Step Two

[caressa]

Thank you both for sharing. As a friend of mine said to me, "It said God 'could' restore me to sanity, it didn't say He 'would' and if so when! The longer I stay sober, the crazier I get but it is not the insanity of when I was using. The insanity of my denial and my unwillingness to look at me. The insanity of living in that fear for so many years.

[caressa]

Any number of A.A.'s can say to the drifter, "Yes, we were diverted from our childhood faith, too. The overconfidence of youth was too much for us. Of course, we were glad that good home and religious training had given us certain values. We were still sure that we ought to be fairly honest, tolerant, and just, that we ought to be ambitious and hardworking. We became convinced that such simple rules of fair play and decency would be enough."As material success founded upon no more than these ordinary attributes began to come to us, we felt we were winning at the game of life. This was exhilarating, and it made us happy. Why should we be bothered with theological abstractions and religious duties, or with the state of our souls here or hereafter? The here and now was good enough for us.

The will to win would carry us through. But then alcohol began to have its way with us. Finally, when all our score cards read `zero,' and we saw that one more strike would put us out of the game forever, we had to look for our lost faith. It was in A.A, that we rediscovered it. And so can you."

My religious experience was very strict. No dancing, no playing cards, no playing anything on Sunday. I got hit if I said 'heck' because it meant hell. I got hit if I said darn because it mean da*n and it wasn't always the action, it was the thought behind it. We went to church three times on Sunday, Wednesday was prayer meeting and if my dad was obliging or around, he drove us to Young People's on Friday if we couldn't arrange a ride.

Being the preacher's son's daughter gave me the excuse to use for years. I was raised to be a lady and spent most of my years trying to disprove the fact. I resented the lady I think because she represented rules and regulations that I hadn't been willing to follow. I always felt like I was being put in a box and always felt like I had to break out. A 200 acre farm is a big box. I couldn't wait to leave it. Two institutions of marriage were boxes that were boxes that isolated me from being myself. I lived my life through these people and through the addiction that was to follow, I lost my identity, my integrity and my sense of self and well being. My whole life was filled with 'thou shall not!' and for most of my life I rebelled. As a result of that rebellion, I figured I might as well be hung as a sheep as a lamb and justified my very existance, using, and choice by the fact that I was going to be struck down at any time in my life so I might as well live my life my way and make the best of it before God punished me.

It was such a great spiritual experience for me to learn that everything wasn't black and white and that there were shades of gray. It was freeing to know that everything wasn't died in stone or that I would be stoned if I didn't believe what other people believed. I didn't have to follow other people's beliefs, I could find my own truth, my own God, and my own freedom from bondage. That was the gift that AA gave me.

[caressa]

Now we come to another kind of problem: the intellectually self-sufficient man or woman. To these, many A.A.'s can say, "Yes, we were like you--far too smart for our own good. We loved to have people call us precocious. We used our education to blow ourselves up into prideful balloons, though we were careful to hide this from others. Secretly, we felt we could float above the rest of the folks on our brainpower alone. Scientific progress told us there was nothing man couldn't do. Knowledge was all-powerful. Intellect could conquer nature. Since we were brighter than most folks (so we thought), the spoils of victory would be ours for the thinking.

The god of intellect displaced the God of our fathers. But again John Barleycorn had other ideas. We who had won so handsomely in a walk turned into all-time losers. We saw that we had to reconsider or die. We found many in A.A, who once thought as we did. They helped us to get down to our right size. By their example they showed us that humility and intellect could be compatible, provided we placed humility first.
When we began to do that, we received the gift of faith, a faith which works.

This faith is for you, too."

This was like mirror, mirror on the wall, and yet I didn't have a lot of education and didn't do a lot of college until I came into recovery, I had read a lot, had advanced in my field and there wasn't a department in an office that I hadn't worked in so the great I am thought she knew it all.

One of my sponsors use to say, "Are you still intellectualizing? Stop it!" I wanted to know the whys and wherefore of everything. I wanted to figure it out and I was still trying to play God with my life.

Hearing a long-timer share on humilty helped me to to understand that I had to remain teachable. That I had to open my mind to other ideas and concepts and that my best thinking and ideas got me to where I was and doing the same thing over and over again, was the insanity of my disease not my intelligence.

My control was an illusion. Control doesn't work it only makes enemies and isolates the spirit and leaves me standing alone blocked from the goodness of God's blessings. I couldn't organize my life and make everything fit, I had to take down the walls, open the windows and doors and let the Spirit of God come in. It wasn't until I put the word control in place of powerless that I could truly understand how little power I had and that when I surrendered, I was empowered to help myself. There is a big difference.

I developed a faith in the program. I saw it working in the lives of others and slowly but surely, it began to infiltrate into my life and I was able to build on it in the next Step.

To be continued...

[caressa]

Another crowd of A.A.'s says: "We were plumb disgusted with religion and all its works. The Bible, we said, was full of nonsense; we could cite it chapter and verse, and we couldn't see the Beatitudes for the `begets.' In spots its morality was impossibly good; in others it seemed impossibly bad. But it was the morality of the religionists themselves that really got us down. We gloated over the hypocrisy, bigotry, and crushing self-righteousness that clung to so many `believers' even in their Sunday best.

How we loved to shout the damaging fact that millions of the `good men of religion' were still killing one another off in the name of God. This all meant, of course, that we had substituted negative for positive thinking. After we came to A.A,, we had to recognize that this trait had been an ego feeding proposition. In belaboring the sins of some religious people, we could feel superior to all of them. Moreover, we could avoid looking at some of our own shortcomings. Self-righteousness, the very
thing that we had contemptuously condemned in others, was our own besetting evil. This phony form of respectability was our undoing, so far as faith was concerned. But finally, driven to A.A,, we learned better.

Like everything else in my life, I compared instead of identifying. I was brought up in a very strict religion and yet it teachings were simple. There were no pews, just wooden chairs. No stain glassed windows, just opaque glass, a pot bellied stove that stood near the back of the church, wainscoting around the bottom of the walls, very simple and very plain and there was no minister, just lay ministers, people who felt the spirit of God who got up and shared. I don't know how the person was chosen to share on Sunday. It was seldom that it was the same man twice in a row unless he was doing what I called a mini series. There was a group of elders who made decisions for the church and the whole structure was a lot like the rooms of recovery.

The main difference with that church was filled with thou shall not and this is what you should believe and do. In AA things were suggested but there were some darn well betters or you would go back out and drink again.

When I went to other churches, I had a problems with the rituals, the decor, the 'read' prayers and as much as some of them were very nice and quite touching, they didn't come from the heart of the person sharing them. It was like a meeting I went to once and a woman and written out her story and shared more from the paper than from the spirit of the moment.

So many things are repetitive and we get annoyed and think, I have heard this before and often tend to shut it off and yet, how easily we forget. It amazes me when I go to a meeting and people have to look at the page to quote the 12 Steps. Yet the words mean nothing if you don't know them and apply them to your life. The spiritual principles are there for application not for my education. It is easy to talk the walk, but much easier said than done.

I had trouble with the robes and the fancy churches feeling that they were trimmings and money ill spent that could be given helping the people and the glory of God not the glory of the Church. It didn't attract me and didn't promote religion to me. Especially when I saw people going on Sunday to church and then leaving their principles at the door on the way out. Doing penance for something you did only to go out and do it again didn't sit well with me and yet how many times did I do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. This time it will be different. Yeah! Sure! I would have remorse and guilt but seldom did I ask for forgiveness, certainly not for myself.

I am not sure that resented the people so much as the teachings of the church. Who died and made them God. A sponsee would phone me and say she was going to mass. She would ask, "Would you like to say a prayer for you." I would respond, "You don't need to bother, I have a direct line." There came a time, I would ask for prayers and figured I need all the help I could get. I figured an extra word now and then could only help the cause instead of hinder it. I heard a speaker who became a priest in recovery say, "It is a wonder God doesn't lean over the edge of heaven and shout, "Will you all just shut up!" We tend to keep asking for help and not having the faith that the first one will work and we send up a deluge of words and many forms asking for the same thing over and over again instead of being quiet and listening for the answers.

It is amazing how we can surround ourselves with that self-righteous cloak and think that we are so much better than others. I will never forget hearing many people say, "But that is a street meeting, I can't relate to them...." I did it one night at a group called "The Thunderbird Group." Then I looked around the room and said, "Oh good to see he has come back. I wonder how she is doing, good to see her here. That person is new I wonder if it is his first meeting. Then I heard myself and realized the insanity of my thinking. We are all alcoholics, what makes me different. Do I forget where I come from. A woman, who had 16 years in recover wouldn't come to share for a one year anniversary because she had come to my group to hear me share my story for a three year anniversary and had made the comment about it being a street meeting. We may have not gone all the way to the bottom like some people and yet if we had continued on our path, there is a good chance we might have ended up there. I know I was only one step away. It may not be a physical thing but a mental, emotional and spiritual thing.

Just because I go to church doesn't make me spiritual. Being brought up in the church for 22 years didn't stop me from becoming an alcoholic and an addict. For me, spirituality is a personal thing. Church can't give it to me. It is a God given gift.

To be continued...

[caressa]

"As psychiatrists have often observed, defiance is the outstanding
characteristic of many an alcoholic. So it's not strange that lots of us have had our day at defying God Himself. Sometimes it's because God has not delivered us the good things of life which we specified, as a greedy child makes an impossible list for Santa Claus. More often, though, we had met up with some major calamity, and to our way of thinking lost out because God deserted us. The girl we wanted to marry had other notions; we prayed God that she'd change her mind, but she didn't. We prayed for healthy children, and were presented with sick ones, or none at all. We prayed for promotions at business, and none came. Loved ones, upon whom we heartily depended, were taken from us by so-called acts of God. Then we became drunkards, and asked God to stop that.

But nothing happened. This was the unkindest cut of all. `d**n this faith
business!' we said."When we encountered A.A,, the fallacy of our defiance was revealed. At no time had we asked what God's will was for us; instead we had been telling Him what it ought to be. No man, we saw, could believe in God and defy Him, too.

Defiance a good way to seperate myself from God. For so many years it was my way or the highway. I was raised with this belief. If it wasn't done my Mother's way, it wasn't good enough. If it wasn't done my husband's way, I was less than. If it was my way, I am selfish and self-centered. As I learned to have faith and trust my Higher Power, I grew to trust myself and the faith grew.

I certainly had things happen that made me think God was not on my side. Witnessing my brother's death, my mother's early death, our house struck by lightning, the abuse and the rapes, didn't give me much faith that God believed in me. I was given so many rules and regulations and over the years I was guilty of bending them if I didn't break them. My life was so full of 'thou shall nots' that I feared that I was going to hell in a hand basket. I was surprised that I lived to make recovery. Through the program I learned to have faith in myself through trusting a Higher Power who I came to believe would guide and direct me a day at a time. He was no longer that distant being but an intricate part of my life.

In today, I always say "Thy will not mine be done." Often I have had to pray for the willingness to be willing to have God's will be done. So many times I have changed direction only to be brought back until the lesson is learned. I don't believe God tests us. I believe we test God. How many times over the years I have said, "I didnt' want a part of God, but what I didn't want was the constriction of relgious beliefs and the self-righteous sinners.

I remember my first husband didn't want me to smoke. I had a small pack of Rothman's that I kept for coffee break and when I went out with the girls. He found it and said, "I told you not to smoke." He took the pack in his hand and crumpled it and threw it into the wastebasket. I picked out the butts. This is the man who use to smoke. This is the man who ran around on me with other women and left when his son was two months old.

My aunt called my sister an angel because she was Sunday School superintendant and I was according to her a 'sinner' saved by grace. SIN means l) Social Insurance Number - I am no longer a nobody, I am a somebody who matters. 2) I am a Soul In Need who always looked outside of herself to find happiness and contentment and didn't know she could go within and connect to a Higher Power. That is why I call myself a Godly Heathen. I shared this at an out of town meeting where I got asked to share my story ten minutes before the meeting started. A young fellow came up to me and thanked me for sharing, he too was having a problems with his religious upbringing. When things like that happens, I am sure that they are of the Spirit.

So many times, I sit down to share on the computer or when I am to speak or share at a meeting, I ask for the words, direction and the knowingness. I often have to read what has come out because it seems like the fingers did the walking. People have come up after me and said, "I like what you shared, but I have no memory of the words that have come out." For me I am a channel, and that is why I quit smoking. I wanted to be a clear and clean channel to carry the message of recovery.

[caressa]

Belief meant reliance, not; defiance. In A.A, we saw the fruits of this belief: men and women spared from alcohol's final catastrophe. We saw them meet and transcend their other pains and trials. We saw them calmly accept impossible situations, seeking neither to run nor to recriminate. This was not only faith; it was faith that worked under all conditions. We soon concluded that whatever price in humility we must pay, we would pay." Now let's take the guy full of faith, but still reeking of alcohol. He believes he is devout. His religious observance is scrupulous. He's sure he still believes in God, but suspects that God doesn't believe in him. He takes pledges and more pledges. Following each, he not only drinks again, but acts worse than the last time. Valiantly he tries
to fight alcohol, imploring God's help, but the help doesn't come. What, then, can be the matter?

To clergymen, doctors, friends, and families, the alcoholic who means well and tries hard is a heartbreaking riddle. To most A.A.'s, he is not. There are too many of us who have been just like him, and have found the riddle's answer.

It was coming to meetings, coming to realize that these people had something that I didn't have. I had tried for eight years to quit my way and it hadn't worked. I came to believe that AA would work for me because I could see it working in others. I could stop, but I couldn't stay stopped. After coming to AA, I never found a good reason to go back out, a lot of excuses, but I didn't have to act on them. I slipped mentally and emotionally, but I never had to physically pick up a drink again. I had a spiritual bottom at one year sober. I had used my religious beliefs because that was all I knew. I came to realize it wasn't enough. I needed more. I went on a spiritual journey and as a result I found my religious beliefs enhanced my spiritual beliefs and my spiritual beliefs enhanced my religious beliefs. They were two separate entities joined by the Spirit of the God of my understanding.

This reminds me of a fellow I met in early recovery who shared with me that he relapsed every five years. He had repeated this pattern for many years. He blamed it on his Catholic faith and said it was because of guilt that he always picked up again. Shortly after he shared with me, he relapsed after celebrating five years and didn't make it back.

There was a lot of trauma in my life and yet I don't feel as though I doubted God. I had my beliefs. I just didn't believe God had much faith in me so therefore I didn't depend too much on Him to bail me out of where I was at. There were a few "God Help Me!" but they were more expletives than actual cries for help. It was I got myself in this corner now how the heck do I get myself out. Rather than show me the way out it was more like "Do it for me!"

I was at a group anniversary and the pastor of the church where the meeting was held came to speak and share. He said, "I wish the people upstairs had what you people downstairs have. It would make my job a lot easier."


To be continued...

[caressa]

This answer has to do with the quality of faith rather than its quantity. This has been our blind spot. We supposed we had humility when really we hadn't. We supposed we had been serious about religious practices when, upon honest appraisal, we found we had been only superficial. Or, going to the other extreme, we had wallowed in emotionalism and had mistaken it for true religious feeling. In both cases, we had been asking something for nothing. The fact was we really hadn't cleaned house so that the grace of God could enter us and expel the obsession. In no deep or meaningful sense had we ever taken stock of ourselves, made amends to those we had harmed, or freely given to any other human being without any demand for reward. We had not even prayed rightly. We had always said, "Grant me my wishes" instead of "Thy will be done." The love of God and man we understood not at all.

Therefore we remained self-deceived, and so incapable of receiving enough grace to restore us to sanity. Few indeed are the practicing alcoholics who have any idea how irrational they are, or seeing their irrationality, can bear to face it. Some will be willing to term themselves "problem drinkers," but cannot endure the suggestion that they are in fact mentally ill.

They are abetted in this blindness by a world which does not understand the difference between sane drinking and alcoholism." Sanity" is defined as "soundness of mind." Yet no alcoholic, soberly analyzing his destructive behavior, whether the destruction fell on the dining-room
furniture or his own moral fiber, can claim "soundness of mind" for himself.

Therefore, Step Two is the rallying point for all of us. Whether agnostic, atheist, or former believer, we can stand together on this Step. True humility and an open mind can lead us to faith, and every A.A, meeting is an assurance that God will restore us to sanity if we rightly relate ourselves to Him.

Growing up I had quantity for sure. I think when I was younger the quality for there but as I got out into the world and had to deal with life, I found it was diluted by resentment, disillusionment, fear, and lack of self-esteem and self-worth, mixed messages, guilt, and many other things that I let corrode my faith. I came to believe that God didn't believe in me.

So much of what I knew about God was done in rote and like I have shared before, so much of what I was taught was something I was told to believe and were old tapes like a lot of other things in my life, it was lived through other people. Whoever or whatever became my God, and I switched allegiance and God became distant and I lost contact. God became this distant being and no longer became an important force in my life. Someone who I called out to when I was in a corner and didn't know what to do. I would ask for help yet didn't have much faith that it would come. Soon I was looking for the quick fix, a short time solution to a long-time problem. Me!

It is hard to clean house when you think that your problems are all the fault of the people in your life. It is ironic that my second name means "God's gracious gift." I was always told to help others. I was a caretaker and caregiver all of my life. As a result, I lived through those people and found my value through them. Many times I was put on a pedestal, it is a long way down when you fall off. That generally happened when I became disillusioned by the 'god' in my life and what I didn't know was how to take care of myself. I allowed myself to be abused mentally, emotionally, and physically.

Through my addiction, I became selfish and self-centered and ended up becoming isolated and cut off from all spiritual things. My disease took over my life, and I became mental, emotionally, spiritually and physically bankrupt. When you shut down the negative, you also block the positive from coming in.

At first, I didn't think I was an alcoholic. A problem drinker seemed so much easier to accept. I just knew I didn't want to go back to where I came from. I knew I was an addict, and until I could accept that I used alcohol the same as I used everything else, the insanity still reigned in my life. I am powerless over people, places and things. When I surrender, I am empowered to do what I needed to do for myself. That empowerment had to come from a source outside of myself. As my sponsor said, "It doesn't matter what you believe in as long as your Higher Power isn't you. My concept of God and how He works in my life has taken many forms. I like the Higher Self, the Inner Self, which to me means that I learned to believe in me. I learned to quiet my mind and was able to listen to that still quiet voice within, I was able to take the journey from my head to my heart and find peace. Good orderly direction from a Group of drunks who filled me with Divine Orderly Good, and raised me to a level of being that is far above and beyond what I thought possible.

When I came in, I didn't think I was insane and I thought that I knew who God was. As I became clean and sober and my mind finally grew into a new state of awareness, I realized that I was totally insane and didn't have a clue as to who God was. I went on a Spiritual journey to find God and to make Him personal. The more I searched, the more I opened my mind, and was willing to learn, the chaos decreased and a new soundness of mind came into being. Learning to quiet my mind, to be open to all things, was a process in itself. That I didn't have to accept all things, and could take what I needed at the time, put the rest on the shelf, allowed me to find myself and believe that I could get better and I could heal. As I learned to believe more and more in this God of my understanding, my faith grew.

As someone once told me, God could, doesn't say He would, restore me to sanity. I found the assurance in meetings, I saw the program working in other people, and I came to believe it would work for me.

[schell08]

Wow, lots written above to taken in ...I like what one of you wrote about Listening....I realize I can shut HP off completely along with others, by not truly listening...with my whole heart...today I am aware and meditate and pray on this each day....Step two for me was really not about "finding " a power greater than myself (this was by the time I really got sober) it was believing I would one day be restored to sanity...I think it was Caressa who said above about being more insane sometimes in sobriety than when I was using....we yes, me too, but its not that down dirty insanity that hurts myself and others, damages relationships and lives. Step two made sense to me, as I came out of detox and treatment for crack many years ago. In Step two it says came to believe that a power greater than ourselves....well, going to my home group the day I got out, and working the program again, I saw with a burst of true awareness , that there were way too many really dangerous situations I put myself in and always ended up safely home...something lite up in me...I did not survive on my own power, no these were the times I was carried...something ,someone , not me had plans for me other than the path to death I was taking.....that is where I came to believe....my belief is spiritual ,not the organized church religion I was brought up in, though I am grateful for the values it brought me...spirituality is a wholeness of being of the soul flooded with moments of awareness. That is my basic intake on step two....I worked through AA, and am now just starting my step two in OA, so it was great to read all of your comments. Peace, Schell

[SunnyGirl]

Thank You for sharing Schell08...

I always enjoy reading your ESH but don't always
reply to the ones in OA and AA, as I don't qualify
for these programs. But we all work the steps....

I have always believed in God, but through the
years my relationship with Him had faded away.
It did take me finding Al-Anon/NarAnon to bring
him back into my life. I had to learn that my
addicted loved ones were beyond my help and it
was time for me to fix myself. It wasn't something
I could do on my own and I once again turned to
Him for help and hope.

I don't base my faith in God on the church teachings....
It's my personal relationship with him that has grown,
and my days have been filled with peace because of this!
I reached out to Him and He's been with me ever since....
(although I know He was there all the time, I simply failed
to reach out to Him) Working this step was truly a life changer
for me!

I could feel the words as you shared and they truly came
from the hear... thank you!

Peace on the journey, SG

[BW]

There is a few lines in the Big Book that truly turned me around and helped me. I believe it is true for anyone wanting or needing a "spiritual awakening" regardless of what program one is involved in.

"I found myself at the bottom of the canyon thinking I'd never see the sun again. A.A. didn't pull me out of that hole. It did give me the tools to construct a ladder with the Twelve Steps. "

For me that meant i had to get to work...I could not rely or become dependent on people. I had to dig within and look up and as it says earlier in the book..."TRUST GOD AND CLEAN HOUSE." So that I had a place to build or construct and place the ladder. I could not rely on my broken thunker alone and needed the help of others that had gone before me but i could not rely on them to do the work for me

[caressa222]

Keep It Simple

Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.---Step Two
The Second Step directs us to believe there is hope for us. It may take time to believe this. Many of us had given up hope. But look around. Hope fills our meeting rooms. We are surrounded by miracles. This Power greater than ourselves has healed many. Listen as others tell their stories. They speak of how powerful this Power is. At times, we will not believe. This is normal But in recovery ,"coming to believe" means opening ourselves up to healing power found in the program.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, allow me to believe Help me to stay open to recovery.
Action for the Day: I will list three examples of my past insanity. I will share these examples with my group, sponsor, a program friend, or with my Higher Power. I will remember that I'm a miracle.