The most popular of 12 step recovery programs has as one of its later steps, (the 10th step to be exact) the following, “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it”. Of all the steps in the recovery canon this is the one that has drawn my attention again and again. Most likely is because as an outsider to active participation in these community based groups this step seems to be the most contradictory to the very nature of addiction. Hell, it is contradictory to the very nature of daily life without addiction.
By contradictory I mean something very concrete. My life is surrounded by addicts and addiction (and I have some issues of my own). The very nature of dependency as I see it day in and day out, the very nature of being an addict makes seriously working at this step a kind of passing through the eye of a needle endeavor. Dependent people are by the nature of their problem very self centered. Their actions primarily focus on the satisfaction of their own physiological or psychological needs with no ability to factor the impact on others into the equation of their action.
The 10th step almost requires an objective viewpoint by the person performing the task of how someone other than the actor is impacted. The concept of wrong means understanding the primacy of something beyond the skin of the person grappling with alcohol, cocaine or gambling. For someone focused inward by their cravings and compulsions the growth needed to reach this point of thinking and analyzing the world with third person objectivity requires a magnitude of growth. Of course the moral inventory is internal and subjective but coming to an awareness of a sense of wrong to others requires taking a step outside oneself. Doing that is difficult enough for a clean, sober and focused person.
In thinking on this I have been trying to comprehend why this step always shifts my mind to contemplating Spinoza’s Ethics. Over the past weeks I have been trying to get my mind around Spinoza’s conception of God as outlined in the Ethics. In one book I am reading I came upon these two quotes. I think they are salient here.
One can’t help being committed in a special way to one’s self. One’s special interest in, and concern for, the one thing that one happens to be is part and parcel of just being that thing. No one else can do for me what I am doing in being me. When there will be no one who has the same stake in my persisting, then there won’t be me.
R. Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza, p. 180
One will behave with what he call high mindedness-the desire “whereby every man endeavors solely under the dictates of reason to aid other men and to unite them to himself in friendship” –because having stood outside himself and having viewed the world as it is, un-warped by one’s identity in it, one will understand that there is nothing of special significance about one’s own endeavor to persist and flourish that doesn’t pertain to others’ same endeavor.
Id., pp184-185
Stay with me here because I know this stuff isn’t easy; thinking about it makes my brain hurt. If I get this correctly Spinoza acknowledges that we are of our very nature, being neither in control of how we come into this world or how we go out of it, consumed with the selfish focus on maintaining our lives for our own interest. This is our natural state, without us we perceive no further universe. However Spinoza seems to believe that if we can force ourselves to understand that this is the core element of our existence then we can the next step. Once we realize that nature directs inward, and directs everyone inward then we can move if we act objectively outside the shackles of our selfish native state to a more open understanding of the lives of all humanity. By knowing ourselves as limited and finite beings we can open ourselves up the needs of a world of finite beings existing in an ongoing nature. It is when we acknowledge what we are, and move out of that space acknowledging that we and everyone else is in the same state, that we can act for the betterment of all humanity, of all nature.
After a moment of the moral introspection of self awareness we need to take ourselves outside into the world beyond our limitations, admit the failings occasioned by our limitations and then make our world better. I think this is congruent with the 1th step.
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