Third Step
Third Step

ACA Tuesday Zoombox

Long-time AA and ACA member Kathleen S shares how childhood sexual trauma, family denial, and unmanageability led her to reshape the Third Step into a deeply personal relationship with a loving higher power. She reflects on healing the split between her inner child and adult self while learning to live a spiritual life in practical, everyday ways.

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14:32•24 May 2026

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About this podcast

ACA Tuesday Zoombox

Stories of recovery from the effects of growing up in an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional home. Recorded at the online ACA Tuesday Zoombox meeting and based on the ACA Tuesday Toolbox meeting in Brooklyn, NY. Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families (ACA) is a Twelve Step, Twelve Tradition program of people who meet to share our experience of growing up in an environment where abuse, neglect, and trauma infected us. This affects us today and influences how we deal with all aspects of our lives. We'd love to hear from you - write to us at tuesdayzoombox@gmail.com

Recovery JourneysSexualityHealingRecovery ReimaginedTrauma

Episodes: 190

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Kathleen S on the Third Step, Childhood Trauma and a God That Loves You as You Are

Episode Overview

A personal, loving concept of God can replace fear-based images and make the Third Step feel real and usable.
Childhood sexual trauma and family denial can create a lasting sense of emptiness and unmanageability, even in outwardly successful lives.
Working AA and ACA steps helped bridge the gap between a dissociative inner child and a stable, functioning adult self.
The Third Step becomes practical by asking a higher power to “take away my difficulties” and being willing to act as a channel for good.
Recovery includes accepting that outcomes are not controllable, while taking responsibility for one’s own actions and self-care.

“The spiritual life is not a theory. You have to live it.”

What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol? In this share from ACA Tuesday Zoombox, long-time AA and ACA member Kathleen S talks candidly about what the Third Step really means to her after decades of recovery from both alcohol and childhood trauma.

Kathleen starts by challenging the Third Step prayer in the ACA Red Book, calling it “a very anemic version of the third step prayer, as far as I'm concerned.” From there, she explains how she crafted her own relationship with a higher power, one she describes as “a concept of God that loves me just like I am,” rather than the “horrible, awful, judgmental God” she feared at first.

You’ll hear her describe growing up in what she calls an “otherwise quite functional” family that was torn apart by incest and denial. She talks plainly about being sexualised as a three-year-old, becoming the family embarrassment, and carrying a “giant empty space” into adulthood while trying to perform, achieve, and look good on the outside.

Kathleen shares how hitting emotional and financial bottom – “I was a real estate broker with my house in foreclosure” – pushed her towards AA in 1975 and later into ACA, where she started to address that inner emptiness.

Her version of the Third Step is deeply practical: “I go to God and I say, look, I have a problem… make me a channel of your will… take away my difficulties.” She also talks about bridging the gap between her dissociative, creative inner child and her “stable, property-owning, functional human being,” stressing that “the spiritual life is not a theory.

You have to live it.” With gentle humour, she insists it’s “okay to go ahead and be a high-functioning, happy, joyous human being” in recovery. If you’ve ever struggled with God-language, childhood trauma, or feeling “too much” for others, this share might give you fresh questions to bring to your own Third Step.

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