10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

A recent post reminded me of what it was like in those very early days of AA. The massive contrast between my lonely existence pre AA and the warm and friendly environment I found in the rooms is one of my strongest memories.

I met people with weeks, months and sometimes years of sobriety. Even the person who was sober just a few weeks was amazing to me.

My head wasnt functioning too well. Not only in the emotional sense, I was more or less running on instinct, but also in terms of logic and reasoning. Here are some examples:
You go to treatment (hospital) you must come out cured!
Everyone in AA is just so wonderful and well motivated!
To recover requires rigorous honesty so all in AA with more than a few weeks sobriety must be rigorously honest!

I had my own concept of right and wrong. I stopped doing a lot of the wrong things and began pursuing what I thought was right, only to find later that that was wrong as well!

One suggestion that I followed was to get a sponsor and I remember him informing me that all in AA is not as it seems. Subsequent experience has shown me that  people come to AA for different reasons. Many are recovered alcoholics trying to pass on what they have to others, many are alcoholics on the path to recovery, trying to help others in order to help themselves (the selfish motive behind the program), then there were some with a range of motives seeing AA as a means to overcome loneliness, as a source of entertainment and drama, as a cure for some other outside issue, and of course as a lonely hearts club. Not to mention sexual predators of both sexes. All in all a pretty good reflection of society as a whole.

So how was a little innocent like me to be kept safe? Funnily enough I was attracted to the well ones and sought out and acted on their suggestions, which involved working the steps, prayer and getting a sponsor. My number one priority was to get sober and stay that way for good.

But those instincts were also driving me, security, sex and so forth, and disregarding all advice to the contrary (as I know you guys would never do) I spent a lot of time pursuing what I thought were the right solutions to my other needs. No human power could keep me safe in this respect, because I thought I was on the right track.

God kept me unharmed. For my alcoholism I was working through the steps and had learned about step 10, putting right any new mistakes as we go along. I was making plenty of mistakes but how else was I to learn. Putting sobriety first  meant each time I made a mess of things I had to put it right immediately, and I learned from the experience. I experienced a lot of pain in this process, growing pain, but I didnt have to drink over it.

Steps 4-9 were all concerned with the past, clearing the wreckage, but even in those early days I could see the logic in step 10 having cleaned up the big mess of the past, dont create a new one by letting unresolved mistakes pile up.

God bless

Mike H.