I'm not a doctor, but I play one in my life

The subject of today's meeting was Step Two. Two is key for me, because my Step One was very sincere, a very low bottom. I was disgusted by my behavior and I couldn't stop. Desperate. Step Three was fairly easy for me, because I've always been one to jump on the bandwagon. Very willing. Recovery has been a very good thing to commit to.

Step Two is hard, harder for me. I like to entertain the notion that I'm special, especially damned and beyond hope. I'm really not all that hard a case, but I feel incurable. I think this arises from my experience of not being able to fix myself. I can be so hard-headed that I think "If I can't fix it, no one can".

I'm such an expert. I am also an expert on most other people.

Step Two tells me that there is something out there that can make me whole. It also tells me that that power is not me. From this, I understand that the best thing I can do is get out of the way. The doctor (God) wants to work on me, but I need to get out of the way first.

That is really, really hard for me. For some reason, I am always searching, always reaching. I think my mind is completely devoted to being a problem-solver. There is no bigger problem than me. How is that for grandiosity?

Thinking about it more as I drove from the meeting, there is only one Step where I fix anything, and that is Step 9. I fix -- or at least try to fix -- the messes I have made along the way. And even that is a humble task, because I do not really fix the issue, I do my best to mend the issue. I treat the problems of the past, I do not ultimately correct them.

But the other Steps, the other actions of recovery, none of them are about me fixing anything. None. It is just not part of the program. What is a part? Accepting. Accepting. Always, always I want things to be different. I guess I am afraid that if I accept things, things will not change. That is my fear. That is the little "truth" that keeps me in a state of personal meddling.

God, I am afraid of letting go. I am afraid that I am not going to be taken care of. I am afraid that letting go means giving up. I am a fighter. I am a fighter. Man, am I beat up.

So, I have a lot to learn. Luckily, I do not have to go anywhere to, catch anything, hold anything to learn it. I just need to be here now. I need to let go.

Please God, you are welcome to my sorrow, you know how to sooth it.
You are welcome to my pain, you know how to treat it gently,
God, you are welcome to mistakes, you know which step lead me astray,
You are welcome to my plans, you know better than I.

May I accept what is happening now
May I move forward with simplicity
May I look backward with equanimity
May I be grateful for all that happens

Encasing my suffering ... in ice

I promised to post again about yesterday. I promised to post again last night, but today will have to do.

I didn't stay with my suffering yesterday. About an hour after I wrote the previous post, I opened up my browser and started reading about Iran. I don't live in Iran, I'm not of Iranian descent, I'm not a diplomat, I'm not a politician. But I decided that it was important that I know just what was going on there.

There's something admirable about staying on top of important news stories; staying informed. But that is not what I was doing.

What I was doing was avoiding. I was in turmoil and I reached out for something that would help me forget. I equate it to putting my emotions on ice. Television is my traditional numbing device. In recent years, the Internet has taken that position. What's yours?

So, there were a couple of hours there where I knew a lot about the pain of Iranian disenfranchisement, but not a lot about my pain. And then, of course, I started to "gently" berate myself for being lazy, for wasting time, for not living up to my word, for not taking care of myself. Do you know this trap?

I realized I was in that trap and started taking better care of myself. I called a friend in recovery, actually two. I made and ate lunch. Then I went to a 12-step meeting after work. These things all brought me back to reality.

Recovery is sort of like a jigsaw puzzle. If you work on it, you'll make progress. If you just leave it there on the card table, you won't. So, I actually had an opportunity to process some of the pain that was lying within me, but I took a pass. It wasn't that the pain was too much, it's just that I decided to go another way. I'm conditioned to avoid. That's just how I am.

This is an example of taking the 2d Step without taking the 3d Step.

I have made a decision to live differently, to feeling my feelings straight through. I didn't do that, not completely. I have a little bit of a raw feeling about that, like I let myself down. I did. But I'm also aware that I am learning, slowly, how to take care of myself. I need to both recognize my shortcomings without shame while acknowledging what progress I have made.

And, all things considered, yesterday was a good day. I took one step forward and no steps back.

Your higher power is who you think is in charge

Being a practical addict is sometimes an uphill battle. I want things to make sense. When things don't make sense, I want to reject them. One big obstacle is the concept of a higher power. I've developed a working relationship with my higher power in a practical way that works for me.

It's a slow process and it comes down to this: what am I willing to believe today? I have not had a great thunder-strike realization about God. I'm trying not to stand in the way of that happening, but I'm also not waiting around for it. I can't afford to wait around for me to completely accept a concept of a higher power. I could die before then, or at least live miserably before then. I don't think that's my higher power's will for me. So I need to find a concept of a higher power that I'm willing to believe in today.

I've made a lot of progress in accepting the reality of a higher power in my life. I'm not going to get into the particulars on this post, or maybe any post. I realized last night in a meeting that I keep my concept of a higher power pretty sketchy. I think that's practical for me, because I have a tendency to tear down the things I construct. Negative skepticism. My experience so far and my expected experience for the rest of my life is that God will be revealed to me only partially. I need to keep my attention on the fraction of my imagination that has faith rather than the fraction that lacks faith. It's hazy now and will forever be a little hazy. So, I need to be at peace with the haze, with the doubt.

But back to the point at hand, my first toehold into having any faith in a higher power is this: my higher power is whoever or whatever I believe is really in charge. It's a simple question: What is the ultimate authority in my life?

The practical aspect of this for me is that I can start my faith in a higher power without having to believe in anything supernatural. Even a complete atheist -- which I'm not -- has a concept of the ultimate authority. No one believes there are no rules. You can deny Noah's flood, but you can't deny gravity or death or the sweetness of a lollipop.

When I reflect deeply on what or who is really in charge, it exposes the fact that I have been living my life under the control of some false gods. The primary false god is me. I have found anxious refuge many times in the belief that I am the ultimate authority. I say anxious, because being my own higher power is a miserable experience. I am a jealous god and my subjects are very uncooperative.

The other ultimate authority has been my parents, or more broadly "other people." I seem to have this chorus of clucking Presbyterians continually holding judgment over my thoughts and actions. This higher power, while moral, consistent and fairly accessible, has not been particularly humane, at least not towards my native inclination to fail to take faith at face value.

My relationship to a higher power has developed through reviewing my preconceived notions of ultimate authority. I take up the idea, reflect on it and accept what I can believe and discard what I can't. This initially doesn't leave me with a lot to believe in. But for me -- and this is very important -- I don't get a lot of spiritual traction by giving lip service to something I don't believe in. So, rather, I have pared down my faith to just that little bit I can believe in.

From that little beginning I can build a faith that is appropriate to me. I don't have to fit myself to another's faith, no matter how exquisite. That didn't work for me as a child and it doesn't work for me now.

So, it's about making faith work for me. I'm a very imperfect vessel, and today I humbly admit that I have an imperfect solution. It's a slow process, but it grows and builds within me and without me in a natural way.

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.