Step Twelve, Part One---A Spiritual Awakening

When a man or a woman has a spiritual awakening, the most important meaning of it is that he has now become able to do, feel, and believe that which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone. He has been granted a gift which amounts to a new state of consciousness and being. ... In a very real sense he has been transformed.... He finds himself in possession of a degree of honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind, and love of which he had thought himself quite incapable.
12 Steps and 12 Traditions

One of the things most of us alcoholics and addicts could not do on our own before recovery was to be in a healthy, mutually satisfying relationship. Most of us grew up in families that were fairly dysfunctional---if there was not outright violence and emotional abuse and/or abandonment, there was usually an atmosphere of tension and unhappiness in our childhood home. At least that's been my observation as I've listened to people talk about their childhood in 12-Step meetings or in my office. As a result, when we become adults and enter into relationships we usually bring a number of dysfunctional beliefs and behaviors to our partnerships.

When we first get into recovery, we tend to point to our addictions as the source of all our relationship problems. But as we acquire time in recovery, many of us discover that we are still encountering a good deal of difficulty in our closest relationships. Even when we have some time in the program and have diligently worked the steps, we often still find ourselves in an unsatisfactory relationship with our partner. If we are able to avoid placing the blame for this state of affairs on our partner (or on ourselves as "f**ked up" alcoholic/addicts) and take responsibility for understanding and correcting the dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors we learned while we were growing up, then with a strong commitment to change and the hard work that entails we are likely to find the happiness and satisfaction in our intimate relationships that we have always longed for.

I believe the kind of spiritual awakening described in the 12x12 is essential for anyone who wishes to be in a healthy, functional close relationship. The qualities listed in the quote at the beginning of this post are the qualities that are necessary to make relationships work well. There is a growing body of marital/couple research that demonstrates how vital honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of mind and love are to the well-being of a relationship. When those qualities are absent, intimate relationships inevitably deteriorate over time, ending either in separation and divorce or a miserable, distant relationship in which partners increasingly move to live separate, parallel lives while still living together.

The spiritual awakening created by working the Steps and the personal qualities engendered by that awakening will not in themselves bring about a loving, healthy, mutually satisfying relationship. They are necessary, but not sufficient since most of us will have a lot of work to do to change the dysfunctional beliefs and behaviors we learned in childhood. But those qualities will give us the ability and the strength to look at these issues, to acknowledge how our childhood experience has negatively affected our ability to be loving partners, and to persevere in our efforts to adopt healthier beliefs and actions in our relationships.