That's why my first step, and yours, are both about control, only they use the word powerlessness. Finding yourself powerless has almost nothing to do with how much you WANT to be well. Two separate mental processes.
Ever tried to dive off a high diving board? You can really really want to, can want to be in that water, but doesn't mean you won't think yourself into a corner and be unable to get out of your own way.
My denial, it's instinctual. Everything in me fights being mentally ill because I'm mentally ill (another one of those closed circuit things) My illness tells me I'm not sick -- If I am not sick I must be well, must not really need the castor oil. If I don't take the medicine, the disease lives. This is the whole "surrender to win" thing. I can't win until I lose.
As for me, so far I just can't lose.....
I've learned that for me surrender is NOT an action. I cannot manufacture this mental state. I've tried and tried to behave my way into it. I can't.
I think it's because I DO want it so bad, becaue I try so hard, that I fail. In my case I think it's the action itself that means I'm still controlling.
This is why addicts get instructions to be still and either pray or meditate. The expression is let go and let god.
so far words not in my vocabulary, to let go. I am more the type to, oh, say, spend every waking moment for 10 years micromanaging every facet of my mood and how much anybody anywhere knows about that.
I have this excess of thoughts-energy, this tendancy to obsess about every little TINY thing. Classic alcoholic personality. I drove me so crazy, I deiberately began anesthetizing myself. See how much I'm writing? Aren't I driving you a little crazy RIGHT NOW?!
In my personal case, I think there's a control issue in being the architect of my own prison; if I do it to me, I know that no one has or will or can.
I notice this very autistic quality to my addiction, Maybe it started there, a pattern from childhood - weird solo mission of self stimulation in the absence of normal healthy stimuli and it just kept on until it found the perfect instrument - slogan: "It knocks you out like a sledghammer but feels like a pillow."
Being stoned sure made being alone behind my bunker feel like a preference instead of a rejection. I just never thought I'd get stuck there.
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Finding yourself powerless is the rerequisite and it's
It seems true that the majority of addicts and alcoholics do die from the disease - and die badly - after long suffering. We can safely assume these men and women would have preferred getting well, and chosen to live if they had ANY choice.
On the other hand, witness the miraculous percent who get well. The ones I meet say "Do exactly as I say, do exactly as I did." If I understand my own powerless, if I surrender to it, I am gonna grab this life preserver. But you can't manufacture your own powerlessness no matter HOW much you want to.