Daily Reflections · November 11
Self-Acceptance
The last words of Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven, and three places the Twelve and Twelve tells members not to be too hard on themselves.
Today’s reading
The reading for November 11 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 105, the last two sentences of Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven.
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Themes and asks
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Watched over
The passage closes the essay on prayer on a note of trust in God’s care, in this life and beyond it.
- When have you felt looked after without having earned it?
- What does turning toward God, or toward the good, look like for you on an ordinary weekday?
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Kind to yourself
The member who wrote the reflection treats looking after themselves as part of their faith, not a break from it.
- If someone you sponsor treated themselves the way you treat yourself, what would you tell them?
- Which of your own needs do you keep putting last?
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The harsh judge
The member also prays to be willing to let go of self-criticism they call arrogant. Read beside Behind the words, the Twelve and Twelve has a name for wallowing in guilt: “pride in reverse.”
- Whose voice does your self-criticism speak in?
- When does an honest look at yourself turn into a beating, and how do you tell?
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Days you won’t pray
The essay around the passage expects days when praying is a struggle, and even days a member refuses to, and tells members to go easy on themselves and start again.
- What do you do on a day you don’t want to pray?
- Who could you tell about a dry spell without worrying what they’d think?
Behind the words
Pride in reverse
Today’s passage is the last two sentences of Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. They end the paragraph that November 10’s reading begins, and the essay with it. What comes before them is candid about the hard stretches. The essay tells of seasons of grief and suffering, “when the hand of God seemed heavy or even unjust,” and says members learned from them. It tells of days when praying takes all the will a member has, and days they rebel and won’t pray at all, and it tells them to go easy on themselves.
Pass It On, AA’s 1984 biography of Bill, notes that the Big Book had said nothing like this. Its chapter for doubters, “We Agnostics,” ends, “When we drew near to Him He disclosed Himself to us!” The biography calls the Twelve and Twelve’s lines extraordinary statements from a man who had once had his own sudden spiritual experience, and says that, as Bill and other members had learned, staying sober doesn’t always bring “instant immunity” from rage, guilt or grief. He wrote the book in 1951 and 1952, through a depression that hardly let up. It had begun in 1944.
The book says as much about guilt. In the essay on Step Four, Bill called wallowing in it “pride in reverse.” Pass It On quotes the paragraph and says Bill’s own mood is implied in it. More than once in its essays on the Steps, the book warns members against being too hard on themselves, and says what to do instead.
The passage’s last word reaches back to AA’s first book. In 1939 the Big Book said that members who put God in charge began to lose their fear of “today, tomorrow or the hereafter.” Bill came back to the word in 1958. In “Take Step Eleven,” written for the June 1958 Grapevine, he pictured a doubter who keeps up prayer as an experiment and, he predicted, will come to “accept himself and the world around him,” and to know he is safe with God, in this life and the next.
More on Bill’s long depression: The quarter mile, in Number One Man. On his night at Towns Hospital in 1934: Hot flash, in The Educational Variety. On how he wrote the Twelve and Twelve: Wit’s End, in Suggestions Only.
Go easy, three times
Three of the places where Bill W.’s essays on the Steps in the Twelve and Twelve warn members against being too hard on themselves, in book order: the trap, then what the book says to do instead. The words in quotation marks are the book’s.
Step Four
The trapTaking stock, a member given to depression can be “swamped with guilt and self-loathing.”
InsteadA sponsor points out the newcomer’s assets along with the liabilities, which helps “clear away morbidity.”
Step Ten
The trapGoing over yesterday’s anger and fear again and again. Taking stock, the essay says, doesn’t mean members must “wander morbidly around in the past.”
InsteadAn inventory lets a member “settle with the past” and then leave it behind. At the day’s end, remember that “inventory-taking is not always done in red ink.”
Step ElevenToday’s essay
The trapIn the paragraph just before today’s passage: days a member rebels and won’t pray at all.
Instead“We should not think too ill of ourselves.” Start praying again as soon as you can.
Threads
Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.
Sources
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essays on Steps Two, Four, Ten and Eleven (the reading cites page 105).
- Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 18 and 22.
- “How It Works,” in Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book), 1939; quoted from the fourth edition, 2001.
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “Take Step Eleven,” June 1958.
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. November 11 · aa.org
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Daily Reflections is AA’s book of readings for every day of the year, each written by a member about a favorite passage from AA’s literature. A Daily Reprieve gives each day questions to sit with and the story behind its words.