One person's thoughts on Higher Powers in Recovery

When I got to rehab, I was absolutely broken.  I had lost everything, and I had absolutely no idea how I was going to move forward.  I wanted to be better, but I had no idea how to handle the emotions that kept me petrified, and the idea of mopping up the giant mess I had made of my life was too daunting to think about.  I was mentally paralyzed, and I dealt with this by walking.  Every second I wasn’t in a rehab session, I was walking the big loop that went around the rehab grounds - dozens of times a day.  I was teased by the others, but it was surprisingly gentle teasing, because everyone knew what I was going through.  They just dealt with their situation differently.   Some of them played ping-pong incessantly, some of them sat and told war stories, some of them read.  A lot of them were on the semi-public phones all the time begging and promising and crying.  

The rehab I went to was based on the 12 steps, and I had always avoided these programs because I was convinced I didn’t believe in God.  I thought they couldn’t help me because I was lacking a core belief on which the program was based, so I had never really tried.  After all, the steps specifically mention “God” several times.  Being stuck in a program for 30 days, I was finally put in a situation where I had to identify a Higher Power.   I initially started out calling the Universe my Higher Power.   At that time, I smoked a pack a day (probably more), and I was frequently out at night smoking and staring off into the stars.  The constellation Orion was always in the center of the sky when I went out to smoke before bed, so why not?  If I had to pick a Higher Power (which I was pretty pissy about), then that would be it.   I felt like the Universe ran according to its own rules, and I certainly didn’t have any say in how things turned out.    

When I learned more about the program, I learned that the key phrase in the Steps is “God as we understand Him.”   This is a critical qualifier and cracked wide open everything I thought I knew about 12-step programs.   I had never been encouraged to fashion my own vision of “God” before, and the idea was very appealing to me.  It was at that time a long-forgotten memory came back to me.  I remembered being a small child (3 or 4) living in our small farming community and being taken to Church every week.   I hate to say it, but at that time, I had never met a black person before.  There were none in our little town at that time, and I had only ever seen them on TV.  So whenever I heard “God” I always pictured Him as a friendly black man with grey hair on a cloud, because black people were just as rare and esoteric to me as God was.  I made the mistake of telling people about my ideas and was laughed at (by adults) and quickly told “that’s not what God looks like.” So my earliest ideas of God were being told what he is and isn’t with no room for my own ideas.  This perceived inflexibility of God followed me into adulthood, and I had always refused to believe in something I couldn’t relate to.   

When I had the opportunity to decide what a God would look like to me, it fundamentally changed the way I thought.   My God was based on the Christianity I was raised with, with several important differences.  To this day I have reservations about organized religion and strict adherence to the Bible.  I believe that even if it is the true word of God, it was transcribed by fallible humans and re-transcribed thousands of times.  Like a written game of telephone, I have to believe that the thoughts and understandings of the individual transcribing and translating the words must have crept in and changed the message over time.   That’s just me, friends, I certainly don’t know everything, but that’s the loving God of my understanding.   If I’m completely honest, I always picture my grandma, who passed away in 2005, up there whispering in God’s ear because someone has certainly been watching out for me. 

As I got further into recovery, I discovered that when people discussed their Higher Powers in meetings, it was almost always a reference to my God, or my Higher Power.   I found that meetings were not religious, even though God was referenced frequently.   Everyone had their own beliefs and they were all respected - it was actually amazing.   I met someone in rehab who had suffered horrific abuse at the hands of his parents growing up.  He was unable to believe in a God who would allow those things to happen to a child, so he had chosen a frog to be his Higher Power.  Apparently back at his home, there was a frog that was always croaking outside of his window all night no matter what he did.  So he finally resigned himself to the fact that he had no control over the frog, even though it could affect his life (at least his quality of sleep!).   And you know what? This worked for him and we all respected that. 

I discovered that for some people whose beliefs include believing in a God, then, yes, their Higher Power is their God.  But for atheists and everyone else, Higher Powers are really any concept or force that has power over them.  It’s about control – both having it and admitting that we don’t have it.  Addicts are control freaks, and most of us used a loss of control, big or small, as an excuse to drink or use.   Tell me if any of this sounds familiar:

I wasn’t going to drink/use today, but then:

-          My boss made me stay late;

-          My partner pissed me off, so I’m going to get back at him/her;

-          My team lost;

-          I got an unexpected bill;

-          I got really worried about something;

-          I have to do something I don’t want to do;

-          I really need something to cheer me up;

-          My kids won’t listen to me;

-          I had a crappy day - I deserve to do something for myself;

-          Etc…….

These, and countless other excuses are exemplative of normal life things that are beyond our control, but they are a huge source of anxiety for almost everyone.   In my experience, trying to control the future, and other people, and most life events, is an exercise in futility, and guaranteed to cause anxiety.  Before my body was completely dependent on alcohol, my expectations of others and desire to control the uncontrollable are the things that used to keep me drinking.  I would wake up in the morning and swear I wasn’t going to drink that day, and then something would happen (because that’s what life does), and I would use it as a justification for drinking.   I believe that modern life sells us daily the idea that we can control the uncontrollable.  There's huge money in it. From wrinkle creams to designer medications to universities and pretty much everything you see an advertisement for, they are all trying to sell us the idea that we have some control over the things that are important to us.  We are "empowered" to the point of being unrealistic about what we have control over. As an alcoholic, I took this one delusional step further. Even when I was strapped to a hospital bed for an alcohol-fueled psychiatric incident (see my previous post), I still thought I could control my drinking and get my life back together. When we buy into these ideas of control and still fail to have the desired outcome, most of us caught in addiction will see it as a personal failing and will escape rather than try to face the real issue.  The real issue being that whatever you call it, something bigger than us is in control and we must accept our powerlessness before we can begin to heal.