Step 3 of the 12 steps

I shift my focus, from being fixated on my problems, to seeking a sense of wholeness and contentment in my life.

Original wording (AA):
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of our Higher Power as we understood this Higher Power.

A leap of faith

The Third Step is a leap of faith - but not necessarily religious faith. What is it about?

You decide to put your efforts into increasing your sense of wholeness and contentment in life.

This is harder to do than it seems.

It feels really scary to let go of the “solution�?you think you have. It feels like, instead of dealing with the problem, you’re giving up.

The more stuck you are, the more you feel that the only way out is to try harder doing what you’re already doing.

What enables you to let go is the hope that it will work out. As you feel more whole and satisfied with your life, you will be in a better position to deal with what now seems impossible to change.

Transformation

As you progressively let go of your fixation on your problems and your usual ways of dealing with them, you’ll notice how you tend to tighten up -- how much you want to control things -- when you're faced with something new. Noticing this, you're in a better position to start to relax this tension.

You start noticing how you tend to have knee-jerk reactions to certain situations - how it happens so fast that you weren't even conscious that there was any possibility of doing anything different. Noticing this, you become more aware that you have a choice of how to react in these situations.

Little by little, you discover that your range of reactions is much broader than you were accustomed to. You broaden our sense of who you are. Compared to how you used to be, it feels like you have been touched with something greater than yourself.

Indeed, you have expanded beyond the more limited part of you that you used to think was all of you.