Compelled to Control by J. Keith Miller

Author:J. Keith Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Health Communications Inc
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Step 11:

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and for the power to carry that out.

Having come this far in the 12-Step process, we have improved our ability to be intimate with others and with ourselves. Through increasingly intimate and threatening self-revelations, we have confronted our shame voices and begun to free ourselves from their control. Whereas we had been convinced that such revelations would destroy us with shame, now we have seen shame’s biggest lie: that “keeping everything secret is our strength and security, so we must not share deeply.” We have moved from Tournier’s first step in becoming a functional person—that of being able to keep secrets—to the second step—that of choosing to tell our secrets in a safe, appropriate atmosphere.

The experience of going to meetings, sharing with sponsors and others in recovery and working the Steps gives us an increasing awareness that all kinds of shameful secrets lose their power over us when we share them. As the shame voices lose their domination over us, our authentic inner Person gains confidence and strength to risk expressing its secrets, dreams and hopes (as well as the shameful facts about our past and present) with others in the program.

At this point many begin to experience a longing to share freely with people who are not in a 12-Step program. After a few unproductive or painful attempts, a new problem becomes apparent.

Sue speaks of this common problem voiced by many people in recovery.

I found that it was one thing to be intimate with people in 12-Step meetings, but it was vastly more difficult to feel secure enough to go back to my marriage and my other painful relationships and to share honestly and vulnerably there from within my Person. I had all this freedom, this new power, and I wanted to express it in all aspects of my life, but it was pretty scary.

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