Obladi,
hm...i don't know what "squaring the notion" means all by itself; what i asked about is your belief about being powerless vs your experience. for me, those two didn't mesh for the longest time.
and for that time, i preferred my belief that indeed i had the power/control, and couldn't see my actual experience through any other lens.
i ask about the powerlessness thing not because i'm trying to steer you towards any program which starts with an admission of powerlessness but because i spent years grappling with it and i keep 'reading' you as being in a very similar spot.
my choices about how i saw it/believed it to be:
-for decades, i believed i was in control. couldn't square committing to not drink again with drinking again anyway. but since i was in charge, clearly i hadn't tried hard enough. something was wrong with the commitment.
-later, i saw these choices: if i was in control , then how come i didn't stick to my decisions re not drinking again? if, after deciding never to drink again, i did indeed do so the very same day, two things came to mind: either i didn't actually have control, or if i did, i was insane. since clearly it was an insane decision to go back there.
-later again, i reconciled it this way (after hanging around with lots of concepts like choice, control, power, decision, commitment, agency) i always had the ability to stop and stay that way. the problem was, i didn't have the access to the ability. i didn't have the key, and the ability was somewhere locked up.
and since i couldn't access it, i didn't have the power. i couldn't do it.
the key came for me out of nowhere, and i'm reminded by your sharing about the universe bringing you the wrong people...anyway, i sat there one morning, with my coffee and my headache and feeling , as usual, slightly ill and shaky, and i fantasised about how one day, some day, this wonderful and healthy (i had left a destructive relationship recently) person would come and find me and bring me all these wonderful and healthy loving goodies and i would bring them....and it all stopped. stopped dead. it hit me that i was a drunk. that i had nothing top bring but a drunk. that this is who i was, and not just behaviour i engaged in.
i grabbed onto that moment and knowledge and it changed everything. it wasn't an intellectual thing. it was a total re-arrangements of the facts as i had known them before.
some might call it insight (in-seeing), others grace.
i didn't do it, nor did i make it happen. i had that moment of clarity, or whatever, and it's been key.
key to my powerlessness and key to "new power".
i'm going on and on here and not sure what is useful to you.. my own experience is that i simply couldn't stay stopped until i had that clarity. after that, the next few years had more incoherence as i inched my way towards "the program", since knowing myself as a DRUNK didn't in any way equate to being powerless over alcohol!!
wanna talk about "difficult student/slow thinker"??
actually, i don't think it's got much to do with thinking. it's the other knowledge that i needed. or: the knowledge, but in a different place.
i needed to accept the beyond-rational fact of my experience with at-times-powerlessness over that first drink. accept it as in: giving consent in heart soul and mind that yes, it was so.
how are you doing at the end of this day?