Many people resist the Twelve Steps because of their reliance on a Higher Power. Sometimes that resistance comes from atheism or skepticism, but just as often something more complicated is happening. A person may believe in God and still have very little idea how to trust Him. In fact, the God he believes in may be one of the reasons surrender feels so difficult. I discuss the broader idea of a higher power in addiction recovery elsewhere, but there is another question worth considering: what happens when our image of God itself becomes an obstacle to recovery?
That was closer to my own experience.
My understanding of God looked remarkably different when I first entered recovery than it does today. By that point, shame and disappointment had become such familiar parts of my life that they inevitably shaped the way I imagined God. I did not experience Him as particularly close, merciful, or interested in helping me. I imagined something more like a divine scorekeeper who watched from a distance and kept an accurate account of everything I was getting wrong.
Naturally, I did not feel particularly eager to approach Him.
Instead, I thought I needed to make some progress first. I needed to stop drinking, straighten out my life, repair some of the damage and become a little more respectable before sitting down at the table with God. Looking back, that made about as much sense as deciding I needed to get in shape before going to the gym. The very relationship I believed I had to become worthy of approaching was the relationship I most needed while trying to change.
There is a deeper irony here that goes to the heart of addiction. The alcoholic frequently resists surrender because surrender feels like giving up control, even while continuing to drink despite overwhelming evidence that control disappeared a long time ago.
The God We Learn to Expect
We do not develop our understanding of God in a vacuum. Long before most of us begin thinking seriously about theology, we have already learned something about trust, authority, love, punishment, forgiveness, vulnerability and belonging from the people around us. Those experiences do not automatically determine what we believe about God, but they can become powerful lenses through which we understand Him.
A person who grew up believing that affection had to be earned may have difficulty comprehending grace. Someone raised around harsh or unpredictable authority may hear the word Father and imagine judgment before love. A child who learned that vulnerability was dangerous may become an adult for whom surrender sounds less like freedom than exposure. Even the language of faith can awaken old expectations long before the person consciously understands why.
Religious experiences can complicate this further. Some people encountered hypocrisy, judgment, legalism, abuse, or Christians whose behavior bore very little resemblance to the God they claimed to represent. Others simply experienced religion as empty ritual imposed upon them during childhood and abandoned it as soon as they were old enough to decide for themselves.
I once heard someone in recovery describe how difficult the “God part” of recovery was because any reference to Jesus immediately brought her back to a chaotic Christian home in which the adults who were supposed to care for her behaved in ways that were anything but Christian. Psychologically, God and those experiences had become fused. Asking her to trust God did not initially sound comforting; it sounded like asking her to trust the very world that had already failed her.
That distinction matters because sometimes the person resisting God is not actually resisting God. He may be resisting the God he learned to expect.
Shame Can Make God Seem Even Farther Away
Addiction adds another layer because repeated failure produces shame, and shame has a peculiar way of altering how we imagine relationships. When we become deeply disappointed in ourselves, we often assume that anyone who truly knew us would eventually feel the same way.
If I could barely tolerate what I had become, why would God want anything to do with me?
So I imagined Him disappointed. Every failure seemed like another entry in the ledger. The more I drank, the less worthy I felt of approaching God, and the less worthy I felt, the more convinced I became that I first needed to fix myself. Because I could not fix myself, I continued doing the very thing that intensified the shame.
The result becomes almost circular. Addiction produces shame; shame creates distance; distance reinforces isolation; and isolation makes escape through alcohol or drugs even more attractive. The person most in need of mercy begins to believe mercy is something he must first earn.
From a Christian perspective, the whole logic is backward. We do not clean ourselves up so that we can finally become worthy of grace. Grace is part of what makes transformation possible in the first place.
The Strange Logic of Control
This is where the Second Step becomes psychologically interesting. It says that we “came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” The wording matters because it does not describe someone arriving at recovery with perfect faith, settled theology and complete trust in God. It describes movement. We came to believe.
For many people, that movement begins not with certainty about God but with growing uncertainty about themselves.
Addiction has an almost absurd capacity to expose the limits of our own management. A person wakes after another bad night, anxious and ashamed, and sincerely promises that today will be different. By afternoon the physical consequences have faded enough that his thinking begins to change. Perhaps yesterday was not quite as bad as it seemed. Maybe his promise of total abstinence was an overreaction. Maybe one drink would be fine. Maybe this time he will stop after two.
Tomorrow brings another promise, followed by another negotiation and another trip around the same merry-go-round.
People watching from the outside often cannot understand it. You know what this is doing to you. You know what you are losing. Why don’t you just stop? What is harder to see is that the person trapped inside the cycle is often asking himself exactly the same questions.
The reasoning also does not feel irrational while it is happening. Thoughts such as “Maybe one drink will be fine” can feel perfectly reasonable in the moment even when experience has disproved them repeatedly. This is one reason CBT can be useful in addiction recovery. It helps make the relationship among triggers, thoughts, cravings and behavior more visible before the final decision begins to feel inevitable.
Yet through all of this the person may continue insisting, I can handle this. I simply need to try harder.
That may be one of addiction’s greatest contradictions. We often cling most fiercely to the idea that we are in control at precisely the point when our lives are providing the clearest evidence that we are not.
Eventually, sometimes after considerable suffering, something changes. The person stops negotiating with reality. He admits that his method has failed, that sheer willpower has not been enough and that continuing to insist upon self-sufficiency is no longer strength.
What looked like surrender begins to feel strangely like freedom.
The alcoholic who feared surrender because he thought it meant giving up control can discover that surrender was what finally allowed alcohol to stop controlling him.
“Come to Believe” Is Not the Same as Pretending to Believe
None of this means there is value in pretending to believe something you do not. If you are angry with God, uncertain whether He exists, distrustful of religion, or carrying painful experiences connected to faith, covering those questions with religious language does not resolve them.
But skepticism does not require closing the door either. There is an enormous difference between saying I believe and saying, I am willing to consider that what I currently believe may be incomplete.
For some people, that openness develops within AA. Others need a different starting point, particularly when spiritual language itself has become an obstacle. Recovery does not depend upon forcing yourself into one particular model, which is why there are legitimate alternatives to AA and other paths to recovery.
Whatever the setting, the deeper work may involve questioning the image of God a person inherited. Is the distant scorekeeper he has spent years avoiding the God Christianity actually describes? Has an experience with imperfect human beings been allowed to define God Himself? Has shame been mistaken for God’s judgment?
Sometimes the God a person cannot believe in is a God Christianity does not ask him to believe in either.
For someone struggling with Step Two, that can be a profound realization. The task may not initially be to acquire faith but to examine what has been standing in faith’s place.
The Spiritual Hunger Beneath Addiction
One of the more striking things I have noticed in working with people struggling with alcohol and substance use is that many of them are deeply spiritual people. They are often searching intensely for meaning, transcendence, relief, connection, and something larger than themselves. The problem is not always the absence of spirituality. Sometimes it is the absence of an apparatus for directing it.
Without a coherent framework, discipline, community, or understanding of what that longing is reaching toward, the search can attach itself to alcohol, drugs, sex, achievement, pleasure, or escape. The person wants to get outside himself, quiet himself, feel connected, feel whole or experience something larger than ordinary life, but he is trying to satisfy a deeper hunger with something incapable of sustaining it.
Seen this way, recovery involves more than simply removing alcohol or drugs from a person’s life. It may require discovering what the person had been searching for through them.
It also helps explain why ongoing recovery usually needs more than private determination. Human beings change in relationship with other people, whether through AA, SMART Recovery, therapy, a faith community, or some other form of meaningful support. It is one reason I am currently gauging interest in a weekly addiction recovery group in Calabasas for people who want support while building a life that is about more than simply not drinking or using.
The God We Return To May Not Be the God We Left
For a Christian, and particularly from a Catholic perspective, surrender does not mean abandoning responsibility and waiting for God to fix everything. Prayer does not replace therapy, medical care, meetings, medication when appropriate, making amends, changing relationships, or learning entirely new ways of responding to stress and craving. Faith should never become another sophisticated excuse for avoiding the work recovery requires.
But neither is recovery simply an exercise in better self-management.
At some point, many of us confront the limits of a life organized entirely around our own appetites, judgments, defenses and attempts at control. Letting go of that can be frightening because surrender initially feels as though we are losing something important. What we may actually be losing is the exhausting belief that everything depends upon us.
The God I slowly came to understand in recovery was not waiting for me to become worthy enough to approach Him. He was not keeping score until I accumulated enough good behavior to cancel the bad. I did not need to recover before approaching God. I needed to become willing to approach God as someone who needed recovery.
Perhaps that is why the language of Step Two remains so powerful. It does not require the person standing at the beginning of recovery to possess mature faith or theological certainty. It asks whether he is willing to come to believe that something beyond the same thinking, promises and strategies that have repeatedly failed him might help lead him toward a different life.
Sometimes recovery begins with the uncomfortable admission that the way we have been doing things is no longer working. The irony is that what we spent years calling “control” may be the very thing we finally have to surrender in order to become free.
If alcohol or drug use has become difficult to control, or if you are already sober but recognize that deeper issues involving shame, relationships, meaning or faith remain unresolved, therapy can provide a place to examine them honestly. If you would like to talk privately about what is happening and whether working together might be useful, you can contact me here.
