Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

STEP SEVEN

but obviously good character was something one needed
to get on with the business of being self-satisfied. With a
proper display of honesty and morality, we'd stand a better
chance of getting what we really wanted. But whenever we
had to choose between character and comfort, the charac-
ter-building was lost in the dust of our chase after what
we thought was happiness. Seldom did we look at charac-
ter-building as something desirable in itself, something we
would like to strive for whether our instinctual needs were
met or not. We never thought of making honesty, tolerance,
and true love of man and God the daily basis of living.

This lack of anchorage to any permanent values, this
blindness to the true purpose of our lives, produced an-
other bad result. For just so long as we were convinced that
we could live exclusively by our own individual strength
and intelligence, for just that long was a working faith in
a Higher Power impossible. This was true even when we
believed that God existed. We could actually have earnest
religious beliefs which remained barren because we were
still trying to play God ourselves. As long as we placed self-
reliance first, a genuine reliance upon a Higher Power was
out of the question. That basic ingredient of all humility, a
desire to seek and do God's will, was missing.

For us, the process of gaining a new perspective was
unbelievably painful. It was only by repeated humiliations
that we were forced to learn something about humility. It
was only at the end of a long road, marked by successive
defeats and humiliations, and the final crushing of our
self-sufficiency, that we began to feel humility as some-
thing more than a condition of groveling despair. Every