Step 10: Instant Change of Your Defects

to be real clear about what this podcast is intended for it is intended for entertainment and informational purposes but not considered help if you actually need real help and you're in need of help please seek that out if you're in dire need of help you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them but don't rely on a podcast to be that form of help it's not it's just a It's for

entertainment and information only. So let's keep it in that light, alright? Have a good time, learn something, and then get the real help that you need from a professional. Step 10. As we're working our way through the steps, we've finally gotten to step 10, the maintenance step. That's what they call it, right? The maintenance step.

So you've gone through all this hard work and you've gone through the process of, you know, self-awareness, self-exploration, and then like... moving towards getting rid of stuff and trying to you know being preparing yourself for getting rid of stuff and then finally things start kind of culminating into that step eight where you start making that list of people that you you did things to and then step nine where you're finally getting to uh making them making amends with yourself and with

other people and you know it's really interesting in recovery i see a lot of people kind of they kind of fizzle out on step 10, 11, and 12 because they figured that the work is done. So they're kind of there. And I see it happening in their lives. They've been working the steps for a while. It's probably been about, you know, eight, nine, 10 months maybe. And they really feel like they kind of have it. They get it. Like they haven't used for a long time and they haven't had any real urges.

Life's kind of moving along pretty well for them, right? and then they got this step where they have to to do these other things that mean that it's got to happen like step 10 is where you're doing it all the time like your your awareness of kind of what's happening so step 10 what is step 10 step 10 we continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it now that's that might seem like That's pretty easy to do, right? You just kind of, oh, sorry, you know, I did this.

I said that. I didn't show up. I showed up at the wrong place, wrong time. I said something wrong to the person. You know, it's like, oh, I'm sorry. And it's kind of the end of it. But really, what really we do with Step 10 is we start living the life.

We're living that life that we've been trying to get to all this time where you are actually... living sober that's you're kind of really starting to understand how to live sober and that's a different thing than living as somebody who's working on sobriety and certainly it's a very different thing from when you are trying to get to a point where you're not just let alone sober but just trying to not to use right and the destruction So how do you do step 10 on a daily basis where you're

consciously thinking about those moments when you're going to try to let go of those things that are causing you so many problems in your life? And so the conflicts and the upset, the things that really start to plague you, they're gone, right? So the major catastrophes are over with. But it's that daily living thing. And I'll tell you something. It's really tough for people because... you gotta be humble, right? And so you've let go, you've made amends, right?

And that seems like that would be a tremendous relief to the problem of being arrogant. But when you finally let go of the arrogance or you try to let go of the arrogance, that madness of that superiority and the don't screw with me, it's not my problem, it's your problem kind of thinking, when you put the sword down, now you have to admit when you're wrong.

So you're actually now living the life that you've been trying to live, but you're still going to make mistakes because you're still not totally sober, are you? So step 10 is where you learn to accept your flaws. You really do, inside you. And watching somebody go through that, where they actually will say, yeah, you know what, I guess I made a mistake. It's really interesting because they do it with this peacefulness that comes over them.

And you know when you're there because you feel a little inner conflict and you're upset. But you know who you can talk to. You have your support system. And you actually see something and you feel that problem that you just created in that moment. It's like the opposite of sociopathy, right? You're not a sociopath anymore because you're not a crazy addict. So you really start to learn to take on those changes. And you realize that... You have to be forgiving and you have to forgive.

So you're forgiving of other people for their mistakes, even if you just then like get really upset with them and you start to attack them. And that's the shortcoming. Or you go the other way where you are accepting forgiveness or you're forgiving yourself, right? So forgiveness is something that you feel in that moment. And so the words like, I'm sorry, I said that, all right? You start working things through.

And that's really where the difference is in sobriety, is you start working through the things that are happening. So a conflict arises, And being just argumentative and combative is not something within yourself anymore because you've kind of let that part of you go, that anxious part of you. And so you've let that go. So now what you have to do is you have to live that life where you can then work through the problem that you created.

Yeah. Maybe, you know, you're talking to your husband or your wife or your boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever, and you say something that really makes them upset, right? And you don't want them to be upset. And that's part of the problem that you had was you didn't like those kind of interrelational conflicts. And they were, you know, so you said something, you know, and you're working on step 10. So I said something and it created an argument.

Now you have to go through the process like normal people do when they have these conflicts, not crazy addict thinking, and you let that adrenaline and that cortisol flow out of your system. It takes about 20 minutes for that to occur. So you take that time and then you come back and you try to patch things up. You try to fix them, but not because you're running your agenda, right?

If people are upset around, you try to get people to be, I'm sorry, you try to get people upset around you as an addict so you can throw them off center, you can unbalance them so that they won't focus on the fact that you're using is actually a huge issue, right? So if you upset them. then you know that they're focused on you being, you know, whatever's upsetting the situation, you know, they're going to be distracted by that.

So that's kind of, it's almost like you don't set out to do that, but it becomes second nature. So you're so used to causing so many problems around you that that kind of disruption ends up with the person being able to use. And so, you know that you're going to be able to use if you cause conflict. Well, now you're in a position where in your recovery, you don't like that because you want peacefulness. You've lived enough of your recovery where you're sick of that.

And that's the description that I get from my clients, my patients that get to the point where they value the calmness. They actually want their sobriety to be there intact and and in place, and when there's conflict, that's a threat to your sobriety. And if you're at step 10 and you really fully are there, you really do understand that the threat to your sobriety is not worth the conflict. And so you want to work through those issues.

Now, if you're not really in step 10, you're just kind of going through the process and the motions without actually fully engaging in the recovery process, and you don't feel that way, you're not really at step 10, right? You're not really in that place in recovery. You're working the steps, but you're not really there. It's that change where, like, I don't like conflict, right? And so I've created something.

And now you have a little bit of a challenge in trying to make that conflict something that you can work through. Peacefulness, right? So when you get to where you are sick of the conflict and you don't like the threat to your sobriety, you will start to work that through. I've been reading a lot in books. I've been reading a lot of different books, and there's an age-old problem of conflict in our life, and how do we resolve it?

And so the challenge, if you are used to being very dysregulated, is how do you then, when you're doing that personal inventory, meaning every single day, every single hour, perhaps every single minute, you are consciously aware of what you're doing you're trying to be right that's your focus so i'm going to be really aware and so working through those conflicts really can become a challenge if you don't know how to do it and you're so used to being in conflict so used to having kinds of

disruptions and problems going on in your life that how do you do it so techniques that that can be employed to get you there Peacefulness. I like to feel peaceful. I don't like to feel conflict. So what I do is I'll take a pause. I you know, we we get in these verbal battles at times with people, but it's not comfortable. Right. I don't find that to be very comfortable. So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to work through in my mind. How do I make this better?

Now, the advantage I have is that I am almost 61 years old. So I've spent a lot of time trying to figure this stuff out. And I've had enough life experience where I can look back at that. Certainly when I was 22 and 23 and 24, I did not have a perspective of adulthood. I mean, I'd been living as an adult for quite a while at that point, but not nearly as long as I have now.

So wisdom through experience, that knowledge-based experience, or the experience-based knowledge, that changes the perspective. So here's a thing you can do. Here's a couple things you can do. Take the pause. I'll tell you, unless you have an immediate need for engagement right in that moment, Really, I've learned the pause can be very beneficial to resolution.

And so, like I said, the hormones of adrenaline and cortisol take 20 to 25 minutes to, once you've stopped the conflict, it takes about that long for you to have that flush out of your system and not be changing your emotional response. So the pause, 30 minutes, an hour, maybe a couple hours. So not just saying, I'm out of here. I'm not going to talk to you anymore. That's not really kind of what you're doing. But just backing off. It's not worth it.

I was listening to Jocko Willink, the Navy SEAL, and he was talking about conflict when you're in confrontation. He said your best weapon is your feet. If somebody is pulling a knife on you or they're pointing a gun at you, your feet are your best weapon. at that moment. You don't need to engage in conflict. And he states, you know, I don't like engaging in conflict because the best way to engage is to disengage.

And, you know, the different thinking is I don't want to engage in a conflict if it's not necessary because I'm going to get hurt or they're going to get hurt or we're both going to get hurt. And it doesn't matter if it's verbal, if it's physical. A conflict is a conflict. And so I don't think anybody really wins in a conflict because it didn't need to happen. He does put the caveat in there that it all changes if you grab me because now I'm going to have to engage in conflict with you.

And I will. So I kind of like that idea of like, you know, you create a conflict. Maybe it's time to back away.

and and be like any other you know animal in the wild that really doesn't want to engage in that fight they'd rather you know rear up on their hind legs and growl at you just to get you to go away um they don't they don't want you in their territory they don't want you taking their food they don't want you trying to uh attack members of their tribe whatever it is like just go away right and so we see that in nature animals do that um So I think in recovery, since we've been living in conflict

for years, most likely, learning to live not in conflict is a very different experience.

So taking the pause to be able to collect your thoughts, calm down, re-engage in a more peaceful way you know love your neighbor love your spouse love your children love your friends love your relatives love yourself then go back in with that idea of i'm going to uh re-engage but my mindset is i want peace right so if you're in conflict and if it is at all possible to re-engage with the person where you're peaceful that's that's a very good one it's very useful it's very effective The

misunderstood quote from The Art of War is the best battle fought is the one that was never fought. It was never engaged in. So I think that's one. Two, the second thing is if you are engaged in a battle, you have to humanize the other person.

Now, I've had... people come to me and seek help and then they have these uh tremendous feelings of of of anger and and upset aimed at somebody else because they didn't want to uh they didn't they didn't want to the person to succeed or win or whatever they felt like they had this this power over them you know every single person on the planet is a human being first and foremost. They are a human being. Now, if they're trying to kill you, you must defend yourself.

I mean, Jesus talked about that. We're going to defend ourselves, but how do we defend? He did it by demonstration of compassion and caring and using that as a tool to teach people that engagement is not necessary. He's trying to save us from ourselves, so to speak. But Trying to figure out how to make that person a human. Humanize them. That's a person you're talking to. It's a person you're yelling at. I have fought. I have fought people. Physically fought people. And I take no pride in that.

But I have. And I'm sure that there's been physical pain that I've caused people as people have caused me in my lifetime as a younger man. But You know, the physical encounters is something that's interesting because I did not enjoy doing it. I usually was doing it to defend what I felt was a wrong. Right. I'm going to write a wrong. So I'm going to engage in this physical altercation with somebody. It wasn't until I learned how to when I started training.

with other people to learn that physical encounters, while maybe at times necessary, you are actually inflicting pain on somebody and that's really an issue. If you humanize them, it's really difficult to do that. So the person that you're in this battle with, Battling with them over the custody of your children or battling over them over the divorce or you're battling over them over bad business deals or something. You know, they've done something to you. They are a human being.

And that isn't going to change just because you're battling them. They are a human being, first and foremost. So to go back to the idea or the concept of letting it go, really based on a personal inventory means that you have to let go of your ego and your anger and your resentment at that moment in order to take that personal inventory. Let's say you're having a discussion with somebody that's a friend or relative and they say something about maybe something you did in the past.

And they bring it up. And maybe it's something that you've already tried to make amends for. You've apologized for it, but they bring it up anyway. So now you get angry, right? Because it's like, hey, what are you bringing that up for? It's out of context. Or, you know, how dare you say that to me? Because I've been working on this and I'm proud of where I am. And the person is kind of condemning you. Well, so your personal inventory that you would take at that moment is like, I'm upset. Right?

And so the idea of boundaries and being able to put down boundaries and keep them down, but are they in the right place and is it the right kind of boundary and all that? Yeah, you have to consider that, but you also have to consider what just transpired that resulted in that, your emotion, and are you actually demonstrating that emotion appropriately? Yeah. Because people in addiction, they generally are very dysregulated, right? They're all over the place.

Anybody who's encountered an addict who's engaged in their current drug of addiction and they're using it, they're all over the place and you feel it, you know it. And so that may be where it triggers that response back in you. So the boundaries, you remember, you put a boundary down that said, I'm not going to do things that are going to be upsetting to me or would cause me to be upset. I'm not going to do that. Okay, so you just got upset. Now what? You know, let's do an inventory real quick.

hey, I don't like the way that came out. Sorry. Or maybe you just walk away and say, look, I can't have this conversation anymore. But you being able to dial down the response that you have that perhaps would have been something that you would have engaged in prior to your recovery. So personal inventory, like immediate, and it's right then, and you're working on it right then, that's really when you can tell when you're You really kind of have step 10 at that point because you're able to do it.

Feelings are one of the bigger problems in that step 10 response of personal inventory is your feelings about something. And it's reported to me all the time that people are just really kind of confused because whatever they were experiencing before wasn't happening because it was all drugged out or drowned out with alcohol. So they didn't have the ability to feel anything. And now they have these feelings and it can feel overwhelming. So being overwhelmed is a very uncomfortable feeling.

So I think when we think about step 10, We've done the work. We've worked really hard. We've started to really get ourselves together. Perhaps we've made the amends. We made some of them. Maybe you haven't been able to get all of them, but you've gotten at least some of them. You've gone through this where you have been able to work through those things that caused those problems, you think, and now you have to practice, right? Practice peacefulness.

And depending on what your drug of choice, because that can also perhaps be a bit of a challenge when you're trying to come back down into the real world with your feet on the ground. You know, being able to sit there and say, look, I did something wrong. You know, own up to it, right? If you ever go to rehab, you know what that's like because you're sitting, you know, with a whole bunch of people that have all this and they'll start attacking each other.

And then we have to work on having those shortcomings being, not only have them pointed out to us and be able to withstand that, but then to be able to make the change. There was a great episode I saw of the TV show House. And House, if you're not aware of it, if you're not in this country, it's a TV show about a doctor. Hugh Laurie plays this doctor who is a drug addict because he's on pain meds. And he's gotten to the point where he's having delusions. He's perhaps even become psychotic.

They don't know. And he checks himself into a rehab facility. he thinks, but actually turns out to be a psych hospital. And he spends a considerable amount of time in that psych hospital because he's forced to basically go through a 12-step process in his own way. But there's this one episode where he really starts to realize that what he's doing is actually probably not a good thing.

You know, being a smart aleck and a lot of deflection and sarcasm to deflect from the fact that he doesn't like to feel his feelings. And in recovery, that's very typical dysregulation and deflection to hide your pain. And if you are in recovery and you've gotten to the point where you're at step 10, you can't deflect anymore.

You can't redirect like he did in the TV show in that moment where he realizes those coping mechanisms really are not effective and they're not going to be useful anymore and he's got to give them up. And he does. And it's an awesome thing to see it from the perspective of a therapist watching a demonstration of a character who is just overwhelmed by his addiction.

come to terms with it but then also be able to come to terms with his own character flaws and to make a change and they're not easily given up let me just say that step 10 is not an easy one because you have to give up something that's a behavior or a constant behavior that you've engaged in now it's time to give it up and it's really hard to do that so I challenge you with getting through step 10 and to try to make the person that you're encountering at that moment and you're also then

embracing your own flaws to be able to get to a better place. I challenge you to do that. Take me up on the challenge. See if you can do it. Well, that's this episode of Doc Shock, your addiction lifeguard. If you are in need of help, please do yourself a favor and reach out to a professional for help in your area. Wherever you are in the world, there is always a chance of getting into recovery by getting some clinical therapeutic help. Check into a rehab. Call a psychiatrist.

Go to an emergency room. But please, whatever you do, don't protect your addiction by killing yourself. That's insane. Don't do that. And if you would like, you can reach out to me. You can reach me through my website, wellspringmindbody.com. I'd love to be able to get a chance to help you with your recovery. And let me know if I can help you. It's been a real pleasure talking to you on this edition of Doc Jacques, Your Addiction Lifeguard. See you next time.