Dear Friends in Recovery,

My name is Mari Cokely. I am a CO and grateful to have found the Twelve Steps to guide me on my journey to recovery. Thank you for letting me share my journal with you.

"Were entirely ready to have God remove
all these defects of character."

~~THE SIXTH STEP~~

The Twelve Steps of Recovery

For me .... upon reflecting on all the steps .... there is no doubt that Step Six was/is the most difficult of them all. "Saying" to God that we are entirely ready to have our character defects removed is one thing. Being READY to have them removed is an entirely different ballgame.

I've spent most of my life coping with it in my own unique way. I got very comfortable with this. I think fear plays a big part in our not having the willingness to take the sixth step. After all, when we've acted a certain way and thought a certain way for many years and suddenly we're asked to completely change our way of thinking and acting, it's very easy to go into our "avoid syndrome." Most people don't like a lot of changes in their life .... and as we get older, we like them even less.

So, we begin to take that Sixth Step and we tell our Higher Power that we're ready and we tell ourselves that we're going to never engage in the old self-destructive behaviors again! Sounds easy enough. But many of us find ourselves reverting to that old comfortable way of life even though we KNOW that by doing the same old thing we've always done ... we're going to get the same old thing we've always gotten. And, before you know it, we find ourselves right back in the grip of our former self ..... guarding those CDs as if they were precious jewels rather than the manifestation of our disease.

Because we have always wanted to have control of our lives, it is hard to realize this. But God sets the timetable ... not us. We must make ourselves aware of what our character defects are ... and we must tell God that we are ready to have them removed ... but it is God alone who determines when and how our defects will be removed.