12 Steps to Recovery Essay Example for Free

12 Steps to Recovery Essay Addiction of any substance is an extremely difficult thing to accept. When we finally realize that We have a problem it is up us to admit it. Once we have accepted that we are addicted we have made the first and most important step to recovery. We learn that once recovery is what we want in our lives there are steps to take these steps is to mean we are ready to completely give yourself to a higher power. This higher power can be anything or anyone we want it to be, whether it be God or someone we can really trust and depend on. There are 12 steps to recovery that will help us stay clean and help us be successful in staying in recovery. This we call the â€Å"12 Step Program. † The first step to recovery is we admit we’re powerless over our addiction and our lives have become unmanageable. This means admitting weeven have an addiction problem. By saying your life has become unmanageable states that we don‘t want to continue living your life the way have been during your addiction. Our addiction has taken over our life, and admitting that we’re an addict helps us take responsibility for our actions instead of blaming others as we did before. The second step is we have come to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity as we knew it. See more:  The Story of an Hour Literary Analysis Essay For most of us our higher power is god. We would give everything to our higher power and ask him for forgiveness. We then would recite the Serenity Prayer to help us. The Serenity Prayer is â€Å"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference! † This is a very powerful prayer as I feel today. The third step is that we’ve made the decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand and know him. We allow him to guide us through the recovery process we are going through. He lets us know that we are not alone in this, and we will never be alone again as long as we have him in our lives. The fourth step is making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We look inside ourselves to find out what our morals are and to figure out what we believe in. We figure out what we stand for and learn what we think is right and wrong in life. In this step you must become brutally honest with yourself knowing that there’s nothing we can do to change the past. This does not mean you are a bad person but that you have made some bad decisions in our lives, that we as human beings are not perfect. The fifth step is when we have admitted to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact natures of our wrongs we have done during our addiction. Completing this step gets the monkey off your back pursay. More than most people the addict lead a double life. This means we are only showing what we want people to see. Not being honest and showing our true colors. We still continued to lie and expected to be able to stay clean. Through this step we learned that this is not possible in order to stay clean and live a honest life through recovery. Those of us that belong to religious sanctuaries can confide in the proper person of that faith . Others that are not religious may find someone they can confide in such as a doctor or therapist. Someone that we can trust to keep what has been said in confidence. We cannot disclose anything to our family because we are not allowed to say things to them that will make them unhappy. We cannot save our own skins by making someone else unhappy. By doing so our fears come closer and we begin to realize that our life is opening up and showing what our life was really about . This is the scariest thing we will do. And the hardest step to complete out of all 12 of them. The sixth step is when we ask God to remove these defects of character. Which in turn means we surrender our whole self to God? When we are ready, we say to him something like this: â€Å"My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen† The seventh step we become willing to ask God to help us to remove all of our shortcomings. This is not a long step and like I said previously it’s not one of the hardest steps to do during recovery.