Step Seven

There's a lunchtime Step meeting in Covent Garden Thursday about half a mile from where I work. I go there about two weeks out of four, stay for about forty minutes and get back to the office before the lunch hour is up. It's like a lot of meetings: the usual suspects say much the same things, which is okay if they're a good act but not if they have chips on their shoulders, and occasionally someone shares something honest and emotional that reminds me why I go to meetings. I don't say much and a lot of the time I doze a little – I wake up before six in the morning for god's sake.

It was Step Seven - “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings” - and the speaker said a couple of things that grabbed my attention. The first was that he regarded it as a Step to take every day, not just the once. The moment he said so, it made immediate sense: having a whole heap of shortcomings, it would be a good idea to remind myself to leave them behind every morning, to remind myself of what they are and to watch out for them being triggered. I'd always thought of Step Seven as a one-time thing that worked out over a while, rather as Steps Four and Five do, but I'd never been entirely convinced. The idea that I remind myself every day of the “stuff” that's still lurking deep inside, masquerading as “who I am”, and so reminded reduce the odds of tripping up over it during the day, well, that's a good one.

The second thing he said was about being “right-sized”, a term of (Recovery) art that means we have abandoned grandiose and inflated ideas of ourselves, what we're entitled to, what we can expect by way of treatment from others and other unrealistic ideas that often compensate for being slagged off for no reason when we were younger. Needless to say, for most alcoholics, getting right-sized is mostly an exercise in reduction and (gentle) deflation. Not for all of us, and not in every aspect of ourselves. We may be under-valuing our abilities and character in some things, and so, for instance, being underpaid because we don't ask for what we're really worth on the market. Thinking too little of yourself is as “wrong-sizing” as thinking too much. Getting right-sized means getting a realistic view of ourselves, and being down on ourselves is a shortcoming as much as being grandiose. So if I can sort out what opinions I have as a compensation mechanism and what I have because certain people important to me behaved like I'd never amount to anything, and correct both, I'm on my way. And that is Step Seven – every day because that stuff is buried deep.