Aug 19: Accountability is Sustainability

Accountability is Sustainability

Step 5 -Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

The first five steps barreled into my life all together like a ton of bricks. Step 5 was my turning point! I had tried to be honest with my husband after drinking and his begging me to stop (for years)…not good enough….I tried to be honest with myself and my failed attempts to be sober…not enough and in fact after really trying to stop and repeatedly failing, I was getting worse because my conscious was telling me I was a failure in every respect. I couldn’t do it alone. I’ve been a Catholic my entire life and had fallen away from church, prayer or anything spiritual. It was all fake. One day I cried and finally cried out and asked God to help me. I was powerless and drinking was going to take everything I held dear away. By listening to what I needed, to seek God’s help in order to be open and honest to another human being about my life, my choices and who I had become and how this has happened, came the grace I so desperately sought. I would never have fathomed the questions or the answers which poured out. All of the terrible things I had done and said, the lies, the pain I had caused others. After it was over it was like the entire AA program, made complete sense.

It was an ever so slight shift in thinking and a decision to never want to go through that pain again. My honest words leaving my mouth somehow made things seem real for the first time. It was like being set free from a prison. I found that I could do the work needed to accomplish being sober. I recognize that God is humble and never comes if first not invited, but God will find a clever way to get invited. And so it truly began.

A book I recently read said you cannot heal what you don’t acknowledge and what you do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control of you from within. We must work through our fear, our stinking thinking, guilt, to get to the powerful steps of AA in order to be the women we were meant to be. Step 5 gives a clear structure of recognizing that accountability is sustainability. How do you keep yourself accountable in order to sustain your sobriety?