Sort of In 12 Step, Mostly Hung Up On The God Thing
How Your Close Mindedness & Basic Misunderstandings Short Circuit Your Sobriety
“I can’t do this God thing in 12 step. It’s asking way too much. I’m out.”
I wish I had $10 for every time I’ve heard someone in12 Step utter those words; telling me that there’s no room for spiritualism in his life. Funny though…
God and spiritualism are not the same thing.
In the rooms of AA, SA, NA, OA, GA, people hear what they want to hear. And, as errors go that’s unfortunate, because it’s really one of Our core problems. That is, we routinely close Our ears — frequently Our eyes, and yes, we thoroughly nail shut the front door of our minds. Here we sit. Closed up, and closed off.
But look a little closer…being closed off was how we were slowly killing ourselves. The kicker was that Our ego did not allow Us to mount a successful argument against self, and win it.
Consequently, we can’t recall a time when Our voice was not the loudest one in Our head…in the apartment…in the car…at the office…in the classroom…in the threapists’s office…in the bedroom…in group. There are a gazillion reasons why we turned up the internal talk volume to 11, and left it there for decades. I know. I did it.
I/We did this not because it was a championship idea set apart from all lesser ones. Dude, we cranked up the self-talk volume to crowd-control levels because we perceived it worked. We didn’t care about the wisdom of that mindset; we were not seeking wisdom, we were seeking relief through pacification and self-medication. Why?
Pain and trauma drown you unless you self-comfort with a voice that drowns out all the other stuff — and people. This was where we learned to be closed off for specific reasons; to stop specific harms. For many of Us, the trusted voice that did not signal danger was Ours. When others could nor or would not help Us, Our self-talk voice quickly obeyed when summoned.
In those years, we taught ourselves that whatever script we summoned must be good for us. Decades later when we climbed out of Our heads— often for a few moments at a time, we glimpsed that Our voice, Our words, Our emotions, Our self-talk, Our arguments, Our fantasies were not as soothing, helpful, or healthy as we believed.
That realization was not a moment of clarity; it was a moment of clearity. It’s awfulness was scary.
How it came to us we were not able to say. Interestingly, we could not summon that moment across the years. However it happened, we glimpsed it. Yet something else more important landed on Us. That something else was a second moment of realization sometimes filled with emotion. Whether or not we experienced emotions, there was something else…surrender. We saw a truth stretched across the road as if ten feet in front of the car hood.
That message of truth was simple. This was not the God “moment.” Nope. This moment, like all things in early sobriety, was so simple as to evade seeing or sensing. As a sort of myopia, it revealed something not about 12 Step but about Our uncanny ability to hyper-complicate every part of Our thinking, Our lives. This crystal clear insight became reducible to these words: in that moment we became teachable.
Our pain and trauma — constant life companions, did not immeditely lift away. But, we began to hear others in the room(s). We could feel the force of struggle, dark energy, deep hopelessness, and utter unmanageability in others’ shares. Something else happened; we learned compassion for someone outside of Us.
Almost accidentally, we turned that compassion for others, inward. An act of mercy upon self signaled the beginning of conversion. Of what?
Here, some in the program turned to the God of the Old and New Testament, Torah, or Islam. Some sought stoicism, while others pursued far eastern faiths. However, all relied upon the Steps. All oriented on helping those around Us. Here, we learned to push Us farther down today’s to-do list; self obsession began to die. We gave up being closed off. We located truth and experienced relief in our new ability to be taught.
However, we saw others ricocheting off the program, or struggling in it. While they had qualities in common, many intellectually high-centered themselves on “the God thing” as they called it. They over-reasoned, over-analyzed, over debated; in short, they obsessed. Their problem was not external, in God…it was internal, in themselves.
I close where I began. Is doing 12 Step the same as doing God? No. It is about spirituality, your spirituality. This is where we can’t win our sobriety by cheering for someone else in the room. We’ve got to do this for ourselves. Ceasing being closed off was climbing out of the deep well that became Our life. When we achieved this, we became teachable.
To review:
Q: Is 12 Step a God program?
A: When I become teachable, I discover my Higher Power, god as I understand Him. 12 Step is a program of conversion.
My name is Mig. I can be found at: the.recovered.life@gmail.com
