Work the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous with a biblical worldview in mind. Find series resources at https://www.pursuegod.org/steps-to-recovery-series.

Speaker 2 00:00:27 Step 10. Step number 10 says, uh, continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admit it.

Speaker 3 00:01:10 Yeah. And if you look at the step that you'll see some, you know, similarities to step number four, personal inventory. And the keyword here is we continued to take it. Okay? So this continuation of the principles that we've learned, um, putting them into practice, you know, and so, so for us, again, we've gained this new spiritual life. We've, we've been forgiven, set free, we've got a new way of living. Um, and a lot of that requires humility and taking a personal inventory and being willing to admit when we're wrong. And, you know, make amends quickly. Now, like when we hurt people, we can, we can quickly do it instead of waiting years down the road, you know, like we did this first time handling it. Now we're gonna try to maintain all the things that we've learned about, um, in our faith.

Speaker 1 00:03:05 And if, and none of that is possible if you don't have a right relationship with God. And we've talked about this over the last 10 weeks, that really, you know, step number one was about recognizing God's part in this whole thing. If you're gonna be a healthy person, then God has to be involved in, in other words, there needs to be a, a healthy, what do we call that? Vertical relationship, a relationship with God. And then that healthy vertical relationship impacts our hor horizontal relationships with friends and family members and parents and spouses and kids and all that stuff. But, but really, if we don't go all the way and, and, and learn to love ourselves, not in a, not in a selfish way, but in a godly appropriate way, if we can't love ourselves, if we can't forgive ourselves, then we can't love and forgive and, and ask for forgiveness from our neighbors, from our friends, the people that we've offended like we talked about last time. And again, none of this happens if we don't recognize that God loves us and we're his children.

Speaker 2 00:04:23 Well, we love God by, um, this new life that we're living. We live a, we live a life to honor God. Um, and I think when we're talking about this, I think it's, this is recognizing that there's an order of things, right? Mm-hmm. , we talk about love, God love others as ourself, and we need to love all three. Um, but, but if once they get out of order, that's, that's when things start to get hairy.

Speaker 3 00:05:31 Yeah. And how I would answer, how do I love God? You know, it's what you said was true. We, we, you know, we live the life he called us to live, find out how to honor him, right? Mm-hmm. like God loved us by coming and, and dying for us, and graciously forgiving us and blessing us. Well, we're not, God. We can't do those things back to God. , I can't die for God, right? Mm-hmm. , no, he, he, he loves me with the love that I almost can't, can't give to him. Um, and so the Bible kind of is clear, how do I love God by following his commandments, by, by being a doer, not just a hearer only, right? Like not just a receiver of love, but actually loving God back. He's explained to us is by following him, going to his word, seek out what it says, and just do it.

Speaker 3 00:07:20 Uh, if we wanna maintain our spiritual maturity, he says this in James chapter one, verse starting in verse 23, for if you listen to the word and don't obey, it's like glancing at your face in a mirror. You see yourself walk away and forget what you look like. But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and you do what it says, and don't forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it. If you claim to be religious, but don't control your tongue, you are fooling yourself and your religion is worthless, basically, he's saying here, you know, take inventory by how you love God, by looking at how do I follow his word? Do I look at his word and, and forget what it says, and then go live a completely different way? Am I just a hearer that comes and sits and listens to sermons and hears people and reads the word, but it never actually comes out of my life? Uh, that's, that's what I think. Where we're going with this is maintaining our spiritual maturity by using humility in the word of God to say, will I follow it or will I go my own

Speaker 2 00:09:14 Yeah. I think that's exactly what that is. That that is taking a daily, uh, personal inventory, right? It's, and this is, I think, you know, we talk about living this God honor, God-honoring life. And I think what that really means is we want to continue to be transformed more and more into the likeness of Jesus, right? Like, that is the goal here. Um, and in order to do that, it, it's not a, a one step quick fix thing. This is, this is something, it's, it's a lifelong process because, you know, as much as I'd like to think differently, I am never going to reach that final goal here in this life, right? But, um, it's, it is a lifelong process. And so I think that's why the verbiage here in the step, you know, it says continue to take personal inventory. It doesn't say, go back and do step four again. Go back and do another inventory, and then you're done. It says continued. Like this is a new life that we're living now, and we should be growing and learning. And like Eric was talking about, we should be digging into the word and, and learning better ways to honor God with our life. And in doing that, in digging into the word, I think it's gonna give us better clarity on having our, our order of things correct in loving God, loving others, loving ourself.

Speaker 1 00:12:02 So again, we can talk about all that on the spiritual plane. Mm-hmm. . And, and we, we could even, I think we can lose people sometimes, because they, some people say, well, how does that actually apply then to my, to those other two things? How does that apply to my relationships? How does that apply to my emotional life? Right? So, love God, spiritual love your neighbor, relational love yourself emotional. And I think a good way to maybe frame this is in what, what's called emotional intelligence. E your eq, your emotional quotient. It's not just your IQ that matters, which is great news, by the way, because not everyone has, IQ is something you can't really change. You're born with a, a with the ability to process, uh, intellectually or, or to not process as well as the next guy. But EQ is different. Eq emotional quotient is something you can actually grow in, you can develop, you can get better at.

Speaker 1 00:13:54 Number two is self-regulation, managing your emotions. Number three is motivation. That's directing your emotions toward a goal. So the first three are about your emotions, being aware of your emotions, managing your emotions, and then directing them toward a, a healthy goal. The last two are about relationships. It's the number four is empathy. That means recognizing emotions in another person, which is really important. That's especially important when it comes to what we talked about last week about making amends is recog, you know, reading the room and recognizing how someone's receiving what you're saying if they're ready for it. Or are they defensive? Are they not ready for it? That's called empathy. And then the fifth one is social skill, and that's managing the emotions in your, in your spouse. So, so let's kind of unpack these with the recovering addict in mind. Who's saying, I want to be a healthier person. I want to be healthier spiritually, but I also want to, to be healthier emotionally and relationally self-awareness. Let's start with that. Recognizing your emotions. Why is this hard? I think in particular for addicts to be self-aware?

Speaker 3 00:15:59 That is so normal because you've been su suppressing your emotions with so much like, you know, dopamine and serotonin and all this, all of this, you know, uh, stuff outside of your body, putting it into your body. You've been suppressing it so long that finally when you get clean, your body naturally wants to repair itself, including your brain, you know, and all the things that comes from, you know, emotions come from our, our minds, right? Mm-hmm. . And we call that also the heart. But, um, your body's trying to repair itself. And so there, there's hormones involved and, and you're trying to get back to this, this maintenance level that we're talking about, like a, a good baseline. And we don't even know what our baseline of emotion emotions is. Therefore, and, and regardless of being able to try to understand what I'm feeling, I remember, yeah.

Speaker 1 00:17:56 Emotion. So the emotion behind the thought. Yeah, exactly. Or underlying the thought. Now, again, I, maybe even today, some people are listening to this saying, I've never really even considered, you know, go back and maybe we should identify a few emotions. Cuz when people think of emotions, they think of sad or mad. Mm-hmm. , that's what most people think of. There's so much more Oh yeah. To emotions than sad and mad. There's so much more that can underlie your addiction. Because what's happening is there's something you feel deep down that you don't want to deal with. You don't want to be self-aware about it. Mm-hmm. , you don't want to be honest about it. You don't want to put it on the table and dissect it and look into it. You're too afraid to do that. And so what do you do? You, you, you do drugs. You, you, you, you go to that anesthetizing behavior that is just, that it's an anesthetic so that you can't feel it. You don't, well, that's kind of the root of so many addictions is you just don't want to feel, you don't want to deal with your feelings. You don't want to face your feelings. Mm-hmm. . And we're saying, you gotta stop that. Right. So what are some of those feelings that underlie so many addictions?

Speaker 1 00:20:05 Yeah. So acknowledging them is the first thing that's hard enough. Being self-aware. Mm-hmm. , recognizing your note, your emotions, naming them. My, I, my daughter or my wife used to always say this to my daughter and son when they were little and they would, they would lash out. Think about little kids. They la they only, they, they don't, they can't manage their emotions, which is the second thing. They can't regulate their emotions. They have to learn to regulate their emotions. But what would come out, especially with my son, is he would have outbursts of anger, but it was because there was a, an emotion beneath it. That, that he would mask it with this other emo a more manly emotion. He would, anger would mask the other emotions, insecurity, unworthiness, whatever. Disappointment, shame. And so Tracy, my wife, would always say, Hey, use your words. Use your words.

Speaker 3 00:21:42 Yeah. And let's just be clear, the reason why we're talking about emotions is because they affect our recovery. Right? If we've been masking and, and trying to suppress them. And now when they pop up, um, you know, two things is, one is we want to stay clean and sober. We want to avoid relapse. And so it's gonna be helpful to us if we can identify, regulate, maintain, and learn how to deal with our emotions. And then secondly, it's going to help our relationships. We just dealt with lessons eight and nine, making amends. We don't want to go breaking our relationships after we've just made a lot of them better. And so, uh, we've gotta learn to handle these emotions before they start affecting our, our recovery and our sobriety. And so one of the things that I like to do in, you know, in relationships well and, and personally, um, is yeah, think about what, why am I having all these thoughts?

Speaker 1 00:23:42 Important. And I love how, uh, you know, Eric on staff, I think I've shared this on this podcast before, but I gotta brag on you again in, in terms of self-regulation. So we were in a staff meeting one time and I had shared something that made you feel insecure. Now, you didn't say something in the middle of staff, but you called me later that day or maybe the next day. And I appreciate that because this is a great example of self-regulation. You didn't just let that feeling fester, that feeling of insecurity fester. I remember you actually called me and said, when you said this thing, it made me feel insecure. That was so refreshing to hear. And what we were able to do, you and I both is we were able to, to nip that feeling in the bow. I was able to clarify what I meant by what I said.

Speaker 3 00:24:57 You know, I don't want to sound, I'm not trying to like sound prideful or anything, but, but you, what's crazy is that people that have been through recovery and addiction, having to deal with these things, actually, uh, it might put you up, you know, a give you a leg up on the rest of society because the rest of society struggles with these same things. That's so true. They've been, they've been ma maybe they didn't have as bad of addictions or maybe they, it was food or, or some other thing that they've used. But like the rest of society struggles with being able to name their emotions. And so actually, because I've, because I've been trained and disciplined in this way, you know, not always because I chose that, but because this was the path that God led me down. When I am super clear about my emotions, I think a lot of people are like, whoa, this is intense. You're weird man. Like

Speaker 2 00:26:32 Yeah. Well, and it's funny that, that you mentioned that cuz I was, I was just thinking earlier about, about this step, what this step really is, you know, it's, um, continuing to take personal inventory is because we want to be transformed, right? And so what came to mind for me was Romans chapter 12 verse two, which relates to the world as well, says, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. That by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. And that's really what this is about, right? It's not operating the way that we always have, not operating the way that the world does. We need to learn to operate in a different way. Now, we used to be ruled by our emotions. We thought we weren't, we thought we were like stuffing them or hiding 'em, but they ruled us. Like when those tough emotions came along, it, it totally, uh, derailed us. We, and so we would, we would go back to our addiction to try and, and so our emotions ruled our lives. Now we don't want to be ruled by them anymore. So we need to be aware of them. And now we need to know how to handle them differently.

Speaker 3 00:28:30 Yeah. Let's, let's not forget that emotions aren't bad . Even the, the seemingly negative emotions are not bad. They were given to us by God. We were created with emotions. All right? Now, some of them have been used for bad and d we've dealt with them in, in, in wrong ways. But God himself is an emotional being and he has righteous anger even, you know, like I can use anger for good now, you know, like for justice, right? I can fight for, for something that angers me in, in a positive way. It can compel me and motivate me to want to, to change myself. Or it can compel me and motivate me to want to, um, stand up for a cause, stand up for something that I believe in. You know? And so anger, um, I, I was just reading this in our lesson, Ephesians chapter 4, 26 through 27, be angry and do not sin.

Speaker 1 00:29:59 Okay? So those are the first three out of five. Self-awareness, self-regulation, and then self-motivation around your emotions. And then that leads, I think just naturally leads to the last two, um, elements of an emotionally healthy person. Cuz an emotionally healthy person isn't just healthy emotionally, they're healthy relationally. So the last two are about how your emotions and you handling your emotions well, how that actually begins to impact your relationship. So number four then is empathy. Empathy, empathy is like the other side of self-awareness. Self-awareness is recognizing emotion in you. Empathy is recognizing emotion in someone else. And this is what I love about emotionally healthy per people, is once you deal with your emotions, well now you can be like, oh, cool, now I can start helping someone else. Now I can start recognizing when I see anger or insecurity. And I would imagine people in victory, people who have recovered from addiction, are recovering from addiction are really good with empathy. Because you guys can recognize in an addict, I've heard you guys say it throughout this podcast, you could, you guys can recognize in an addict an emotion because you've been there, you've, you've dealt with it, you've been honest with your own emotion. So you recognize it in someone else probably before they even recognize it in Ms. Hills.

Speaker 3 00:32:23 Yeah. I would say I certainly can spot and name my emotions and I can name other people's. I can pick those out really well. Um, I think one of the areas I struggle with is empathy. Um, in not, like I have levels of seriousness in my mind, degrees of, you know, and, and oftentimes I probably approach it maybe in a selfish way, but I think, man, I went through this, you know, I was able to endure through some crazy consequences and discipline. And, and so sometimes I'll have that same, i'll, I'll think, think that towards some people, like, why can't you get through this?

Speaker 3 00:33:10 Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:33:34 , right? Yeah. And, and that's something that the Lord's helping me with. Uh, I mean, I, I try to search the scriptures and look at Jesus life, you know, I try to, I try to pick out, because that's the thing that motivates me the most. I'm, I think, you know, when talking about all this, like even with personalities, I'm more of a more logical than, than I am emotional. Mm-hmm. , you know? And so for me, what ties to my emotions has to be some kind of information or truth. You know, some kind of logic, right? Mm-hmm. . And so I search the scriptures and I try to find the way Jesus modeled empathy, you know? And, and certainly he was, he was very gracious to people, you know, the woman who was caught in a, caught in adultery, right? He's, he, he basically defended her in front of everybody, but then he says, go and sin no more.

Speaker 1 00:35:39 So then there's one more, there's a final, there's a final skill when it comes to eq and it's called, we're just gonna call it social skill. And social skill is like the other side of number two. Number two is managing your emotions. Social skill is managing the other person's emotions. And this is tricky because you can't really, man, you can't really, you can only clean your side of the street, right? Like we said in the last episode, you can't, you can't make someone be an emotionally healthy person. But the ultimate sign of an emotionally healthy person is that you're doing everything you can to help them manage their emotions. So you've learned to do it for yourself. You've managed your emo own emotions. And now, now that you can recognize someone else's emotions, you can actually be part of the solution for them and, and help them lovingly help them manage your emotions.

Speaker 2 00:37:21 , I, I think that's probably, that's probably the majority of what I end up doing in mentoring is helping somebody else manage their emotions because of the people that I end up mentoring who have generally gone through a lot of the similar things that I have mm-hmm. . So I've, I've learned to recognize those emotions that I have there. I have that empathy and then, um, and that's what they need more than anything is to be helped in managing those emotions that they have. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 00:38:24 Yeah. It's one of those things that is the beautiful way that God works, right? Is is, um, using everything, even the worst things that we've gone, gone through for good. It, it's, it's, I remember the first time that, that, um, somebody came to us for marriage, uh, mentoring and first off it was the most humorous thing to me. somebody who pretty much destroyed their marriage. Yeah. Uh, but then, yeah, that was just something that just, um, was overwhelming to me was that God was going to use that for something good. And it was amazing.

Speaker 1 00:39:47 And, and that's really how victory gets cemented in our lives. And we'll talk about that in these next couple lessons. So today was step number 10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, we promptly admitted it. So it's about maintenance and continuing to move forward and be a healthy person spiritually, emotionally, and relationally. If you wanna talk about this topic, you can find a video to go along with it, discussion questions, and so much more at pursue god.org/recovery. Uh, use it for your family, your small group, or one-on-one with your mentor or your sponsor. And join us next time where we'll talk about step number 11.