“We admit that we were powerless over … (fill in your area of powerlessness), and that our lives have become unmanageable”. That’s Step 1 of the 12 steps of the many recovery programs based on the original program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In a different blog, I went over the wide application of Step 1 and concluded that you don’t need to be an addict in order to benefit from the wisdom and philosophy of the 12 Steps.
The admission that we were powerless is a big step towards engaging in recovery and establishing sobriety. The unmanageability refers to our lives having become unmanageable due to our acting-out behavior. And that is all too often the case. Most of my clients are getting int recovery and therapy because their lives have truly become unmanageable.
Just imagine the guy who has to attend three Thanksgiving parties with three different partner’s families, none of whom know anything about the existence of the other two. Yikes. That’s a lot of turkey. But it is also a sign of life having become unmanageable. It’s like a house of cards that is at the brink of collapsing if anything doesn’t go according to a tightly planned itinerary. There are countless other scenarios where people’s lives have become unmanageable, and maybe you are living such a scenario as you’re reading this. That’s the unmanageability our addiction has gotten us into.
But what if we were to take this a few steps back and ask ourselves “why did we start acting out in the first place?” Is it possible that our lives were already unmanageable and that acting-out has become a quick-fix solution to the painful feeling of life being out of control?
In AA there are three questions we must ask ourselves in Step 1. The first two, “What’s wrong with my body?”, and “What’s wrong with my mind?” refer to the powerlessness. In the olden days when AA was formed, they contributed the alcoholic’s disease as an allergy to alcohol. Since then, neuroscience has come a long way, and we now know that, in simple terms, the pleasure-reward center in our brain is not quite working as it does in “normies’” brains. The answer to the second question refers to our obsession with either the substance or the behavior. Herb K., a very prominent spiritual leader in the recovery world once put it this way. “We don’t know that we’re obsessing about something, because it’s the only thing we’re thinking about.”
So now that we covered the powerlessness, what question do we need to ask ourselves regarding the unmanageability of our lives?
“What’s wrong with my will?” This refers to our willfulness, or in other words, “If things don’t go the way I want them to, all hell breaks loose”. This points straight to one of the core character defects in addicts, self-centeredness or ego. If we are holding on to the notion that people, places and circumstances must follow our will and that we are in control of our world, life will inevitably become unmanageable. This can come is a myriad of ways, and it’s mostly painful.
What if we were to be able to let go of this need for control? What if we were to “accept the things we cannot change”? Our lives would become way more manageable. When we can accept the fact that there are very few things in life we actually have control over, and we can make peace with that, then we have set the stage for a fundamental aspect of recovery This second half of the first step is the foundation for emotional sobriety. However, this is not an easy task and often requires the help of a Higher Power that will restore us to sanity. After all, isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same things over and over and expecting a different outcome? When we can come to terms with that fact that we can’t control everything in our lives and that we will be ok either way, we have come a step closer to our lives becoming managebale.
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