Christmas has come and gone this year. At my house, it’s all over but the mess.  We need to put away our gifts, take down decorations, disassemble the tree and return it to storage.

My sobriety date, sometimes referred to as an AA birthday or anniversary, is December 23rd. I barely remember my first clean and sober Christmas. But I vividly recall my life was a mess in early recovery. Facing the consequences of my drinking and drugging while attempting to understand how the program worked overwhelmed me.

At meetings I heard, “This is a simple program for complicated people.”

My sponsor told me about Dr. Bob, one of the co-founders of AA who sponsored over 5,000 people in his lifetime, and his prescription for a miracle:

TRUST GOD, CLEAN HOUSE, HELP OTHERS

Steps 1-3 are “Trust God”:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - 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.

Steps 4-10 are “Clean House”:

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.<!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–>
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Steps 11-12 are “Help Others”:

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 the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Working the 12 Steps with my sponsor helped me clean up the wreckage of my past.

Like with recovery, once the Christmas mess is sorted out and cleaned up, my house will be easier to maintain.

Recovery Rocks!

Roxie

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