Step Seven: Thank You for Keeping Me Alive. Now You Can Go
By Kimberly Cooper
kimberlycooperstudio@gmail.com
“Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.”
When I first read the Seventh Step of Alcoholics Anonymous, I thought it sounded simple enough. Humbly ask God to remove your shortcomings. Done. Except it wasn’t. It took me a long time to realize that my shortcomings weren’t random flaws sprinkled into my personality. They weren’t evidence that I was lazy, weak, or morally defective. Most of them had once saved my life. That realization changed everything.
The first six steps prepare us for this moment. In Step Four we take an honest inventory. In Step Five we admit our defects out loud. In Step Six we become willing to let them go. Step Seven is where true surrender begins. Not because we’re trying harder. Because we’re finally willing to stop protecting ourselves with the very behaviors that once kept us alive.
Humility, I’ve learned, isn’t thinking less of yourself. It isn’t beating yourself up or pretending to be small. Humility is seeing yourself accurately without inflation and without shame. It is looking honestly at the habits that no longer serve you and saying, “Thank you. You got me this far. But I don’t need you anymore.” Many of my character defects were actually survival mechanisms I had been clinging to since childhood.
Take procrastination. For years I called myself lazy. Sobriety showed me something entirely different. Part of me didn’t believe anything I created was truly worthwhile because no one in my early life taught me that it was. The adults around me were drowning in their own addictions. My accomplishments, my creativity, and my little victories drifted by unnoticed. The other half of procrastination came from perfectionism. Like many addicts, I lived in an all-or-nothing world. If success wasn’t guaranteed, why even begin? So, I waited. Then I panicked. Then I somehow pulled everything together at the last minute. For decades I mistook adrenaline for productivity. Only after getting sober did I realize procrastination wasn’t laziness at all. It was my way of keeping myself safely hidden. If I never truly gave something my best effort, I never had to find out whether I was actually good enough.
Impulsiveness looked much more glamorous. People used to compliment me for living spontaneously. They loved that I could fly by the seat of my pants and go wherever the wind carried me. What they didn’t understand was that I wasn’t following freedom. I was chasing dopamine. When your emotional foundation isn’t built on consistency, affection, and safety, you spend years trying to manufacture those feelings somewhere else. Ice cream after dinner? Absolutely. Stay out dancing until four in the morning with a handsome stranger, fueled by attraction and vodka, the night before an important presentation? Sounds exciting. Take a break during a difficult workday to get stoned with a visiting friend because life is short? Why not? From the outside it looked adventurous. Inside, I was constantly searching for relief.
Defensiveness was another one. I was the queen of, “It wasn’t me.” “I didn’t do it.” “I didn’t know.” Sometimes no one was even accusing me. Someone would simply ask a question because they wanted to solve a problem, and before they finished speaking, I had already built my defense. When you’ve spent years believing mistakes make you unsafe, honesty feels dangerous. My nervous system answered before my heart ever had the chance.
Then there was discipline, or more accurately, the complete lack of it. Every night I faithfully wrote beautiful to-do lists. My life has looked like a ticker tape of handwritten plans for decades. As an alcoholic, I rarely completed them. I knew I needed structure. I longed for structure. But following a schedule felt like dragging a sled through mud.
Finally, there was evasiveness. This one hurt. I wasn’t exactly lying. I just wasn’t exactly telling the whole truth either. I’d tell half the story. I’d use charming distractions. I’d offer enough mumbo jumbo that everyone, including me, forgot what we’d originally been discussing. It was survival through smoke and mirrors.
Step Seven asked me to surrender every one of these coping strategies and it wasn’t easy because they had worked. Until they didn’t.
Recently I told my sponsor about something I remembered from childhood. At eleven years old, after school, I would come home to an empty house. I’d steal quarters from my mother’s giant Arrowhead water jug, hop on my bicycle, and ride to 7-Eleven to buy candy. I’d eat until I felt better. That candy was my medication long before alcohol ever arrived. Looking back, I can see so many of my future character defects taking root right there. Escape. Secrecy. Impulsivity. Comfort from outside myself. Those habits weren’t trying to destroy me. They were trying to comfort a lonely little girl who had no healthier way to soothe herself. Step Seven doesn’t ask me to hate that little girl. It asks me to love her enough that she no longer has to live that way.
The Seventh Step has become a favorite in the entire program because it reminds me that I am not asking to become a better person simply for my own benefit. I am asking to become someone who is easier to love, easier to trust, and more useful to the people around me. That is where the real miracle begins.
I started making living amends long before reaching the Ninth Step. My boyfriend appreciates that I don’t leave the house ten times a day looking for one more errand, one more coffee, one more distraction, one more excuse to avoid sitting still. It used to drive him crazy. Today he has a partner who can stay home, finish what she starts, and simply be present. If I burn something in the toaster oven, which thankfully doesn’t happen very often now that I’m sober, I admit it. No elaborate explanation. No defensive maneuvering. No disappearing act. When I make a mistake, I tell the truth. When I’m overwhelmed, I don’t have to run. When my work needs doing, I begin instead of waiting for panic to become my motivation.
These may sound like ordinary victories. But for someone who spent decades living in survival mode, ordinary is extraordinary. One of the greatest gifts sobriety has given me is an appreciation for what once terrified me. An uneventful Tuesday. A quiet morning. The same cup of coffee. A familiar routine. A day where nothing dramatic happens.
There was a time when chaos felt like aliveness. My nervous system mistook unpredictability for excitement because it was all I had ever known. Peace felt foreign. Silence felt suspicious. Stability felt almost boring. Today I understand that boring isn’t boring at all. Boring is safety. Boring is sleeping through the night. Boring is paying the bills on time. Boring is showing up when I said I would. Boring is making dinner, taking a walk with the man I love, reading a good book, and waking up the next morning without shame. That isn’t a small life. It’s a liberated one.
Step Seven didn’t erase my personality. It didn’t make me perfect, and it certainly didn’t happen overnight. Those old survival instincts still whisper from time to time. The difference is that they no longer run the show. Today I can recognize them, thank them for carrying me through the years when I needed them, and gently let them go. Because they were never who I was. They were simply the armor I wore.
Sobriety, and the Seventh Step in particular, has taught me that I no longer have to live inside that armor. I can set it down. And underneath it, I’ve discovered someone I was beginning to think didn’t exist: a woman who is honest, dependable, calm, creative, and quietly content. A woman who doesn’t have to chase excitement because she has found something far better. She has found peace. And it turns out peace isn’t the absence of adventure. It’s the absence of chains.