The One You Feed - Mini Episode: God and the 12 Steps

Episode Date: March 12, 2017

Many people could benefit from a 12 Step program to help handle their addictions but the issue of not believing in God can be a real blocker for them. I discuss a way to use 12 Step programs while not believing in God.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey everybody it's Eric from the one you feed with another mini-episode.

If you like the mini-episodes, people who support the show at the $10 a month level get a supporter-only mini-episode every month. So get one that nobody else can hear every month, oneyoufeed.net support. I got this week's topic for the mini-episode from our Facebook group, which if you're interested in, whenyoufeed.net slash Facebook, and somebody is starting a 12-step program in the group, but she doesn't believe in God. And so she was saying, you know, how can I make this work with a 12-step program without really believing in God? And so I started to write an answer about four times and just never had enough time. And I finally figured, you know what, I'll just sit down and talk about it. I've talked on the show often enough about me having been part of 12-step groups that that's probably no surprise

for most of you. And I don't really believe in God, certainly not in the sense of an interventionist God. So how have I been able to make this work? So the first time that I came into recovery, I was 24 years old. I was a heroin addict and I was a total disaster. And so I came in with, I think the line is, the desperation of a drowning man and worked really hard to believe in God because I thought I have to get this. And so I basically just kind of went along and really tried to believe in God. At some point down the road, when I started having some really difficult challenges in my life, I found that my spiritual life was kind of empty. It was just, it was made up. I was trying to

believe something I didn't, and that didn't work out very well. Eventually, I ended up going out and drinking again. And so when I came back again from drinking, it didn't go very well, obviously, because I came back. I decided that I had to find some way to come up with a real spiritual life. And so that meant sort of reconciling this God thing. Now, one of the great things about 12-step programs, and it originated in AA, is the line, God as we understand him. And the fact that Bill Wilson and the early AA members decided to put that in has probably saved countless lives, because we're kind of

off the hook then. We can believe in whatever God we want. But being able to define God doesn't really work if you don't believe in the basic concept. And so I think it's important to think about what is it that the 12 steps are after with this God idea. The first step is that we admit we're powerless over alcohol or whatever that thing is in our life is unmanageable. And then the second step is that we came to believe that a power greater than us could restore us to sanity. And then finally, the third step is the first time the word God appears, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. So I think that if I look at God through the lens of those steps, I think it's the first is I can't do this really by myself. I need more help than I'm gathering.

Second step sort of talking about, well, I'm kind of insane in the way I'm acting and I need something outside of my own brain to help me figure this out. And then the third step is really to me is about, hey, I'm going to try and live a different way. I'm going to try and be open to a different approach. And so for me, I had a couple of realizations. One of them was, you know, the third step is about turning our will and our life over. It really didn't matter what in a lot of cases I was turning things over to. It was the letting go. It was the not clenching everything so tightly that was good for me. I get sick when I do that. So it's not really important what I'm turning things over to. It's really saying, look,

I'm going to do the best I can with the things I can and the other stuff, you know what? I've just got to let it go. I think the other thing that the God thing is driving towards is the word connection, connection to a higher power. And I think connection is at the heart of what makes AA work and I think it's at the heart of a good spiritual life or a program. And so what that connection is is less important than that we have it.

We have to find ways to be connected to things. That can be ourselves in a genuine and real way. It can be the people around us in a 12-step program. It could be the group. It can be nature. It can be God, however you define him. We just have to be connected to something. And so that's part of it. The second part is we have to have somewhere to turn beyond ourselves. And so God, as defined

as one option, a lot of people work with acronyms for God, so group of drunks being one of them. So the idea that the group itself is more powerful than we are, or good orderly direction is another one. Like we're going to follow a certain life plan that is better than the one we've been living. Both of those things are useful and they work. and they work. For me, I think I got to the point where what it was, was I believed in and wanted to sort of turn my life over, if you will, to spiritual principles, things that I knew to be true, honesty and love and kindness and things like the idea that we reap what we sow, and wisdom, that if I was to live by wisdom, that would be the power that restored me to sanity, and also the connection with other people. So far, that has worked pretty well for me. And the idea in a lot of this is that you get to a

point where you trust God. And this is a tricky one because if you don't believe in God, how can you trust him? And what are we trusting God to do? Or what is the trust that we're looking for? And for me, what it came down to was that the trust was simply that I was going to be able to handle whatever came along. With the tools that I had, with the group, with support from other people, with a deeper connection with myself, I'd be able to handle whatever life throws at me. Maybe not gracefully, I certainly probably wouldn't like a fair amount of it, but I could handle it. And I could handle it without drinking or doing drugs. And so really, that's the trust I have is that

by cobbling all these different things together, I'm able to handle what life throws at me. So that's a relatively quick thought on that on, you know, how can you approach a 12 step program if you don't believe in God as in the big guy in the sky. So hopefully that's helpful to some of you. And I'll do another one of these soon. New episode out on Tuesday, as always, if you want to help support the show, it's really important. We love it. OneYouFeed.net slash support. Thanks.

Bye. Thank you.