Making Room to Grow Up

"Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character." So reads Step Six. After the guilt and remorse of my last drunk had faded, I didn't think this Step had any application in my life. Now that I was no longer drinking I wasn't a bad person. Character defects? I couldn't see where I had any. My character defects were hidden behind all those hurts and injustices I'd saved up through the years and which I regularly brought out and relived with all the original emotion. Not only that, I accumulated any and every new hurt, real or imagined. In fact I took a kind of perverse pleasure from feeling sad and self-pitying. I was giving power to people who were long gone. Then I realized that these people gave me my favorite excuses for why I did what I did or couldn't do what I should have done. I used them to justify my actions and blamed them for my failures. Every time something went wrong in my life or I failed to live up to some responsibility, I took out the list of abuses I'd suffered and used it as an excuse. I became very adept at hiding my guilt behind these real or imagined hurts. I was a chronic victim.