Having Had A Spiritual Awakening As A Result Of These Steps We Tried To Carry This Message…

” Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to the depressed, and to practice these principles in all of our affairs  THE TWELFTH STEP OF DEPRESSED ANONYMOUS

The only requirement for membership in Depressed Anonymous is a sincere desire to quit sadding ourselves today.  Just for this twenty-four hour period. We want to try for this short period of time to let go of our sadness. But since we are saddicts, we need to know that we can’t just snap out of our sadness in minutes or even days.  To get to feeling better takes time because our learning to sadden ourselves goes back  over months, possibly years and one doesn’t just snap out of feeling bad in a few days when the whole way of living has taken years to develop. As was brought out in another Step, it’s not so much our addiction that we need to focus on as our whole life  – which we now admit is un-manageable. By practicing the principles of the Twelve Steps, we now know that we need to make  an inventory of our whole life. We can leave no rock unturned if we want to live with serenity and hope.  Our sadness, like any other addiction, is merely a symptom of some deeper compulsion that manifests itself in our need to seek comfort and safety in sadness. But this is the nature of our addictive behavior and thinking.  Our thinking has been compulsive. Every time someone hurts our feelings, and said something that wasn’t pleasant, we withdrew into the dark hole of our depression.  We shut down our feelings by numbing ourselves against future hurts.  Depressed Anonymous wants you and me to try for one day at a time not to withdraw compulsively into sadness when we come up against a stressful situation.”

—–Read more about the Twelfth Step in the DA  Manual, 3rd edition, (2013) Depressed Anonymous Publications, Louisville  Ky. Page 104.

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