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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

A Wellness 12-Step Program For People Too Well To Qualify For Any Other 12-Step Program
Wednesday October 26, 2005

Introduction: Worseness is the opposite of wellness. It is a lifestyle approach to a reduced state of both physical and psychological health. It is a quest for ill-being. It is associated with shortened lifespans, a high incidence of disease and a low quality of life. Amazingly, it is a choice, not a role assigned by any god or dictator. Amazingly, it is the lifestyle of choice for vast numbers of people, though most do not think about what they are doing until they are almost hopelessly addicted to this tragic condition.

Worseness has five dimensions:

Felonious under exercise and overeating.
Pernicious delegation of responsibility.
Excessive expectations.
Insufficient critical thinking.
Deference to prevailing norms and customs.

Some believe worseness is incurable. Nonsense! Others say it is amenable to a quick fix of one kind or another. More nonsense! There is, however, a slow fix for worseness. It is called wellness. It doesn't cost much but it takes a lifetime and most can't do it.

Since worseness is very difficult to overcome in advanced stages, even when the afflicted get past the denial phase and genuinely want help, prevention through wellness promotion at an early age is important for a healthy society.

Americans are caught up in 12 step programs, from AA to whatever ails them. If you look around or search the Internet, you will find a 12 step program that fits. Therefore, I think the time has come for a wellness 12 step program, one for those too well to qualify for any other 12-step program.

With my 12 wellness steps and 12 wellness traditions thrown in for good measure, all you have to do is read and follow the 12 guides. So, lean over, grab those bootstraps and haul your butt out of the pits and into the sunshine of wellness. Praise you, brother and sister, here we go.

The 12 Steps of Wellness

Step One: Acknowledge that you are a wimp in the face of worseness. By acknowledging your obsessive behaviors and compulsions, phobias, chemical addictions and other inadequacies, you can cease and desist in abdicating responsibility to the siren song of abusive self-ruination and slovenly destructive near-term gratification. This is the first step to liberation by wellness. Go ahead--conclude that you are a pox on the Earth, a slime-bag of perdition and a sorry excuse for a human being. It is important not to spend too much time wallowing in this process. About ten seconds is recommended. Then move to Step Two.

Step Two: Decide that you need help and are willing to ask for it. Join with others in varied forms of healthy living. Admit that the reality is "I Can't Do It," thereby drastically lowering expectations regarding grandiose goals for which you lack the genetic and other potentials.

Step Three: Choose yourself as Guru or Sovereign Master for the course of your life. Make a commitment to independence and self-sufficiency tied to friendships, professional guidance and having a bit more fun, every day, throughout the day.

Step Four: Conduct a searching inventory of where you are. Assess liabilities and strengths, with an emphasis on the latter. Look at the extremes of past self-abuse. For instance, consider old patterns of blaming, excuses, worry, anger, self-pity, and relationships and associations that reinforced worseness. Then, conclude that these are no longer acceptable and start acting accordingly.

Step Five: Write down the key features of the old-inventory profile. Share it with special wellness-oriented friends and colleagues and helpers. This step is great for release of tension, experience of humility and tranquility, sense of community, strengthening of honesty and realistic self-appraisal.

Step Six: Create a personal plan for wellness. A written plan is the start of a lifetime slow fix to self-actualization. It leads you systematically towards fulfillment and a conscious quest for your highest potentials. The overall goals are advancement and satisfaction or lifestyle artistry, never perfection of self or the conquest of others.

Step Seven: Set and pursue realistic but worthy goals in a systematic way. Think about where you want to go, what you want to do there, how it will be fun and worthy to pursue such endeavors, in short, what rewards await you along the way.

Step Eight: Identify special people crucial for your wellness quest--and include them in your support network. Avoid isolation; wellness is challenging under any circumstances and nearly impossible to sustain in isolation.

Step Nine: Explain your commitment to a wellness lifestyle to all who had been willing or other participants in your worseness past. Make amends, if necessary, in order to secure a tranquil emotional state. Risk-taking is an important part of this process. A willingness to take chances for advances is an important asset when joined with prudence and discretion.

Step Ten: Reassess along the way. A wellness lifestyle is a work in progress as long as you last. Enjoy making the fine-tuning that life changes invite as time moves along.

Step Eleven: Use fantasy and other forms of imagery self-dialogue to attain a needed sense of life balance and serenity.

Step Twelve: Reach out in service to others. Share your insights about the satisfactions of wellness initiatives. The joy of living well is too great to keep to yourself. Offer it to others--without being a bore to those not even slightly interested in alternatives to worseness or mediocrity.

The 12 Traditions

One famous 12 step program has 12 traditions, so let's adapt them all for wellness purposes.

Tradition One: Get your own act together first. Then worry about someone else, the planet, the evolution of the species and so on.

Tradition Two: You are the ultimate authority for determining the wisdom and methods of your flight from worseness and approach to wellness. A support group is great but responsibility rests with no one else.

Tradition Three: The only requirement for living a wellness lifestyle is a commitment that you are (as of now) living and henceforth will continue to live in such a manner. You do not first have to qualify to live this way.

Tradition Four: Your support group (s) exists only to provide guidance and cheerleading for your quest. If you think it is not performing that mission, disband it and form another.

Tradition Five: Better to initiate a few positive lifestyle enhancements and go about them well than to try a lot of things half-heartedly.

Tradition Six: Avoid associating wellness with a political cause, a religious perspective, a cult, a commercial product or any affiliation that invites automatic resistance or opposition from those with a different cause, perspective, cult, product or affiliation. Running for office on a wellness platform might get you elected but could turn a few good folks away from sensible and beneficial advances. Why? Because of the Groucho Marx syndrome: They wouldn't want to be part of something you promoted!

Tradition Seven: Wellness is best approached in the absence of poverty. Maslow knew this--and so he made up a hierarchy to explain it. Wellness is much more difficult to secure if you are homeless, malnourished, undereducated and/or otherwise without a secure foundation wherein security and safety needs are attended. An important part of wellness, therefore, is a foundation level of financial security. Do not neglect this foundation.

Tradition Eight: You don't need a wellness coach, a wellness center or a library of wellness books/videos and computer games to live in a manner consistent with your best possibilities for physical and emotional well-being. It helps to have some or all of these features at times but you can obtain all the information and encouragement you need on your own, if that's what you choose to do.

Tradition Nine: We do not need a wellness czar to declare what is the way, the truth and the light to wellness. Committees may be nice now and then to make suggestions to the populace but that's as far as it should go -- just suggestions and ideas. The rest is up to you. Use what fits and pass on the rest.

Tradition Ten: A person's lifestyle is an unreliable guide to his/her worth as an individual. The temptation is strong to judge harshly persons who behave in ways that offend sensibilities attuned to personal excellence. Yet, it is in your interest to resist these tendencies, not only because they are often going to be inaccurate but also because judging wears on your own energies and inhibits your ability to love others and yourself.

Tradition Eleven: Who you are and the degree of satisfaction and joy you manifest is the most powerful message you can offer others for the value of wellness. Who you are counts more than what you say. Better to "walk the walk than to talk the talk."

Tradition Twelve: Wellness is not well represented by self-appointed messiahs (or elected messiahs, either). It is not the words of wellness but the living example of such that affects, moves and guides the seeker. Shouldn't we place principles in advance of personalities? Isn't a reformed worseness addict more admirable--and helpful, than an uncensored wellness show-off? Nothing wrong with vaudevillian acts of wondrous wellness, unless it discourages a worseaholic from getting help. Or, frightens the horses. If you can't be humbly well, then at least have the decency to be anonymous.

Readers who are reformed alcoholics as well as anyone who has attended AA meetings or read the "little blue book" entitled "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions" will recognize that the above is part paraphrase and part reinterpretation of the time-tested principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. All changes are for the purpose of defining matters in a non-religious context that address the broader-than-alcoholism issue of worseness (all forms).

I'll sign off by saying, "Hi, I'm Don and I'm a wellnessaholic.

(Note: This essay will be filed in the archives in the PHYSICAL DOMAIN under the skill area of adaptations and challenges. Additional articles related to this theme may be found there.)

(Ed. Note: Views expressed in this and other columns are those of the author and not necessarily those of the SeekWellness Editorial Board.)

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