Step 3

Step 3 – Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

The verb in step 3 is not “surrender,” even though that’s what people talk about when they talk about step 3.  The verb is “Made a decision.”  A decision to do what?  To turn my will and life over to the care of God.  When I first got into addiction recovery, I found that there were a few things I could turn over to the care of God.  So I did that.  People often call this “surrender.”  It seems that turning things over to the care of God, letting things go, and surrendering are similar, if not identical.  It’s strange to come into a program where they tell me to surrender when I’ve been fighting for decades.

Here’s what surrender looks like for me.  I’m not fighting against a substance or a behavior or an addiction, I’m fighting against me.  It seems there are two parts of me.  One part wants the thing I’m addicted to.  The other part doesn’t want it.  Surrender is when the part of me that wants the thing I’m addicted to makes a decision to let go of that thing.  It seems simple, but difficult.  Before, I had the two parts of me fight over it.  Now I have the side of me that wants the thing I’m addicted to just let it go.

But in order to let go of something I’ve trusted for so long to help me escape life’s difficulties, I need something else I can hold onto instead. It’s like Tarzan swinging on vines. He’s not going to let go of the vine he’s currently holding onto until he has a firm grip on the next sturdy vine. For me, that next sturdy vine is the God I’m building faith in as part of working step 2. As my faith in God continues to increase, I become more willing to let go of certain things and hold onto Him instead. That then increases my faith in Him and the cycle continues until I can let go of my life and will and trust in Him completely. That’s a lifetime endeavor, but there are great rewards all along the path as I continue letting go of the things that destroy me.

Here’s one way to visualize it that helps me a lot.  Since I’m a Christian, I’ll use Christ as my higher power.  I take the thing I’m holding onto (an image, a thought, a negative emotion, whatever) and I visualize Christ kneeling on the ground in front of me. He’s facing away from me a bit because I don’t know Him that well.  I imagine taking the thing I want to surrender and I physically put it on the ground in front of Him, and then I watch Him suffer with it instead of me.  It’s always more powerful if I also connect with someone else who is in recovery from similar addictions to mine when I do this – like my sponsor.  For some reason, having a witness makes a big difference.  If the thing comes back, I repeat the process until it stays away.  This can be a current image, thought, emotion, or temptation, or it can be something from the past.

This seems to have some symbolism with sacrifice.  Anciently, people would bring things to an altar to have them sacrificed – to give them up freely to be burned away.  In some instances, this happened in the presence of witnesses.  It seems like placing these things before Christ is like placing them on an altar and then Christ burns them away.  Connecting with others to surrender is like having a witness to that sacrifice.

Sometimes I don’t want to surrender something.  I have found that I can surrender my inability to surrender or my lack of desire to surrender.  This happens when the part of me that wants to let it go is weaker than the part of me that wants to hold on.  This actually works to make that weaker part stronger over time until I can finally surrender the item in question directly.

Surrender is a beautiful and peaceful thing and it’s unlike the fighting (some call it white knuckling – where spiritual fists are clenched tight as the two sides of me fight it out and I always end up losing such fights) that I used to do.  It’s so quiet and deep.  I’m grateful to the people who have taught me how to do this.

Of course, this won’t work well if I’m not doing my dailies, keeping my boundaries, and working the other steps as well, so all of these things go together.  It’s more difficult to let go of my old gods (my addictions and character weaknesses) if I don’t have a new God who I trust to handle my pains and fears better than the old gods did.

I recently realized that when I’m following my own will, it’s usually almost a compulsive following of my own will. It is like I don’t have a choice to do anything but what I want to do. Which is the opposite of being free to choose – having only one choice isn’t a choice at all. It seems like my real goal is to be able to choose anything regardless of whether I want to do the thing I’m choosing or not. It’s useful to be able to do this because I often want to do things that are not good for me.