Step 1

The Thing That Aspires To Be Crap!

In my earliest days of recovery, I can clearly remember the mornings. My eyes would open and again I would realize it hadn’t been a dream or nightmare but reality. My wife knew everything and so did my children. I didn’t feel like getting up and just rolling over but I couldn’t do that either or my wife would become suspicious I was doing something again.

In those days, I would share in group and talk about feeling not just like crap but “the thing that aspires to be crap.” It was to show how low and worthless I felt. The guilt and shame were heavy loads. I was still in the middle of Step 1 and admitting I needed help. Step 2 was Hope and what hope was there for me? How could this ever get better?

Step 11

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step 3 is me letting go of my own will, and step 11 is seeking God’s will. In step 3, I stop drowning myself with my own horrible ideas to where I’m just floating there. Step 11 gives me a positive direction from God so I can start moving in a direction that’s aligned with His amazingly frightening will.

Of course God’s will scares me to death. How could it be any other way? I’ve already tackled all the easy stuff that I’m not afraid of. All that’s left is the stuff that petrifies me with fear. I am bound by that fear, and fear is not from God. So it’s got to go. And the only way to get rid of fear is to face it. When I’m working my program well, I include steps 1, 2, 3 and 11 in my morning prayer. I will add step 12 to that too some day. I’m slow. So I talk to God about the things I’m powerless over, then I express my faith in His ability to help me with these things, and then I give them all to Him to figure out and only then am I ready to follow His will. My will is usually too noisy to hear anything from God. So the steps are in order for a purpose. I have to let go of the wheel and let Him guide me through my day, asking for the courage, power, and clarity to align my rebellious self with His will.

He loves me and wants me to get stronger and freer. And I’m giving Him permission to do that, so I need to stick with it when He starts me down a path toward something I fear. It’s like I’m working out a weak muscle and God’s my spotter and I’ve agreed to be here doing this and then the pain gets to be more than what I expected. Then instead of working through it, I’m tempted to run out of the gym to avoid the pain. But that just puts me back where I was before. If I can build up a little more trust in Him each day, each week, it helps me to put up with the pain and fear, knowing that it will be better afterward. Like going to the dentist. If I thought the dentist was my enemy, I’d run as soon as I saw the needle.

My daughter came to me with a sliver in her finger. She trusted me enough to help her get it out. She knew it was going to hurt worse than what she was enduring right now, but she and I have built up a trust that I love her and will do what will give her peace and happiness in the long term. So she comes to me when she needs relief from the pain – even if it means more pain for a time. Afterward, the pain subsides and her faith and trust in me is increased a little bit more. So it is with me and God. He is my father after all.

Meditation (or pondering) has also helped me seek God’s will and get rid of my own defective parts of my will. There are a few different methods I have used.

One method is to focus on breathing and nothing else. If my mind drifts, I don’t get frustrated, I just bring it back to my breath. That method quiets my mind down and gets rid of the noise.

Another kind is observational meditation where I simply observe my mind’s activity without holding on to any particular thought. That’s a lot more difficult for me because I grab the thoughts and run with them. This helps me become more aware of my thoughts and decreases my self-condemnation, which allows more thoughts to come to the surface. The more awareness I have, the more freedom I get to make choices about my thoughts and feelings instead of them silently running me.

Another kind of meditation is when I visualize a flame in front of me with a huge empty space around the flame. I focus on the flame and my breathing. As I breathe in through my nose, I imagine the air soaking into parts of myself physically (like into pain in my back or tension in my shoulders or neck) or emotionally (into lust, anger, stress, etc.). I hold it in for a second and then let it out through my mouth and imagine the pain, tension, lust, anger, stress, etc. going into the flame and burning up. I repeat for a few minutes. I’m visual so this one works well for me and gives my mind something to imagine while I’m doing it. And it really helps a lot. I have no idea why it helps, but I don’t really care. I found this technique in the Wheel of Time book series, but I believe the author Robert Jordan might have gotten it from somewhere else. I do it as described above, which is slightly different than what is described in the book. The lust and anger and stress tend to get visualized coming from my heart or entire body depending on how intense it is. And with each breath the emotion seems to get less and less until there isn’t anything left to feed the flame. It’s strange, but it has worked really well for me. More on this here. Sometimes I can feed images into the flame (like I do with Christ in Step 3) and those might be coming from my brain. So breathe in through the nose and visualize the breath going up into my brain and soaking up the images, then breathing out of my mouth those images from my brain into the flame. And I do this with my eyes closed. It can even be just a couple of breaths at my desk.

We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.

As I spend time in meetings and connecting with other addicts (step 0), I find myself beginning to open up. This is because others are opening up, and nobody is judging them or hating them. They’re just understanding them and loving and respecting them. So I begin to develop a growing trust in the group. I open up about the truth of my situation. I’m not sharing graphic details of my addiction, just being vulnerable. Continue reading “Step 1”

Goals

My whole life, I had been setting goals that had to do with the addiction – like “I will remain sober for 14 days” or “I will be sober long enough to make it to the temple”, or even worse “I’ll never do that again.” Since I had no control over the addiction (step 1), I was making goals that dealt with outcomes that I had no control over. Not too surprisingly, this would usually end up in depressing failure after depressing failure. It was similar to me making goals for someone else to complete – if I have no control over it, I can’t commit to it. And when my goals are tied to external, shifting things, then when I reach the goal (like going to the temple or taking the sacrament again) I end up either self-sabotaging the goal during the stressful last weeks leading up to it, or I end up reaching the goal and then fall afterward because the crutch is immediately gone. Sometimes those crutches can be motivating, but I’ve had to be very careful and focus on working recovery one day at a time instead.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I first came into the program, I started changing the types of goals that I made for myself. I started making goals about recovery: completing certain steps, getting to a certain number of meetings per week, and reading scriptures and praying daily, etc. These are different than the old goals I used to make because I have control over the outcomes of these goals. I can work on the steps five minutes per day or complete Step 4 by the end of next month or attend at least two meetings each week. I had control over these things; and therefore, I had a say in whether I achieved these goals. What a concept!

Because of this change in the types of goals I was making, I started seeing success in meeting these goals and started seeing a correlation between my efforts and my successes – something I rarely saw when working on goals that dealt with my uncontrollable addiction. The old addiction-related goals didn’t work. The new recovery-related goals work.

The 12 Steps – An Overview

I realized that the core of 12-Step programs aligned with something familiar to me from my religious upbringing—a higher power helping me become a better person. This higher power encompassed faith, self-reflection, personal growth, and support from others. Although I had encountered similar ideas in my spiritual journey, I questioned the importance of revisiting them within the context of 12-Step programs. Previous knowledge alone hadn’t freed me from addiction, so why would exploring these principles again in the context of the 12 steps make any difference? However, I’ve found an answer, and I want to share it with you.

Continue reading “The 12 Steps – An Overview”