In keeping with this Month’s Step 7 topic. I would like to discuss the topic of humility.
For the longest time for me I associated humility with being humiliated.
In the active addiction I was humiliated daily. Each morning, I woke up embarrassed of how much I drank the night before, what I said or didn’t say the night before, how I acted, my behaviors. You name it I regretted it. Family members making remarks about last night often I had no recollection of whatsoever. Not to mention I was constantly humiliated by how I said never again only to repeat the insanity again and again. I lived in that perpetual state of humiliation.
As always, I looked to define these terms to shed more light. Here’s what my search found.
Humility is a voluntary state of being grounded or self-awareness. The lack of arrogance, thinking of yourself as less.
Humiliation is involuntary an external often painful experience of shame, sometimes publicly at times resulting in feelings of being reduced or devalued.
Humiliation tends to be a painful way to crush the ego, a passive state. While humility is an active choice, letting go of one’s self-centeredness to seek a higher power of openness to change.
Humility is not thinking less of yourself but it’s thinking of yourself less.
Funny to me how common definitions often align with AA principles.
What a beautiful thought, humility really is. Not to mention it’s an active state, isn’t that what we are all striving for to be active in our recovery?
Coming to AA and learning, doing the steps, the program, going to meetings teaches you humility but never humiliates you. The Twelve/ Twelve pg. 76 states, ” The seventh step is where we make the change in our attitude which permits us, with humility as our guide to move out from ourselves toward others and toward God. The whole emphasis of Step Seven is on humility. It is really saying to us that we now ought to be willing to try humility in seeking the removal of our other shortcomings just as we did when we admitted we were powerless over alcohol and came to believe a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. If that degree of humility could enable us to find the grace by which such a deadly obsession could be banished, then there must be hope in the same result respecting any other problem we could possibly have. ”
I now try to seek humility daily.