Restoration of Sanity in the Second Step

There are three tests of faith in the 2d Step: faith in a higher power, faith in a process of coming to believe and faith that we can be restored to sanity. The last one is also remarkable in that it says sanity will be restored.

I don't know if I've ever been sane. I certainly know that I was innocent, but I don't really count that. The simplicity of childhood was just simplicity for me. There was a truck and I played with it. There was a Popsicle and I ate it. Once I really started to have to make decisions about my life, I can't say I've been very sane.

But there it is in Step Two, "restore us to sanity". I think there are three stages of sanity in recovery. The first is the insanity of my addiction. The second is the time when my addiction is in remission and now I have to deal with the fact that I still have a lot of problems. The third stage is recovered sanity, where I'm okay and I understand the word serenity and so forth; the promise of The Promises.

I'm squarely in the Second Stage of sanity. There is a book called Stage II Recovery by Earnie Larson and I read it after I passed one year's sobriety the first time. It was a gift from my sponsor. I'm grateful for the care and attention of my sponsor. I may be liberally quoting the contents of that book. If I am, my apologies to Mr. Larsen. Consider it a review.

The belief that there is a basic sanity, a core integrity to me is pretty novel. The religion I grew up in believes in original sin; a basic flaw to humanity. There's really a lot of spiritual opportunity in believing that there is an imperfection, an incompleteness to us, and I'm open-minded enough not to sell it short. I've heard that God enters through our flaws. But the shaming part of me takes the idea of a fundamental flaw and conflates it to: I'm all bad. I can be dissatisfied when the cup is 3% empty. My addiction was the treatment for the fundamental belief that I am flawed. Gradually and progressively, I came to equate my addictive self as the incarnation of that flaw.

Round and round and round. How I had convinced myself that my misery was just the fulfillment of my destiny. I don't think that way anymore and I don't live that way anymore.

The 2d Step is an early one, but what a grand promise. Restoration to sanity. If I have ever been sane, I'm either forgetting that I was sane or I was just to young to have actually noted it. Maybe, maybe the promise of the 2d Step is that there is a basic sanity to me that I have not ever experienced, that perhaps exists, spiritually, and the Steps can help me towards that. That seems reasonable, even hopeful.

But then I get caught up in the cycle of self-improvement, the march toward perfection. And there I am always falling short. Perfection is definitely the wrong road for me to take. It is more humane and more effective, actually, for me to accept who I am right now and move from there.

Perhaps I'm confused about sanity. I'm so far from it, really, that I think it's perfection. As an aside, it is almost humorous when people who are having difficulty with getting a few days' sobriety say they don't think they can be perfect. It's funny because I know damn well that sobriety is not anything like perfection. Perfection resides always beyond our reach.

Sanity might just be taking life for what it is. I definitely did that as an infant and probably a toddler, too. And then I grew up. Paradise Lost. So, is maturity, is adulthood insanity? I don't think that's it. There are people who aren't insane and who also are not in recovery. I think for me, perhaps I had difficulty being an adult and being sane. The freedom to make decisions for myself was definitely overwhelming. I didn't know what was good for me, didn't know how to nurture myself. And so I gravitated to insanity: erecting a uniquely skewed concept of what life is that no one else could understand or share. That's actually kind of a hard one to swallow. But there seems to be some spiritual traction there. I'm feeling some compassion for my young self right now. And compassion for my current self too. I was unprepared for the rigors of living.

I have so much to learn about being gentle with myself.

I'm finding reality difficult this week. I guess I've always found it difficult. But I'm not experiencing it as impossible these days. I've come to believe I can find a way to live sanely with God's help. That open-mindedness, the opening to the possibility of restoration is my experience of the 2d Step today. Dear God, it's slow, but like water wearing down a rock in the river, it is working.