Day 80 & 81 - How to use the 12 steps in your relationship

For those of you familiar with a 12 step recovery programme this will ring a few bells. For those of you who are not, but have suffered difficulties in relationships, you may also find identification.

Let me just set the scene. The 12 step recovery programme is designed to help people go about change a particular harmful pattern of behaviour. It was originally developed to help alcoholics stop drinking and experience a spiritual and psychological change to their personalities to maintain sobriety. Resultingly it has been adapted to drugs, sex, gambling, love, nicotine, alanon, food. pretty much anything where people suffer addiction problems.

It effectively helps the person undergo a profound psychic change in a process that is encouraged to be maintained daily. They are not rules or exams, but to be taken with the help of an experienced spiritual helper to defeat the ego, see your part in any perceived troubles, make restitution to anyone you have harmed and seek to help others. They are specifically designed to challenge the sick ego and facilitate change. Make sense?

Therefore let me just show how you can use these in a relationship;

Step 1 -  I admitted I was powerless over my girlfriend - that she had become intolerable  
 
Step 2 - Came to believe that only a Power greater than herself (me) could restore her to sanity 
 
Step 3 - Made a decision that she should turn her will and her life over to the care of God as I understood him.
 
Step 4 - Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of HER
 
Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of HER wrongs  (even though she doesn't think she's got any)
 
Step 6 - Were entirely ready to have God remove all HER defects of character   (even though she doesn't think she's got any)

Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove HER shortcomings (even though she thinks she doesn't have any)
 
Step 8 - Made a list of all the things she had harmed, towards me and became willing for her to make amends for them all 
  
Step 9 - Decided she could now make direct amends to me, except when to do so would be inconvenient. 
 
Step 10 - Continued to take personal inventory of HER and when we were wrong promptly denied it. 

Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to make her realise she's in the wrong.

Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message loudly and angrily to a non listening girlfriend, and to NOT practice these principles in all our affairs

The result of following these steps? Put it this way I've about as much chance of getting a blozzer as Max Clifford. Do the opposite. That's the way forward troops.

Together We Are Stronger

Nicholas Evans