I have an action plan: From now on, I am squarely facing everything that is in the way of feeling really satisfied with my life.
Original wording (AA):
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of our
Higher Power as we understood this Higher Power.
The third Step is the third big shift: After that, the other steps describe the unfolding of the process which has been put in place by then. The shifts are as follows: Step One (I get it) is the insight that allows you to step out of denial. Step Two is the strategy (the big picture) that is going to make it possible to do something about this insight. And Step Three is the action plan that defines how this strategy can be implemented.
The action plan is very practical. We’re not talking about cultivating a sense of self that is an abstraction. There is a direct correlation between feeling really satisfied with your life, and this healthier sense of self. In other words: If you keep finding excuses for not dealing with what makes you profoundly unhappy, you can’t really be said to have a very healthy sense of self. It’s that simple. So the action plan is to systematically pay attention to how satisfied you are with your life. If something is not working out, you’re going to be dealing with it.
Now, when you just read this casually, this is the kind of thing you’re likely to shrug off. No big deal, it’s obvious, isn’t it what everybody does anyway? However, if you start paying more attention to this, you’ll see the many ways in which you find excuses to avoid facing your lack of satisfaction in many areas; and how this festers into a sense of powerlessness and lingering resentment. The sense of powerlessness and the resentment, in turn, will “justify” your acting out. And the acting out will feed into your sense of guilt and shame. And so on. This is how you stay trapped in the vicious cycle described in Step Two.
The way out is to make it a clear priority to not accept any excuses to avoid facing what is in the way of your sense of well-being and happiness.
Now, this does not mean that, by confronting these challenges, you will always get what you want. There are plenty of limitations in life. So I am not saying that you will only be truly happy if you get everything you want, no matter what it is you want. The quest for Serenity, Courage & Wisdom (aka “Serenity Prayer”) includes finding the serenity to accept what you cannot change–once you’re satisfied that you truly can’t change it, not because you have avoided dealing with it.
Different priorities
Step 3 is about focusing your efforts into increasing your sense of wholeness and contentment in life. Putting the priority on improving your life means that “fixing” the problems is no longer the top priority. Until now, the problems have been on top: Either consciously (because you’ve actively been trying to solve them with “solutions” that didn’t work)… Or unconsciously (because you’ve been in denial, which means they’ve been hovering, like a threatening dark cloud, in your subconscious).
This is probably confusing. So I’ll give you an analogy. Let’s say you have a really high fever. It makes sense to do whatever it takes to lower the fever, because staying with a high fever is not only unpleasant, it can also hurt you. However, it’s very important to remember that the fever is just a symptom, and the lasting solution requires that you deal with the underlying problem that caused the fever in the first place.
A leap of faith
What does all of this have to do with the original wording of this Step (…to turn our will and our lives over to the care of our Higher Power…)? There is a leap of faith in Step Three (just that it does not have to be a religious one). It is to focus on the big picture defined in Step Two. To focus on your sense of wholeness and contentment, you have to stop being so fixated on your problems. As you do this, you may feel that you’re being self-indulgent, or even that you don’t deserve to be happy. The more stuck you are, the stronger these feelings will be, the more entrenched to need to keep doing what you’re already doing even though it doesn’t work for you.
Transformation
In Step One, you started to see that self-destructive behaviors have to do with fear. We’re talking about intense fears, attempting to deal with stuff that feels overwhelming. What is it, then, that makes change possible, especially in the grip of fear?
As you progressively let go of your fixation on your problems and your usual ways of dealing with them, you notice more how much you had been tightening up—how much you had been wanting to control things—when you were feeling overwhelmed. Noticing this helps you begin to relax this tension.
You start noticing the knee-jerk quality of your reactions to certain situations–-things happen so fast that you haven’t until now realized that there was any possibility of doing anything different. Noticing this, you become more aware that you have a choice of how to react in these situations. Little by little, you discover that your range of reactions is much broader than you were accustomed to. You broaden our sense of who you are. Compared to how you used to be, it feels like you have been touched by the presence of something greater than yourself.
Indeed, you have expanded beyond the more limited part of you that you used to think was all of you. As you expand your repertoire in response to what used to overwhelm you, it feels like you’re in the benevolent hand of a higher power that protects you.
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