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Key points
- Maintaining the benefits of recovery is not easy. They can be lost without ongoing attention to the steps.
- A.A.'s tenth step suggests a way of life that keeps the previous steps energized and vital.
- Step 10 embeds the psychological growth and skills gained from recovery into daily life.
Newcomers to Twelve-Step recovery often mistakenly look forward to completing the steps. Eventually, they learn that no one completes the steps.
This would be like thinking you can complete exercising. As soon as exercising stops, your strength and flexibility begin fading. The same is true for recovery. Stop working the steps and recovery begins fading.
The final, three steps, 10 to 12, provide an ongoing path designed to maintain the benefits flowing from working steps one through nine, deepening recovery’s impact on your basic character, and then expanding core changes throughout all aspects of life.
In this series on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, I want to stress that I am not speaking on behalf of A.A. There are many ways to understand the meaning and implications of each step[i].
What follows is only one perspective on step 10 filtered through my experience as an addiction psychiatrist. My goal is to offer thoughts on the psychological depth contained in A.A.’s twelve-step approach to recovery from addiction.
Step 10 reads: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
After having struggled through Step Four’s moral inventory of yourself and having faced the vulnerability of Step Five’s admitting to another person the exact nature of your wrongs, the meaning of step 10 is self-evident. It implies that, despite all our efforts in steps six and seven to iron character flaws out of our behavior, we will never be finished.
Character defects such as impatience, irritability, avoidance, blaming, etc., are never fully abolished, especially when we are “hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.” Humans always have room for improvement, which is why people in recovery have the humility to strive for “progress, not perfection.” Life is messy and amends are naturally needed from time to time.
Let’s compare how a person with alcohol use disorder and a person working the tenth step respond to treating someone with unwarranted irritability to illustrate changes that occur in recovery.
To begin, a person with alcohol use disorder has far more reasons to be irritable than a person in recovery. In addition to the hunger, anger, loneliness, and fatigue we all experience, this person also has the physical realities of being too intoxicated to inhibit impulsive outbursts or to read social cues accurately. They may also be experiencing a growing hunger for their drug of choice as withdrawal begins dawning.
All these chemical influences in the brain can generate irritability at random moments for no apparent psychological reason. When confronted about their irritability, they tend to blame others, or stress, or traffic jams—whatever is at hand and may contain a grain of truth. Or they will deny being irritable, drink or drug some more, and avoid looking at their behavior.
To the extent those around this person are codependent, they will take on the blame or welcome avoiding the topic. Another day on the downward slope into hiding and disconnection for everyone.
A person working the tenth step is free of disrupting chemical influences and has more psychological resources and skills for dealing with their bout of irritability. An entirely different trajectory ensues.
First, mindfulness cultivated, especially by step six, enhances the ability to recognize and evaluate your behavior. A review of character defects listed in step four confirms your tendency to become irritable when frustrated.
Further self-examination reveals you skipped lunch to finish a task your boss needed. You turn to the person you were irritable with and acknowledge it was unwarranted. With faith in the value of transparency, you say you are frustrated and have gotten too hungry.
The uncomfortable feelings calm down, especially after eating an energy bar, that you keep on hand for emergencies. Life sails on after the turbulence subsides.
Had the person in recovery done everything right and fully recognized being in the wrong, but failed to “promptly admit it,” they would have been left with amends still needing to be made and a lingering strain in the relationship with whomever they had mistreated. Recovery requires continuous vigilance to recognize when our behavior is wrong, a willingness to change, and the transparency to admit our transgressions.
Perhaps this is one reason many A.A. meetings end with the Lord’s Prayer, which reminds us to “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Step 10 runs people in recovery through all the preceding steps, which are now built into the foundation of a recovering person’s personality, from powerlessness over the re-emergence of character defects to faith in the cleansing power of acknowledging the truth. A.A. members are encouraged to make a daily practice of deliberately revisiting the tenth step. No better recipe for life exists.
While step 10 maintains the benefits of recovery by forming daily habits of mindfulness, acceptance of responsibility, and connecting through quick amends, step eleven will present ways to deepen recovery further.
References
[i] Readers interested in a deeper dive into A.A. and the Twelve Steps can find it in AA’s How It Works and the more academic work by Ernest Kurtz, Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, Hazelden, 1991.
