We all make mistakes – readily admitting our mistakes shows integrity and accountability for our actions.
Living Purely, Chapter 6, “Work”
Perception is a strange thing. Self-centeredness shapes the way we live our lives, maximizing our own wants and minimizing our responsibility and accountability. It's like walking through an amusement park full of distorted mirrors or echo chambers – our senses are deceiving us. We find it difficult to perceive reality as it is, especially when it comes to the responsibility of our lives and our actions. Reexamining our reality with other addicts helps.
Working the program – especially with the daily Tenth Step inventory – helps us move through the roller coaster of personal responsibility. As we become familiar with our powerlessness and ungovernability, we blame others less for the wreckage of our past. We begin to take personal responsibility. As we take inventory and ask for help in letting go of our flaws and imperfections, we no longer need to make excuses for our current actions and choices. We take responsibility for correcting past mistakes and practice regularly reexamining our perceptions. We escape the amusement park distortions and gain a better understanding of ourselves and our lives. The Steps help us get better and better at becoming the kind of people we can be proud of.
When we take a wrong turn on the road inside the amusement park and find ourselves in a dead end, it does us no good to pretend that we are not lost. We ask for guidance and if necessary, turn back again. We make mistakes because we are human – we correct them because we have integrity.
My illness distorts my view of myself and the world around me. I will take regular inventory to correct my warped perceptions so I can find my way out of the madhouse of addiction.
