In psychotherapy terms one can see the process of being ready as trusting the newly accepted and worked on inner parent.  The previous parent may have many distorted beliefs that are harmful, negative, punitive and toxic.  Therefore, self destructive when engaging in life in a healthy and emotionally mature way.  The parent ego state which holds the internal messages one has collected from childhood can be full of slogans, commands, statements, misapprehensions, fantasies carried from generations and passed down.  With any toxic process we can react to the environment and others which effects our character.  This relates to the step 6 “defects of character” and that we all have survival flaws as a response to life and significant others.  This is part of our life script the storehouse of messages we have collected in our parent ego state.  Some of this is not trustworthy and we build strategies to survive the process.  Being entirely ready to surrender control to the higher power is about trusting that spiritual parent.  At least enough to hand ourselves over to just “being” in the world and then living life on life’s terms.  In therapy this can take time as individuals have put their trust in their internalised little professors “the parent in the child ego state” to possibly survive the parental messages or magical beliefs carried from experience.  Here the process of developing a different parental introject that is trustworthy allows the individual to let go of old strategies that are counter-productive “defects of character”.