The Tenth Step
September 4th, 2011 | Step Work, The Way I Am, The Way I Was | No Comments »
The Tenth Step states simply that we “continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.” I had the opportunity to practice the Tenth Step last week. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology I have a 256 kps internet connection, that often performs as fast as 56 kps, so I am lucky enough to be able to call my wife and daughter’s every day, I can attend telemeetings, and sometimes the connection is even fast enough for me to check my email.
Last week I talked to my wife one night, a pleasant conversation. We probably get to talk more while I’m deployed than we do at home, since there aren’t as many distractions. I was surprised when I checked my email at work the next morning and found an angry email, asking why I left without leaving her a power of attorney. She went on to point out that I had told her I would get the power of attorney, that I spent much of my leave watching TV and playing video games, and that I still failed to get said power of attorney. She suggested that I either don’t care about my family, or that I didn’t trust her with a power of attorney.
Three years ago that email would have prompted me to get upset, act out, and fire back with numerous counter accusations. I would have remained angry for days, maybe weeks, and gotten defensive. My addictive mind would have taken it as evidence that my wife doesn’t love me, and that her being angry at me only meant that I was unworthy of love and that she would probably leave me. I would have avoided talking to her, all along worrying that my marriage was ending.
None of that makes sense, but by definition we addicts are insane, and I have no doubt that those would have been the thoughts running through my mind. Thanks to recovery, and having worked the Steps, I did what this situation called for. I took an inventory. I realized that I had put my wife in a lousy situation. If anything happened to me, or if she needed to take care of a major financial or legal issue it would have to wait until I could get a power of attorney to her. Worse, if I got hurt (which is more likely to occur do to a sports injury or falling in the shower than through enemy action at this point) and evacuated to Germany she wouldn’t be able to make proper arrangements for the kids to come and see me without a power of attorney.
I very clearly realized that I was wrong. So I did something about it. I went out and found a legal clerk (that was pretty easy) and got a power of attorney drawn up. Then I found a notary and had it notarized, and found a digital sender so I could email it right away. Then I wrote her and admitted I was wrong. More important, I took inventory and listed the defects in my character that made me wrong. It wasn’t a matter of trust. My wife handles all of our money. I have a vague idea of how much I make a month, and no idea how much money we have in the bank. I trust that the bills get paid on time, that my truck won’t get repossessed and that the house won’t get foreclosed on. She handles the finances because I have proven as an addict that I shouldn’t handle our money. A sad, but simple truth. I have no choice but to trust my wife with out finances.
The reasons I didn’t take care of the power of attorney issue before I left were two of my character flaws that I discovered in the Fourth Step, one minor, one major. The minor one is laziness and a tendency to procrastinate. I am a human embodiment of Newton’s Law, a body in motion will tend to stay in motion, a body at rest will stay at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force. I often require an outside force to get up and do something. The more major flaw is that I often don’t feel empathy, even for the people I love most. It never crossed my mind how worrying it must have been for my wife to not have a power of attorney in hand when I’m gone for a year, and worse to have to wonder why I didn’t get her one.
Thanks to the Tenth Step the situation was defused in less than a day. My wife knows I love her, she knows that I trust her, and I didn’t obsess over the state of our marriage. I recognized that I was wrong, I admitted I was wrong, and best of all I did something about it. I’ve changed, and that is a good thing.