When Cultural Silence Meets Step Work

The vulnerability recovery requires can conflict with survival strategies that kept us safe—and both realities matter

My sponsor asked me to make a list of my resentments for Step Four. I sat at my kitchen table after my kids were in bed, pen in hand, and wrote down the obvious ones. The people who’d hurt me. The situations I couldn’t control. The ways alcohol had damaged my life.

Then she asked me to go deeper. “What are you really afraid of?” she said. “What’s underneath the resentment?”

I stared at the blank page for twenty minutes before I wrote it: I’m afraid of confirming what people already think about women like me. I’m afraid of being the one who couldn’t handle it. I’m afraid my family will see me as weak. I’m afraid of breaking the silence we’ve maintained for generations.

She read what I wrote and said, “That’s the shame we’re working on.”

She was right. She was also missing something. The shame in the steps addresses what we did while drinking—the lies, the harm, the ways we betrayed our own values. That shame is real and needs healing.

But I was carrying another kind of shame that existed before my first drink and would outlive my last one. Cultural shame about needing help. Shame about struggling visibly when I’d learned that survival meant appearing strong. Shame about seeking support outside my family when I’d been raised to believe that airing our problems to strangers was betrayal.

Both kinds of shame lived in my body. Step work gave me tools for one. The other required different work.

What Program Shame Addresses

AA’s step work is designed to help us examine the wreckage of our drinking. The Fourth Step asks for a searching and fearless moral inventory—a clear-eyed look at our resentments, fears, and the harm we caused others. The Fifth Step requires sharing that inventory with another person. Later steps involve making amends and continuing to acknowledge when we’re wrong.

This process addresses the shame that comes from our actions while using. The things we did that violated our own values. The people we hurt. The trust we broke. The versions of ourselves we became that we didn’t recognize and didn’t like.

That shame is legitimate. Recovery requires facing it honestly, sharing it with someone who understands, and making repairs where possible. The steps provide a structured way to do that work so shame doesn’t continue to poison our sobriety.

I needed that process. I had amends to make. I had caused real harm to people I loved. Looking at that truth clearly and taking responsibility for it helped me build a foundation for staying sober.

But when my sponsor asked what I was afraid of and I told her about cultural shame, she treated it like another resentment to release. She didn’t understand that this wasn’t about something I’d done wrong. This was about navigating cultural realities that predated my drinking and would continue after I got sober.

The Specific Weight of Cultural Expectations

I grew up in a family where you handled your problems privately. Where asking for help outside the family meant you couldn’t be trusted with family business. Where showing weakness, particularly to outsiders, created vulnerability that had real consequences.

These weren’t arbitrary rules. They came from experience. My family knew what happened when you let people see you struggling—judgments got made, opportunities disappeared, assumptions about your character and your entire community got reinforced.

Strength meant keeping things quiet. Pride meant managing on your own. Loyalty meant protecting the family’s reputation even when you were drowning.

When I finally admitted I couldn’t stop drinking alone, I wasn’t just admitting I had a problem. I was breaking a fundamental rule about how we survived. I was making our private struggle public. I was confirming what I’d spent my life trying to disprove—that I wasn’t strong enough, that I couldn’t handle the pressure, that I was the weak link.

That shame existed separately from anything I’d done while drinking. I carried it into my first meeting. I carried it through early sobriety. I still carry it some days when I share honestly about my struggles and wonder what my mother would think about me telling strangers what she would have kept silent about.

When Step Work Meets Cultural Reality

The program asks for rigorous honesty. The steps require vulnerability—admitting powerlessness, sharing our inventory, acknowledging our wrongs, asking for help.

For women who grew up in cultures where vulnerability meant danger, where admitting you couldn’t handle something had consequences beyond personal growth, that ask is complicated.

Step One says we admitted we were powerless over alcohol. I understood that intellectually. I knew my drinking was out of control. But powerlessness conflicted with survival strategies I’d developed in communities where showing weakness meant people stopped taking you seriously, stopped trusting you with responsibility, stopped seeing you as capable.

I’d learned to project strength even when I was breaking. I’d learned to solve my own problems because asking for help meant owing someone something. I’d learned that vulnerability was a luxury afforded to people with safety nets I didn’t have.

The program was asking me to unlearn those strategies in rooms full of people who mostly hadn’t needed to develop them in the first place.

My sponsor meant well. She pushed me toward honesty because that’s what the program requires. But when I tried to explain that admitting powerlessness felt different for me than it might for her, she told me that was my disease talking. She said everyone struggles with Step One. She said I needed to surrender and let go of my need to appear strong.

She thought she was helping me work through resistance. She didn’t understand she was asking me to abandon protective strategies that had kept me functional in environments that offered no cushion for weakness.

Both Things Can Be True

I was powerless over alcohol. I also needed to be powerful in other areas of my life to survive.

I needed to admit I couldn’t stop drinking alone. I also needed to maintain the strength and competence that allowed me to protect my children, keep my job, and navigate systems that already saw me as less than.

The program’s framework for shame assumed that all shame comes from our actions and needs to be released through steps and amends. My cultural shame came from being seen as someone who couldn’t handle her life, someone who confirmed stereotypes, someone who let her family down by struggling publicly.

Both kinds of shame needed attention. They just required different approaches.

Finding Sponsors Who Understand the Difference

I eventually found a second sponsor, a woman who shared my cultural background. She understood immediately when I talked about cultural shame because she carried her own version of it.

She didn’t treat it as resistance to step work. She didn’t tell me I needed to let it go or that it was my ego protecting my disease. She said, “That’s real. We work the steps, and we also navigate cultural realities that the steps don’t directly address.”

With her, I could separate the shame that needed inventory and amends from the shame that required understanding the systems and cultural contexts I was navigating. She helped me work the steps honestly while also acknowledging that my relationship to powerlessness, to asking for help, to public vulnerability—all of that was shaped by experiences most people in the rooms didn’t share.

My white sponsor hadn’t been wrong about step work. The principles were sound. But her framework assumed shame worked the same way for everyone. It assumed that vulnerability was always healing, that admitting weakness was always growth, that cultural context was secondary to spiritual principles.

My second sponsor helped me see that cultural context shapes how we experience spiritual principles. The steps work within the reality of our lives, not despite it.

What Effective Sponsorship Looks Like

I sponsor women now. When they tell me they’re struggling with shame, I ask questions instead of making assumptions.

“Is this shame about something you did, or shame about being seen as someone who needs help?”

“Are you afraid of what you’ll discover about yourself, or are you afraid of confirming what others already think about people like you?”

“Is this resistance to step work, or is this you navigating cultural realities I might not fully understand?”

Sometimes the shame is straightforward program shame that step work addresses directly. Sometimes it’s layered—program shame wrapped up with cultural shame, family expectations, survival strategies, and protective mechanisms developed over years of navigating spaces that weren’t safe for full honesty.

When it’s layered, we work the steps and we also acknowledge the additional context. We make amends for actual harm caused while drinking. We also recognize that some of what feels like shame is actually reasonable response to real systemic pressures.

I don’t tell women to ignore cultural context in favor of spiritual principles. I help them work spiritual principles within their actual cultural context.

The Work Continues

I’m years into recovery now. I’ve worked all twelve steps multiple times. I’ve made amends. I continue taking inventory. The program gave me tools for addressing the shame of what I did while drinking.

I’ve also done separate work on cultural shame. Therapy helped. Finding community with other women of color in recovery helped. Learning to distinguish between healthy boundaries and cultural silence helped. Understanding that I can protect my sobriety and be honest about my struggles without abandoning the values my family taught me—that helped too.

Some days I still feel the pull of cultural expectations that say struggling visibly makes me weak. Some days I wonder if sharing my story in meetings confirms assumptions about women like me. Some days the old protective mechanisms activate and I want to project strength instead of admitting I’m having a hard day.

The difference is I can see it now. I can recognize when cultural shame is driving my decisions. I can choose how to respond rather than just reacting from old survival patterns.

That awareness came from working the steps and from doing the additional work of understanding how cultural context shaped my relationship to shame in the first place.

What We Need From the Program

Women of color need sponsors who can hold complexity. Who don’t treat cultural shame as resistance to step work. Who understand that vulnerability looks different depending on what you’ve survived and what systems you’re navigating.

We need meetings where we can talk about cultural context without having to explain or defend its relevance. We need space for both spiritual principles and systemic realities.

We need the program to acknowledge that shame operates differently depending on your identity and experience. That asking for help can mean something different when you’ve learned that showing weakness has consequences. That admitting powerlessness can feel different when you’ve had to fight for every bit of power you’ve managed to claim in a world that offers you very little.

The steps work. I believe that. I’ve watched them work in my life and in the lives of countless other women. But they work best when we can apply them within the full context of our lived reality, not by abandoning that reality in favor of a framework designed around different experiences.

Recovery is possible for all of us. The path requires honesty about all the shame we carry—the shame from our drinking and the shame from navigating a world that judges us for struggling in the first place. Both matter. Both need attention. And we need space in recovery to address both without having to choose between spiritual growth and cultural survival.

I protect my sobriety by working the steps. I also protect it by understanding the cultural forces that shaped my relationship to shame, vulnerability, and asking for help. The program gave me one set of tools. My community and my own hard-won awareness gave me the others.

All of it matters. All of it contributes to staying sober one day at a time.