Step 2: Willing vs. Willful

Brothers, on this journey through recovery programs’ 12 steps – steps with meaningful lessons for addict and non-addict alike – we’ll build on last month’s Step 1, admitting powerlessness, to now focusing on the long road of gentle (and, sometimes, not so gentle) surrender to this admission. An acceptance of reality as it is … not as we’d like it to be.

Surrendering, slowly, we “Came to believe” we could be “restored to sanity.” (The “power greater than ourselves” middle portion from above we’ll explore more fully next month with Step 3 … wording mirrored verbatim, BTW, in Illuman’s vision statement!)

Being “restored to sanity” implies we are in some ways insane, meaning not aligned with reality. Insanity driven by our addictions to substances (alcohol, drugs), or behaviors (sex, eating, gambling), or just most people’s addiction to ego’s delusion of control over life/reality, aka “self will run riot” (Alcoholics Anonymous, p.62). What this functionally means is that, at some point in our lives, our insanity brings us to our knees before a reality we can no longer pretend to be in control of. We hit, what’s called in the rooms, rock bottom.

For me personally, my sexual addiction (gratefully recovering 23 years now), drove me to the insanity that tore my soul into the “false-self”, outward-facing “nice” Steve (family man/loving husband), and the shadow-self Steve acting out my addictive obsessions and compulsions – marinating in me since early childhood – and causing wreckage and suffering all around, not only to those I loved, but also to myself – head and heart, body and soul.

And in being driven to my knees thus, I paradoxically found the hope to heal this split. As Rami Shapiro (Recovery – The Sacred Art, p. 35) puts it: “Behind the addicted you, behind the insane you, there is a greater you, a sane you, a pure you that the Hindus call atman and the Westerners call soul, a unique manifestation of God that is your true self.”

Slowly, willingly (vs willfully), we “came to believe” in that sane self, that true self, as a unique and beloved manifestation of the Divine Self. A self that can finally, freely choose to be aligned with the reality of the really real. As Richard puts it (Breathing Underwater, p. 8): “To finally surrender ourselves to healing, we have to have three spaces opened up within us – and all at the same time: our opinionated head, our closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body.”

I hope you’ll join me next month for Step 3 and opening up the space in our head/heart/body – the “God-sized hole in us” as some call it – to the magnificent mystery of a caring “God as we understood God.”

For a short visual poem on this opening, click here: https://poetstevieg.com/Open.html