Going through the Steps, I think, is about looking at things plainly and simply. Understanding what the authors of the book were plainly saying, using the ordinary words they were using. In Step Four, getting to the facts of what I am ‘up to’ when acting in self-will. Getting to the nub of the harm in Step Eight. The truth is always plain and simple.
The process of getting to that simplicity is often laborious, with lots of back and forth, repeated challenges, going round in circles, as I am unable to see the thing my sponsor wants me to see. It is infuriating, exasperating, bewildering, aggravating, annoying, and embarrassing. Progress seems to be slow. The work seems abstract or academic or theoretical. I start to wonder: Why can’t I just keep it simple?
Many years ago, in the midst of the Steps, my sponsor returned, I think, around a dozen attempts to write a Step Eight, each time apparently ignoring the reams of nuanced material I was sending, saying, “What’s the harm?”
Another time, I wrote a four- or five-thousand-word message to my sponsor, drafted in an MS Word document (just to make sure I was getting it right, so he would ‘understand me’ and ‘where I was coming from’). I can’t remember what the response was, if any. I can’t imagine he read it beyond the first couple of lines.
The complexity lies not in the steps, the Big Book, the process of the work, or the ideas that a sponsor is presenting to me. The complexity lies in the morass of muddy thinking, the unthinking and uncritical use of words, the slipperiness and evasiveness I engage in—within myself and in communication with others—when I try to examine my beliefs, thinking, behaviour, and motivations; it lies in the inability to read what people are actually writing, to hear what people are actually saying, to understand what people really mean based on their actual words; it lies in the layers of self-justification and self-deception, the word-castle of self-will I have built in the sky and moved into.
The ostensibly ‘simple’ approach: merely to accept my first response or answer to a passage in the book or a question in the Steps, to flag everything through the gate unchallenged, is neither simple nor complicated: it is nothing; it is merely a lack of reflection, a rubber stamp, a verbal burp. The point of doing the work in the programme is not to get a Scoobie snack and be told that everything is just fine and dandy: it is precisely to challenge and look until I see through until what I see is the truth.