Step Ten and Step Eleven sit side by side, one asking me to stay honest about my actions and the other asking me to stay connected to a power greater than myself. Together they show me how to live in the day I’m in instead of the one I’m trying to control. These reflections remind me what these steps look like in real lives, mine included.
Step Ten: This thought brings us to Step Ten, which suggests we continue to take personal inventory and continue to set right any new mistakes as we go along.
Step Eleven: 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
I like that Step Eleven is straightforward and that the Big Book gives clear direction. I can plan my day while remembering it isn’t my plan.
– Anonymous
Before recovery, I didn’t want to face my mistakes. I’d never really taken responsibility for anything in my life. I tried to cover up my mistakes, ignore them, blame others, none of which worked and only compounded the guilt I felt.
Through working the steps I was given a new perspective on mistakes. I have experienced how they can be used for good, a catalyst for change. I had an old idea that in recovery I would no longer make mistakes, which hasn’t been my experience, in fact I’ve made quite a few mistakes in recovery but I’ve been able to grow and change as a result of them.
The first step of this has been acknowledging my mistakes through inventory. I started to be honest and admit when I was wrong, especially when it felt uncomfortable or embarrassing. I became prepared to make amends when I had harmed others and do whatever was required to make things right. I realised that I needed to take responsibility for how I had behaved, but that the behaviour is only behaviour, it is not who I am.
After taking inventory and my eyes having opened, I need to stop reoffending and to do this I need Power. On my own, my power is not sufficient to cause lasting change. I need God’s direction and strength and I am given this with the only condition being that I ask. My unfavourable behaviour can actually drive me to God in a way that only desperation can.
Every mistake can be used for good if I choose to allow it. As a fellow said to me, “The only mistake you can really make is not acknowledging that you’ve made a mistake.”
– Libby
When I first started Step 10, I was disheartened by the reminder that I only had a daily reprieve from drinking, kept sober by my spiritual fitness and carrying the vision of God’s will into all my activities. I felt this to be a rather insecure basis, and I was daunted by the prospect of trying to live up to this lofty ideal.
The idea of watching my thoughts every waking moment also sounded pretty hellish. Who wants to see their defects all the time? Wouldn’t this constant reminder of my failure to live up to total God reliance drive me back to drinking all by itself?
Today, I am thankful to have discovered the freedom that Step 10 brings me. Rather than being oppressed by my failure to achieve spiritual perfection, I no longer need fear mistake-making. Step 10 offers me the solution: take personal inventory throughout the day, ask God to remove my defects when they crop up, share them with a trusted fellow if needed, make amends where necessary, and then get back to what I should be doing, looking for where I can be of use to others and trying to implement God’s will, not mine, in my life.
My errors of thought and action throughout the day are turned by Step 10 into grist for the spiritual mill; by realising where I’ve gone wrong and taking the necessary corrective measures, they bring me closer to God. I learn humility, and am given the chance to grow in understanding and effectiveness instead of wallowing in shame and self-pity. Being able to look the error of my ways in the face also teaches me love and tolerance of others. Given how frequently I go off course, how can I hold similar actions of someone else against them?
Instead of making life intolerable, cleaning up my side of the street as I go helps me to remain useful to God and the people I encounter in my day, making my life better than I ever imagined it could be. I am relieved that I don’t need to wait for my next round through the steps or even my nightly inventory to deal with my faulty thinking or actions. What I thought would be an unbearable relentless chore has proved to be such an improvement, I wouldn’t give it up even if I could.
– Alex
I recently had a situation where, in a social setting, I felt like a fellow AA member was laughing at me. In fact, they were. This person laughed right in my face. Can you imagine? The audacity.
It’s easy in moments like these for me to get on a high horse and point fingers. I can feel justified and even weaponize the words of the Twelve and Twelve to feel superior: “We begin to see that all people, including ourselves [I’ll conveniently skip over this clause], are to some extent emotionally ill as well as frequently wrong.” (Step Ten, 12×12, p. 92).
What I can—and have done—is cherry-pick lines like that from the literature to prove that (a) my program is miles better than the other person’s (it’s not), and (b) stroke my own ego enough to avoid doing anything about a budding resentment.
As the passage continues, “it is pointless to become angry, or get hurt by people who, like us, are suffering from the pains of growing up.”
In other words: lighten up, sweetie. Sometimes people say and do things that are less than tactful. Whatever. So have I. And so will I. The beauty of the Tenth Step is that it reminds me, case by case, of the (incredibly annoying) axiom that any time I’m disturbed, it’s never about the other person or situation, it comes entirely down to me and what I’m willing to do about it.
So, what do I do about it? Well, sometimes the answer is actually nothing, or, perhaps more helpfully to whoever is reading this, something else that’s more useful than sitting around in delusional self-pity. That comes down to pretty much anything else.
When was the last time I spoke with a newcomer? How are my sponsees coming along with their inventories? Living room dance party, anyone? Maybe I’ll try a recipe from the Finnish cookbook I just inherited from a friend. Oh, my neighbor just rang the bell to ask me to climb a ladder for her. Perfect. As ever, God’s timing is impeccable.
The minute I’m willing to be wrong, God is there to fill my days and hours with things far more fruitful and enjoyable than harboring a silly old resentment.
– Adam
I don’t know why I am an alcoholic but I am. I have damaged myself and my family with this disgusting substance. I have recently lapsed and have to battle again. As Richard Burton said, it is like entering a boxing ring with a champion boxer, knowing that you will be knocked out, yet you constantly do it. I hope to find some answers to this.
– Richard
I was born 86 years ago, in May 1939, a month after the first printing of the Big Book and a month before a group in Cleveland, Ohio, was the first to call itself “Alcoholics Anonymous.”
I am approaching my 49th AA anniversary in December 2025.
I have been sober for over half of my life and half of AA’s life.
How do I stay sober? I can only tell my story, and only you can tell how you stay sober.
I continue to learn from all of AA’s history that started on June 10th, 1935, when Dr. Bob Smith took his last drink, a beer given to him by Bill Wilson. Bill had gotten sober six months earlier in the Oxford Group in New York City, and the Oxford Group in Akron, Ohio, had been trying for some time to get Dr. Bob sober.
What was the key to that being Dr. Bob’s last drink? Two alcoholics telling their stories and listening to each other as equals. Bill Wilson said as much in his article in the Grapevine on AA’s 25th anniversary in 1960. AA’s Sponsorship brochure updated in 2019 says the same: “In A.A., sponsor and sponsored meet as equals, just as Bill W. and Dr. Bob did.” In AA’s biography of Dr. Bob, Dr. Bob and the Good Old-timers, published in 1980, Dr. Bob is quoted as saying, “Bill Wilson is the first person who didn’t preach to me.” And as Dr. Silkworth, Bill’s doctor, suggested to him, Bill stopped his own preaching that wasn’t working with the first 100 alcoholics in New York who he tried to sober up. He simply told the facts to Dr. Bob about what had kept him sober for six months.
Another spiritual program I practice states in its central book: “Our diversity invites us both to speak what we know to be true in our lives and to learn from others.”
For me, that fits 100 percent with AA and expresses the principle of equality that AA expresses in its Third Tradition: “The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.”
It doesn’t matter who I am, where I came from, what I think, or what I believe.
I can consider myself a member of AA if I have a desire to stop drinking.
To stay stopped, I continue to re-read with other AA members all seven books of Bill’s writings and talks that AA has published: Alcoholics Anonymous, 1939, The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, 1952, Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957, Twelve Concepts for World Service, 1962 (available in the 9th edition of the AA Structure Handbook for Great Britain 2024), As Bill Sees It, 1967, The Language of the Heart © 1988, and Our Great Responsibility, 2019.
I draw upon all 36 years of Bill’s sobriety and don’t limit my sobriety to the first book, Alcoholics Anonymous, a life-saving book that represents only the first 10 percent of his sobriety.
I also continue to learn from sources outside AA that offer inspiration, as Bill himself did, as he wrote on AA’s 20th anniversary: “…it would be false pride to believe that Alcoholics Anonymous is a cure-all, even for alcoholism…. Let us constantly remind ourselves that the experts in religion are the clergy, that the practice of medicine is for physicians, and that we, the recovered alcoholics, are their assistants.”
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, 1957, page 232, spoken by Bill Wilson at AA’s 20th anniversary International Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, 1955.
I learn from Bill’s humility from statements like this. For me, humility has become simply: “I don’t know. Others might. I need to listen.”
– Dan F.