"If we are sorry for what we have done, and have the honest desire to let God take us to better things, we believe we will be forgiven and will have learned our lesson."
— Alcoholics Anonymous, Into Action
A lot of alcoholics carry guilt. For whatever reason, we tend to lace guilt together with shame until we can't tell the difference between the two. Then we isolate, hide, and convince ourselves we're no good to anybody. It happens to the best of us.
By this point in the Steps, we've admitted that selfishness and self-centeredness are at the root of our troubles. The funny thing is, guilt can become another form of self-centeredness. We sit around telling ourselves stories about ourselves, to ourselves. We replay old mistakes, old embarrassments, and old failures until they become the main thing we think about.
A little guilt isn't a bad thing. It's like an internal radar that says, "Hey, you messed up. You might need to make this right." That's useful. But when guilt gets mixed with shame, it turns into a resentment against ourselves. And that's no way to live.
We forget that we've been given a very unique education about alcoholism and recovery. The mistakes, the wreckage, the bad decisions, the embarrassing moments—none of them have to be wasted. The more honestly we share them with other alcoholics, the more they become tools instead of burdens. The story that keeps us awake at night might be the exact thing that keeps somebody else from running out the door of a meeting and never coming back.
Faith without works is dead. One of the ways we put faith into action is by being honest about where we've been. When we do, those old guilty stories stop being evidence against us and start becoming weapons against alcoholic thinking.
What's was a guilty story that kept you stuck?
