“Continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear. When these crop up, we ask God at once to remove them.” (Page 84, Big Book)
Step Ten suggests that I block such thoughts and behaviours
when the temptation arises.
To give in to such thoughts and behaviours, to allow them to
flourish, and then to write an extensive analysis is not the practice of Step
Ten. It is self-indulgence masked as spiritual work. It is like accidentally
touching a hot dish, burning yourself slightly, and, rather than retracting
your hand, holding onto the dish with both hands in order really to feel the
pain until the burn is so bad that you have to haul yourself off to accident
and emergency. I did this for years, thinking I was ‘working Step Ten’, and
wondering why things were not getting any better.
Most of my emotional distress is self-indulgence, and
ongoing inventory should not be used to amplify the self-indulgence through
wordy elaborations of the emotions and the underlying ‘reasons’, especially not
with the dramatising, self-victimising buzzwords of abandonment, low
self-worth, not being heard, not being seen, and other dramatic but
uninformative warpaint.
Why am I distressed, ever? Because I haven’t got my own way!
The nature of the way is neither here nor there. Trash goes in the big black
bin bag. All I need to know is what constitutes trash. What constitutes trash?
My demands!
Inventory also must not be used as a way of condemning
others for being at fault (they’re usually not at fault: I’m the one at fault
for insisting that they instantly meet my unreasonable and unrealistic
demands), especially when I’m recounting situations to third parties. What I’m
really doing in such recounting is gossiping, carrying tales, and garnering
sympathy or recruiting allies. Since ‘sick’ means something derogatory these
days, I have substituted the word ‘innocent’ into the page 67 prayer. ‘This is
an innocent person. …’
What should one do instead?
Ask God to remove it, which means redirecting my attention
to something else and getting on with that.
If I fail, and indulge the negative thinking, any examination in the nightly review concerns the fact of my indulging in such thinking, not the apparent ‘content’.