, you know, and then nothing would ever be set again. And you'd be walking around like, I don't know what just happened.

Why did that happen? Did this get solved? They're all talking normal again, but they were just screaming at each other a couple hours ago, what the heck does happen? What do I do? How do I feel like in going through all those things, you know, in, in life, as you're going through, and you're looking at this step, my recommendation is to remember, we're not chronologically, you know, going through step one through 12. And, you know, I've said this before, you don't finish step one, and check it off on a list. And then suddenly, you're in the second second step. And then you, you say, well moved through second on the third, and now we're up to seven.

That's wonderful. It's really important to kind of look back and reflect and see the interconnectedness of an earlier step with this step. So for example, even if we just take a simple step back and look at, you know, step six, we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character and then seven, humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings. You can look at those and be like, okay, at one point, I made this inventory of like things about my behavior, and how I am as a person that I would like to change these quote unquote defects of character Now I'm ready to learn and to grow. And I want to go beyond these things. That's, you know, the sixth step. The seventh is, hey, I need help in doing this. Can somebody help me do this is a therapist? Is it an ACOA meeting? Is it a combination of reading self help books, doing daily journals and a therapist, I can't say what that is for you. I can only say that, for me, it was a multi prong process, you know, of like, all these different things that I worked together, wove them, you know, they were woven into this thread of help and networking support for me that I was able to use over time. It's not something where I just was like, Well, that was easy. And then, you know, just look back and onward and upward and never have to deal with that, again, that's not been my journey. journey has been, I have found that when I'm in times of stress, my natural instinct is to fall back on to dysfunctional behaviors.

And I need to catch myself in that sometimes I don't, sometimes I fall and be like, Wow, I just said that. And that was really dumb. And then I have to kind of own up to that, and say, You know what, I apologize for that, go up to the person and apologize and explain this is what I'm going to do moving forward. This is how I'm going to, you know, work on this behavior of mine. This is how I, I'm going to put my word in asking for your forgiveness. But I'm not going to then ignore and be like, well, I said, I'm sorry. And so I can keep going on. And being the way I've always been, that's not the point of the 12 steps. 12 steps, you know, in my opinion, are about growth, it's about learning things about yourself some things that are uncomfortable, some things that you don't necessarily want to admit, you know, to the world. But in the course of again, with therapist, or in the ACOA meetings, or in your own journals, you could write about talk about these things, share these things, from a perspective in which there will be growth, and then you can learn.

And then over time, you find ways of like, hey, you know what, every time I get into this type of situation, I've always done X, we'll just use an example. Anytime I get into a difficult argument, I shut down and close off and withdraw, and put up my mind for shields my armor, so no one can get through to me. And I find that I do that, because I had to do that, to protect myself when I was a kid. But now I realized that if I do that, it's not going to help me solve this problem with this person. I'm open to a new way, I need help in learning. What are better ways of doing that?

You see how that shift, it's like a subtle shift. It's not saying I'm broken, and the world needs to save me it's, I can see that time and time and time again, I keep using the same dysfunctional behaviors, in circumstances when I'm under stress. But I'm willing to learn something new, I'm willing to try a different way. I'm willing to share my experience of like, why I've acted that way in the past, and how I want to do something different moving forward. That's a much different, you know, perspective, then I'm going to save everybody, I'm going to do what I've always done because it's always worked. And that's, you know, I think that's the work, the hard work of these steps is, you know, in the dark of night, when you're by yourself, and it's just you, what do you really think about yourself?

What do you really think about some of these dysfunctional behaviors? Why aren't they have you identified these defects of character you really gone through and done that moral inventory, that's step four, you know, talks about, and that's something that I look at these steps as a guide, on my every day for the rest of my life, that there's time for me to look back to reflect on these steps, read through them, think about them, process them, talk about them, write about them. And then they're like my, my checkpoint guide as I go through life, you know, like, if I'm driving in the car, and there's these, you know, the lines on the road, when I start veering off, you know, the lines with the little divots in the road started making that bump sound as you drive over them.

You're like, oh, you know what, I need to auto correct here. I need to correct and steer a little bit differently, because I'm going into a dangerous zone. I see the steps is way of doing that, that allow us to do that self reflection on a daily, you know, meditation to be able to say, well, today I'm going to reflect on whatever step one, and then as you go through the process Maybe you want to reflect on step one for three days in a row, or a week, I can't tell you what's going to work for you, you know, maybe you might say, You know what, for the first time, this is what I'm going to do. Over the next 12 days, I'm going to take a step, and I'm going to write about it in my personal journal, and reflect on that and do some self work of what I think about that each day for 12 days, you might decide that, or you might decide, you're going to take your time, and you want to spend three, four days at a time on each step really kind of think about things.

And you might modulate things differently depending on what the step means to you. And I will say this, as I've gotten older, there are certain steps which I thought, you know, I had thoroughly gone through now that I'm older, I look at them from a different perspective and say, I've learned something here, something that I think I can, I can look at from a different perspective. So though these words might seem simplistic, as I've said before, words have power. And power, in my mind means action, they allow us to think, and then we can say, What am I going to do differently moving forward? How am I going to grow? How's that process possible?

And again, if you believe in God, and God has mentioned in one of the 12 steps, awesome, if you don't, you could take the word God out. There still, these precepts, these steps, still have some extremely useful information, because they help us with self reflection, help us understand and process, what are we feeling? What are we thinking about what we've lived through? And how are we going to move forward? How are we going to get the car to veer back in the right direction? That's what I see the steps are there a guide a daily guide? They're not a miracle cure. They're not something that only do these things, and you'll magically be cured. No, that's not it. There are guide.

And there are many other guides in life many other ways. There's meditation visualization techniques, there's journal writing therapy, an ACOA meeting, you can go on and on and on and on. I'm saying that I have found these 12 steps to be helpful as I go through my life. And each day, before I get out of bed, I kind of run through them, think about them. And when I get into a difficult circumstance, I focus on them and what one might be of best use for me at that particular time. So as we're getting through these steps, I recommend, you know, they've, they're all previous episodes, now we're up to step seven, go back, listen to some of the other steps, you might say, Oh, I really thought I had really worked out step one or step two, listen to it again. You know, you could bookmark these, you can listen to them to your heart's content. As long as they're up on this earth, you can listen to them on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google Amazon, through my website, wherever they're there, and they're free. So I do hope that this information, these podcasts have been of use for you and helpful.

If you want to learn more, just visit let go and be free.com. There's a bunch of resources there a bunch of links to my books that I've written, all kinds of stuff that are there. And then I ask again, if you find value out of these please rate you know, give a positive rating for the podcast on whatever podcast platform that you listen to Spotify or Apple, Google wherever the more people rate and like the podcast, the more than others will be able to find this podcast when they do their searches on the various you know, search engines in the world. So again, thank you sincerely for all that you've done in listening to me and being willing to be open minded, and I hope that this resource will be of great use to you. So hope you have a great day. And as always, be well.

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