The following article was originally published in the September 2025 issue of The Integrative Therapist, a publication of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration (SEPI).
In this article, I will describe the integrative process I followed in writing The Proactive Twelve Steps. From the get-go, I saw this project as building a bridge between the perspectives of Twelve-Step groups and of contemporary, trauma-informed therapy. It is difficult to do so when the wording of the traditional Steps has so much to do with God or a Higher Power.
So, the idea was to not focus so much on the words as on the process. What is it that happens to people who successfully follow the Twelve Step process? Is it just that they are healed by the grace of God or a Higher Power? Or is there, beyond the words, a process that can be described in more down to earth terms than the traditional Steps do?
The key word here is process. There are specific steps in the book, twelve of them, as we all know. But these steps are not just tasks in a behavioral sense. They are essentially ways to practice and deepen the kind of mindful self-inquiry that parallel what we do with our clients in therapy.
The central insight is that the Steps, like therapy, engage people in a mindful process of self-discovery. The Steps, like therapy, foster is a climate in which the client is encouraged to zero in on the underlying condition of the problems they have. In other words, to see the symptoms as an entry point and an invitation to dig deeper.
The problem behavior is dealt with by putting change within the broader context of an ‘ecosystem.’ To quote the book:
“To break an unbreakable habit, you don’t focus doggedly on the habit itself. You change your life so that this bad habit becomes obsolete. Your new life supports habits that are good for you. In other words, you focus on the person as opposed to the habit. You put your efforts into changing the ecosystem. You build an ecosystem that will support the life you want.”
The book follows the arc of the 12 step process, but it describes this process in terms that reflect a trauma-informed approach. It describes dysfunctional behaviors as coping mechanisms that are an attempt at regulation. It acknowledges how powerfully vulnerability, and fear of their vulnerability, compel our clients to stick to their default behaviors.
To address this conundrum, The Proactive Twelve Steps progressively leads the readers to understanding how their patterns of behavior are ways of coping with deep fears. It does so in a mindful, embodied way that allows for in-depth integration of what it’s like to face reality.
For instance, Step Two uses the metaphor of disentangling a cord to describe the process. This is a powerful image that goes beyond the intellect to evoke the felt experience of disentangling. Pulling mindlessly does not work. You have to shift gears. You need to engage with what you are doing. So the metaphor speaks to our embodied experience.
And Step Three provides a concrete way to shift from mindless behavior: taking a mindful pause. This is not the same as pausing a video, where everything will resume unchanged by the pause. As a human being, taking a mindful pause means becoming curious, paying attention to inner experience, and being affected by it.
Thus, the progression of steps trains you to be increasingly able to stay with your experience of life, instead of immediately bouncing away from it into your coping mechanisms. As you develop the ability to confront your fears, you are able to progressively experiment with new behaviors.
The key point here is not so much the behavior change, as the process that makes it possible. This mindful process leads you to engage in situations that are starkly different from past experience. To use old language, these are “corrective emotional experiences.”
In more contemporary terms, we can say that this process trains you to notice what neuroscientists call “prediction errors,” that is, mismatches between what is expected and what actually happens. Such mismatches make memories more malleable and allow for new meaning to emerge in a lasting way.
My point is that this book is a resource that helps our clients practice, on their own, the kind of process that leads to memory reconsolidation and makes therapy more effective.
The above is a reprint from the September 2025 issue of The Integrative Therapist, a publication of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration (SEPI).