Twelve Steps to Recovery - The Sixth Step

This article summarizes the sixth step of the Twelve Steps to Recovery. Refer to the Wimberley United Methodist Church website for a summary of steps one through five. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous lists the sixth step from the original Twelve Steps as: “We’re entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.”

In this sixth step of the AA method of recovery, it is now time to accept our character defects and flaws, just as they are, and turn them over to God. The Twelve Steps: A Spiritual Journey (revised edition), states, “Step six is the time to overcome fear and gather the readiness we need to proceed with our recovery.” In previous steps we identified with integrity our perceived shortcomings. In this step our objective is progress, not perfection. So we must take our comfortable, old, and destructive habits and humbly turn them over to God so that we can move on. The only way to fix ourselves is to let go and let God. We do this through prayer by talking and listening to God and to others, understanding that God loves and accepts us just the way we are.

This summary was written by the Faith Partners group of Wimberley United Methodist Church as part of a continuing series of articles the twelve steps. If you want to learn more about addictions, the church library has copies of a book and a CD titled Addiction by Dr. Kevin McCauley and Dr. Cory Reich.