Be content with patient improvement
Step Six: Our character defects (and assets)
“When men and women pour so much alcohol into themselves that they destroy their lives, they commit a most unnatual act…As they are humbled by the terrific beating administered by alcohol, the grace of God can enter them and expel their obsession…Here their powerful instinct to live can cooperate fully with their Creator’s desire to give them new life…But most of our other difficulties don’t fall under such a category at all.”
“Step Six” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions p. 64)
When I was thirteen, life was not good. My parents had split up and I was left with my dad. I was being relentlessly bullied in middle school for the second year. And I was angry. So angry. But you wouldn’t have known it to look at me. I looked quiet and submissive.
Anger was not permitted in my household. Sure, when there were the occasional drinking bouts occurring, the anger between my parents would explode and the fighting would ensue. But for my brother and me, we weren’t allowed to express this emotion.
And the sad thing was that feelings of anger were completely justified considering what I was experiencing. However, I stuffed the anger deep inside of me. By the time I was in high school, my anger had turned into a severe depression.
Anger is a character defect. However, I also learned in Al-Anon that my anger was a survival skill. I was living in an unacceptable and traumatic situation. If I had been able to actually feel and express some of my anger, I may not have continued to be so victimized.
I possess a much more balanced view of my character defects today. Many of them are survival skills that are no longer working in my favor. Years after the trauma of middle school, alcohol fueled my anger and I became enraged and abusive. Clearly this character defect was not working for me—or the people around me. I had gone from victim to perpetrator with my anger.
Bill Wilson suggests in the 12 and 12 that of course alcohol was removed from us 100%. Pouring that much booze in our body was a most unnatural act—an act that threatened our very survival. But then he goes on to explain that other defects we don’t want removed 100%—things like lust, for example. Do I really want all of my sexual drive removed? No. So, what I have to instead accept is that these defects will remain. Only God can and will remove them when they are no longer useful to me or the others around me.
I did a thorough repeat of Steps 4-7 in 2020. At that time, I had many years of Al-Anon under my belt and took a new approach to writing out my list of character defects. Instead of just writing the defects, which often left me feeling beaten up and only adding to my low self-worth, instead I wrote both a list of character defects and a list of character assets. This year, as I am redoing all of Steps 1-12, this is the list I came up with:
Defects
Anger- with trying to control outcomes
Expectations of sick people
Playing God
Smugness over my own sobriety
Approval seeking
Low self-esteem
Manipulating
Mothering
Martyring
Sense of overresponsibility
Perfectionist
Impulsiveness
Obsessiveness
Assets:
All-loving
Dignity
Self-Confident
Grateful
Teachable
Loyal friend
Authentic
Mature
Generous
Humble
Loves God with all her heart
Talented
Hard worker
By taking an equally hard look at my assets, there is less chance of being overcome by a pervasive shame that might hinder me from continuing this important step work. As with the fourth step inventory, this list has to be mine. It has to derive from inside of me after a lot of soul-searching that comes after completing Step Five. While our sponsors can help us get started, we are the ones who have to determine what survival skills are no longer working for us. Just as with the Step Four Inventory, the Sixth Step list of character defects is a fact-finding and fact-facing process, and thus makes us ready to ask our Higher Power for his help in Step Seven.