Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

STEP TWELVE

ing at Step Five, we decided that an inventory, taken alone,
wouldn't be enough. We knew we would have to quit the
deadly business of living alone with our conflicts, and in
honesty confide these to God and another human being.
At Step Six, many of us balked—for the practical reason
that we did not wish to have all our defects of character re-
moved, because we still loved some of them too much. Yet
we knew we had to make a settlement with the fundamental
principle of Step Six. So we decided that while we still had
some flaws of character that we could not yet relinquish,
we ought nevertheless to quit our stubborn, rebellious
hanging on to them. We said to ourselves, "This I cannot
do today, perhaps, but I can stop crying out ‘No, never!'"
Then, in Step Seven, we humbly asked God to remove our
shortcomings such as He could or would under the condi-
tions of the day we asked. In Step Eight, we continued our
house-cleaning, for we saw that we were not only in con-
flict with ourselves, but also with people and situations in
the world in which we lived. We had to begin to make our
peace, and so we listed the people we had harmed and be-
came willing to set things right. We followed this up in Step
Nine by making direct amends to those concerned, except
when it would injure them or other people. By this time, at
Step Ten, we had begun to get a basis for daily living, and
we keenly realized that we would need to continue taking
personal inventory, and that when we were in the wrong we
ought to admit it promptly. In Step Eleven we saw that if a
Higher Power had restored us to sanity and had enabled us
to live with some peace of mind in a sorely troubled world,
then such a Higher Power was worth knowing better, by as