Working the Steps

Image credit: Photo by El Fotopakismo on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I am working the 12 Steps around my codependency for the first time since discovering my husband's addiction five years ago. I have been resistant to working the steps for various reasons for years...

When I first started going to S-Anon meetings, I didn't want to work the steps because I didn't think I had a problem. Other people might have a problem, but I wasn't like them. My problem was my husband.

I slowly began to accept that I did have underlying problems that brought me to my marriage. I wasn't a healthy person who was duped into marrying a sex addict. I was a person who had no idea what healthy looked like. Or maybe I did: healthy was what I wasn't attracted to. It was my dysfunctional background that drew me to my husband like a magnet. And with that realization, I came to recognize that I needed to work on myself independent of my husband and my marriage. But I still didn't know whether or not the 12 Steps were the way to do it.

Then there was the little matter of needing a sponsor to work the steps, which presented two problems. First, my group consisted largely of bitter newcomers just like me, and there wasn't anyone in the group who presented the model of serenity I was looking for. And second, sponsors seemed to fall (along with bosses, therapists, priests, teachers and parents) into that general category of "people who think they know more than I do and try to tell me what to do." (Not that I have some kind of codependent problem with authority or anything!)

Then when S-Anon meetings stopped being helpful and I left, I gave up the thought of working the steps. I incorporated aspects of them into my own recovery work, but didn't know that I would ever be in a place to go back to groups regularly enough to actually work them. But now, all these years later, the opportunity has come up for me to work the steps with a group of friends I love, trust and feel comfortable with. Although there are people in the group who have worked the steps before, and to whom I can look for guidance, there is no one authority figure for my resistance to knock up against. There's no reason to resist anymore. It's the right time and the right format with the right people.

So, I'm off to work on the First Step -- and the next step -- in my recovery.

This post originally published at The Second Road on September 17, 2008.