As I stated last month, when we teach the meaning and practice of working the steps to the men at the Salvation Army, I find it best to place them in the context of, “what’s the problem” and therefore, “What’s the solution?” Working the steps - or any aspect of recovery - makes the most sense when seen in the context of how they function in their overall recovery.

If “our problem,” as the Founders saw it, is spiritual bankruptcy. And the main expression being isolation, then “the solution” must be found in the experience of “spiritual awakenings.” The main expression being in establishing and keeping strong connections. Recovery is all about staying connected.

So how does working the steps contribute to getting and staying connected in general -and in the second step in particular?

STEP 2
“Restore us to sanity.”

Look what happens when you read the steps from the back to the front. In this case the first word in the reverse is “Sanity.” Or more precisely the phrase “restore us to sanity.” If we need to be “restored” it means we aren’t there now.

The 2nd Step says in an active addiction we are in a state the opposite of sane. That “opposite” has a lot of faces. One of those faces is to be obsessed by fear, worry, rage and self-contempt. The longer this life of blind obsession goes on, the more we need to be “restored to sanity.”

There are plenty of mental health professionals who bitterly complain about the use of the words “sane” and ‘insane.’ But there aren’t many people in recovery who would argue with calling the condition of their lives totally insane while under the heel of their active addiction. Call it what you want - insanity, spiritual bankruptcy, flawed thinking. The bottom line is our lives are a mess. And until something much more powerful than us intervenes the mess keeps getting messier and deeper. By ourselves we are powerless to prevent our slide down the black throat of addiction.

We usually have about 120 men in treatment at any one time at the Sally. At this point not just studying the steps but of actually integrating the words and meaning into our lives - there is always a heartfelt and amazing discussion about the “insanity of addiction.” As explained in how we communicate the meaning of the 1st Step in last month’s article, I ask the men to take out paper and write where they described for themselves IN AS MUCH DETAIL AS POSSIBLE “Here is the worst time in my addiction.”

I tell the men to read what they have written. Often I ask them to share with a brother around them what they have written. Then I ask them, “Can you call what you have written anything but insane?” What else do you call creating consequences you hate? What else do you call doing what addiction always does to those you love? What else do you call turning your life over to the care of your addiction - when all addiction wants is your destruction. No one among us has a question about what “restore us to sanity” means.

A POWER GREATER THAN OURSELVES

Taking the next phase of the 2nd Step from back to front, we come to the “sweet spot” of all the steps in particular and recovery in general. WE CAN’T DO IT ALONE. No one is smart enough, tough enough, and slick enough to beat addiction by themselves. If we don’t find a “Power greater than ourselves” - AND a way to access that power, there is no hope.

Getting to the need for a power greater than ourselves is no big leap for our population. All I have to do is ask, “How many of us in this room have ever relapsed?” All hands go up. Then I ask, “How about more than once?” Again, all hands go up - usually with a lot of nervous laughter and guilty body language screaming loud enough to deafen a dog.

The discussion then moves into, why? Why all the relapse? What’s wrong? What was lacking in us at the time of THE BEGINNING OF the process of relapse? What’s the lesson? What’s to be learned from that last relapse? How do we make that last relapse the LAST relapse?

Again, I build on the foundation laid down by the work in the 1stStep. Our lives were “unmanageable” because we were “powerless over alcohol.” So then how did we get here? How did we come into recovery? If we were “powerless” then some power outside of ourselves MUST have exerted itself to break our spiral of self-destruction to get us here. What? What happened?

Here we take time to look within our story. We “go find” the presence of our Higher Power hiding in plain sight in our lives. What happened? Tell me. Tell yourself.

Again, I don’t know if working with mostly felons and “low bottom” folks makes this Step easier or not but our men, when shown how to use the light of introspection and having a safe place to talk about that that light reveals, have no problem identifying that moment in their lives when the God of their Understanding finally broke through addiction’s iron shield of denial and delusion and said, “Here I am. Where are you?”

Have you looked at your moment of clarity? Have you gone back to the point where something deeper, stronger and far wiser than anything you’ve known before stepped out in your muddled life and said something like - Enough! It’s time to grow up.

Again, we keep it really simple. Mostly we find that simple works! For as many classes or weeks as it takes we create a situation where each man is forced to find that point in their lives where something “Greater” appeared in their lives. “A power greater than ourselves,” for us, isn’t a theory or proposition to argue about. Our lives are on the line. If there is a Power greater than self in your life, where is it? Where has it visited you? In the most real terms possible where has that Power found you in the midst of your mess and picked you up and put you on solid ground?

Examples of these EXPERIENCES of men finding - in concrete, down and dirty terms - where a power greater than self found and changed them are more numerous and wonderful for me to recount here. As we’ll see in dealing with step three next month, the real problem is not in finding the Higher Power. It is in accepting that our Higher Power would and does care for us.

CAME TO BELIEVE

Some of our men are wildly certain that they already believe! They claim a relationship with the God of their Understanding that is unshakable. In fact some are so certain of God in their lives they say they find no need of other people to journey with them.

Maybe? Time will tell.

But the majority of our men, and I think people in recovery, find great comfort in the wording of “Came to Believe.” “Came to Believe” doesn’t mean we have to pass the “faith test” before we are “allowed in the club.” So many of us feel so estranged from any source of goodness and light (Let alone any goodness and light FOR US) that it takes time to move from “no way” to “maybe” to “certain.”

The question of faith and spirituality are so personal that it’s tough (maybe impossible) to build any kind of “one size fits all” approach. In fact to demand any kind of “one size fits all” approach is a denial of the very essence of spirituality. Spirituality cannot be fenced in any more than the wind can.

What I ask our men to do though is keep a file or journal of Blessings that have come to them since starting recovery. How is their life better in recovery than it was in active addiction? Once started in recovery through the agency of a power greater than self - how has that power continued to manifest itself in their life? How have they/you changed? What are they/you able to do now (not perfectly - but do) that they/you wouldn’t have even thought of before? What’s going on in their/your relationships? How have their/your moods and feelings changed? How has their/your perspective on the meaning of life, opportunities and responsibilities changed?

Some men are slower than others to spot their blessings. Others shout them from the rooftops. But if anyone begins to file or log the positive changes in them and their lives my belief is, based on that evidence, they will begin to come to believe. Once begun the process usually picks up speed pretty quickly --- all the way to “certain.”

One exercise I use to illustrate this process is to build an upside down pyramid of blocks. On a large whiteboard I draw a single small box at the bottom of the board. The box I tell the men is your sobriety. All good things begin with sobriety. The first blessing, if you choose it and stay connected, is simply being sober.

Then blessings build on top of blessings. I put a larger box on top of the smaller one on the bottom. I ask the men to shout out, “Ok tell me a blessing in your life that has happened because you are clean and sober.” I pick one blessing among the dozens that get shouted out.

Then I put a larger box on top of the second one and ask the same question. I pick one they said and draw a bigger box. You get the idea.

The point of course is - how much evidence do you need to “come to believe?” What more does your Higher Power need to do to “prove” that his Power is better than addictions power?

So that’s pretty much how we explain and do the 2nd Step. It’s very much “evidence based” in that first, here is the mess of insanity, here is proof of a Power greater than you, and what we are asked to do is COME TO BELIEVE that Power exists. And that is done by following the super obvious blessings that Power is bringing into your life.

The only “solution” to “the problem” of alcoholism/addiction is by surrendering to the spiritual in life. It is by becoming more spiritual through the transformation of our minds. This takes us to the third step.