Episode 170 -- November 29, 2021

Inconvenient Recovery: The Gifts of Step Ten

When we're new to recovery, it can be tempting to think that the Twelve Steps are the on-ramp to a life of health and sanity—the hard things we have to do to get on the easy road of contented sobriety. In this excerpt from the revised edition of his classic book A Gentle Path through the Twelve Steps, Dr. Patrick Carnes explains the significance of Step Ten, "Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it." He lets us in on a secret about recovery: it's a lifelong process of growth and learning and change. As each of us goes more deeply into our own journey, a new and ongoing path is revealed.

Carnes offers the Twelve Steps as a pattern of practices and habits that make lasting recovery possible; others have found other paths that work as well. In this excerpt, we learn the inconvenient truth that regardless of how you choose to travel it, the road of real recovery will always be demanding—even as it delivers contentment, joy, and peace along the way.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

STEP TEN ASKS YOU to integrate the program principles of honesty and spiritual exploration into your daily life. By now you will have noticed that the program asks you at different points to be a list maker. Making lists becomes one way for you to develop personal awareness. Daily monitoring of the realities of your strengths and limitations plus a willingness to acknowledge your failings and successes is the surest path to sanity. From the beginning we have emphasized balance, focus, and self-responsibility. Applying those concepts to Step Ten, we see:

This commitment to integrity lays the foundation for active spirituality. Conversely, such rigorous ongoing self-examination can be sustained only with a strong spiritual base—Step Eleven. The combination of the two becomes a way of life for program people. The spiritual component grows through daily readings, meditation, prayer, and journal writing.

By maintaining this balance, focus, and self-responsibility, recovering people create an open system that grows and adapts. This contrasts with the closed (rigid, judgmental) and the chaotic (random, purposeless) systems of addiction and codependency. Making lists, doing Step work, keeping a journal, attending workshops, and participating in therapy and treatment are all examples of recovery activities that help expand our awareness and growth. A growing system stays in balance.

Partial, Convenient, and Inconvenient Recovery
Simply going through the Twelve Steps once is not a solution. Working the Steps is an ongoing commitment—and recovery is something we never complete. As Step Ten teaches us, it's an unending process, a way of life.

In recovery, we revisit the Steps over and over. Sometimes we go through all the Steps in sequence. Sometimes we have to stop and revisit one Step in particular. Each time we revisit a Step, however, it's a different experience, because we are different.

There are three types of recovery: partial, convenient, and inconvenient. Let's look carefully at each one.

We've achieved partial recovery when we no longer practice our addictive or compulsive behavior. We're not in crisis right now, and the drama of addiction has subsided. We've gotten help from a Twelve Step group, and perhaps from a counselor or doctor or mental health practitioner. It's a good start—but it's only a start. In partial recovery, we've grown a helpful protective scab over our wound of addiction. But the wound is not fully healed.

If we imagine that the Twelve Steps are medicine, and that now we're cured and don't need them anymore, we're stuck in what is called stinking thinking—and we're setting up ourselves for relapse. We don't understand that the Twelve Steps are food rather than medicine. We need them regularly, not just when we hurt.

People in partial recovery often take from the program but don't give back. They don't help other people, don't become sponsors, and don't volunteer to serve their Twelve Step groups. When they see other people in trouble, they lack the wisdom to think, There but for the grace of God go I.

If we stick with the process of recovery and continue to work the Steps, we eventually reach the stage of convenient recovery. At this point, we've seen many positive things take place in our life, so we're glad we hung in with recovery—but we're also keenly aware of how much time, effort, soul-searching, and painful feelings have been involved. We willingly help other people in recovery; perhaps we serve as a sponsor and volunteer in our Twelve Step group. But we still hope for an eventual end to the process and pain of recovery. We may say to ourselves, "Recovery is inconvenient and uncomfortable. When do I get to stop?"

We never get to stop, of course. Life never stops presenting us with difficult issues, so we'll never reach a point where we don't need the Twelve Steps anymore. We'll never stop rewriting our story, either, and we'll often need to revisit issues we've dealt with many times before.

One hallmark of people who are caught in convenient recovery is their hesitancy to stand up and be counted. They often haven't told their story of addiction in front of a group. They don't realize that part of healing any addiction or compulsion is talking about their experience before a group of people who care and understand.

Then there is inconvenient recovery—what some people might call "full recovery" or "real recovery." We are in inconvenient recovery when we no longer look for a way out, a way to declare the process complete. We understand that life will always require us to change, grow, and learn. We also understand that if we turn away from this demand, we begin to walk the path toward relapse. We recognize the need to continuously practice the principles of the Twelve Steps in all our affairs, to carry the message of recovery to all who wish to hear it, and to stay open to further spiritual awakenings. We realize that we are not in control of our life, and we regularly seek to carry out the will of our Higher Power. We let go of hoping that, somehow, some day, recovery and life will become comfortable and convenient.

About the Author:
Patrick J. Carnes, PhD, is an internationally known authority on addiction and recovery issues. He has authored over twenty books, including the bestselling titles Out of the Shadows: Understanding Addiction Recovery, Betrayal Bond, Don't Call It Love, and the first edition of A Gentle Path through the Twelve Steps. Dr. Carnes's research provides the architecture for the "task model" of treating addictions that is used by thousands of therapists worldwide and many well-known treatment centers, residential facilities, and hospitals. He is the executive director of the Gentle Path Program at Pine Grove Behavioral Health in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, which specializes in dedicated treatment for sexual addiction.

© 1993; 2012 by Patrick J. Carnes, PhD
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