Today we will discuss the second part of Step 2, our Higher Power restoring us to sanity. This lesson is an important one for recovery. If you are like me you came to Celebrate Recovery because you are looking to change some behavior in your life. In my experience, the mind precedes the body in these kinds of changes, meaning that if we are going to have a change in behavior we are first going to need to have a change in our thinking. Our lesson today discusses the changes we need in our thinking to start the process of changing our behavior.
I have to admit that when I first started my recovery journey I most likely mentally skipped over this part of Step 2 when reading the steps. I probably envisioned this only applying to people who were so far gone they were forced to live under bridges drinking cheap alcohol out of paper bags. As I learned more about the steps though I began to realize that this perception was completely wrong. First of all, this step does not mention the word insanity. This is not saying that our Higher Power will cure some kind of mental illness, but rather that our Higher Power will help to restore our thinking. As I looked back at my thinking and my decision making when I was actively drinking, I began to realize how wrong some of my thinking had been and that I did need help to get to where I could think more clearly.
Our acrostic for tonight is SANITY:
S – Strength
A – Acceptance
N – New Life
I – Integrity
T – Trust
Y – Your Higher Power
Let’s look at each one in more detail:
Strength
This was an area that I certainly had to make some changes in my mindset. Going into recovery I believed that I had to solve all of my problems. In fact, I would go so far as to say I thought it was a sign of weakness to trust in God instead of solving something for myself. One of the things that I learned in recovery though was that this kind of self-reliance was a liability. I had to change my mindset and learn to stop relying on my own strength and rely on God’s. As long as I was trying to do everything myself I was always going to be getting in the way of my own recovery, which is the essence of “Let go and let God” to me.
Acceptance
I had to change my thinking when it came to acceptance as well. It can be very difficult for me to accept when things don’t go my way. When people don’t act the way I expect them to, when things don’t turn out how I predicted they would, when life throws me those unexpected curve balls it always seems to, I can get very upset. I have had to learn to accept that things are not always going to go the way I expect them to or want them to. I think the author of the serenity prayer knows how I feel. In his prayer I am told to “accept the things I cannot change” and that I must take “this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.” In short I must learn to live life on life’s terms rather than expecting everything to be on my terms. Rather than trying to make the world conform to me and then getting upset when it does not, I have had to change my mindset to accept that things will not go my way and trust in my faith and God’s strength to get me through.
My mindset has also been forced to change when it comes to laying blame for my alcoholism. I think that finding blame is a natural instinct for humans. I know at work when we run into a problem, invariably early on somebody asks the question of who’s fault this problem is. While learning from mistakes is important, I’ve never seen a problem solved while trying to find out who is to blame for it. It’s not until we focus on figuring out the steps to solve the problem and then implement those that I’ve seen problems get solved. I have seen the same thing with my sobriety. Before I got in recovery I tended to focus on who’s fault it was that I was an alcoholic. Trying to figure out if it was my fault or somebody else’s never did help me stay sober. It wasn’t until I began focusing on the solution that I actually saw any change in my life. I had to learn to stop focusing my mind on finding fault and instead focus it on the solution.
New Life
I can remember times when I was drinking that I didn’t know if a new life was possible for me. I didn’t know if I could ever stop drinking. I really thought my situation might be hopeless. I had to snap out of that thinking and believe that my life could change for me to commit to working a sobriety program. As long as I stayed in a mindset that nothing could ever change for me, nothing was. Luckily when I got into recovery I met people with the same kind of struggles I have that have been able to maintain long-term sobriety. If this program worked for them, I believed that it could work for me as well.
Integrity
Integrity was definitely a change I had to make in my thinking. For so long I lied to myself and everyone else that this was truly a struggle to be honest. Early in sobriety I kept a journal and my sole rule for that journal was that I had to be 100% honest in what I wrote. Even though this journal was never going to be read by anyone else I still found myself struggling to tell the truth. I found that I would minimize my actions or their impact to make myself feel better without even thinking about doing so. I would write excuses or shift blame to others to cover up for my actions when there really was no excuse for my behavior. I had to teach my mind to start taking accountability for my actions and be honest with myself for what I had done. The good news is that working the steps helps with changing this thinking. Starting with Step 5 where I had to be honest with my sponsor over what I had done in the past and continuing on with Steps 9 and 10 where I have to take honest accountability for my actions I learned to start being honest with myself and others and regain the trust that I had lost.
Trust
Trust was another area that I had to make some changes in my thinking. I had a very difficult time believing that a spiritual solution could be the answer to my drinking problem. I had a difficult time believing that prayer could have any power over my cravings for alcohol. It wasn’t until I saw that this was working for other people that I began to change my thinking and trust that this program could work. In the same way, I also had a tough time trusting other people in the group. I didn’t want to open up to them and be honest about what I had done for fear of judgement or condemnation. As time went on though, I saw how honest people would be when they shared and I realized that rather than judging each other the group would instead focus on the similarities in their own lives and strive to learn from each other. I learned that the people in the group were people I could trust to be completely honest with.
Your Higher Power
I had troubles believing that my higher power could or would help me. As I mentioned previously, I had a difficult time believing that God could be the answer to my problems. In addition to this though, because I had so much guilt and remorse when I started recovery I doubted that God would ever bother to help me. I certainly did not feel like I deserved it. The thing that I had to be reminded of is that God does not always give us what we deserve, he also shows us mercy. Even though I did not feel like I deserved it, I had to learn to reach out to God and ask for His mercy and trust that He would help me if He were sought.
Summary
Here is a quick summary pointed out in the leader’s guide on our Old Thinking versus our New Thinking:
| Old Way of Thinking | New Way of Thinking | |
| Strength | I can solve my problems on my own | Rely on a higher power |
| Acceptance | Angry at the world when things don’t go my way; focus on blaming myself/others for my problems | Accept what happens in life; focusing on the solution |
| New life | Nothing will ever change, I’m stuck | My life can completely change |
| Integrity | Denial, minimizing, lying to cover | Being honest with ourselves and others |
| Trust | Nobody cares about me; I can’t let others see the real me | Trusting the group, using the group as a source of strength and learning |
| Your higher power | God can’t or won’t help me | God loves me and will help me |
Other Thoughts
One of the phrases I heard when I started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings was, “you don’t have a drinking problem you have a thinking problem.” To me this pointed to the importance of changing my mindset if I ever wanted to stop drinking. After all, if my thinking never changed what are the chances that my actions were ever going to change? One line of thinking I had to abandon quickly when I started recovery was the notion that I was on the verge of discovering the solution to my drinking problem. I really thought that all I needed was one or two good tips or techniques on how to deal with my cravings for alcohol and that I was going to be ready to beat my drinking problem. Unfortunately, I was told that I needed to abandon that entire line of thinking. This was tough for me, and it was very humbling for me. What really convinced me of this was a reminder that all my best ideas on how to stay sober had gotten me drunk every time. I wished I could have argued with this statement, but I had to admit it was completely true. If it wasn’t true I wouldn’t have needed to start a recovery program, I’d already be sober. It was at this point that I realized that I needed to start listening to other people’s ideas on how to stay sober, no matter how crazy I thought they were. After all, if I wanted what they had I was going to have to do what they did.
Lessons In Recovery 