I believe that any path is worth understanding, if the result is sobriety.

Powerlessness and Surrender
 

For the record, I'm not in AA and never have been.

There is something about the powerlessness thing and the surrender though that I actually think is really key to recovery, at least to mine. Although I find it really difficult to explain, I feel in some way it happened to me. There was a moment or perhaps a series of moments where I relinquished control and it was in that letting go that I was able to keep my sobriety and most importantly work through recovery.

I was talking to one of my good friends today who has struggled with food and sexual addictions most of her life. Those are two things that are hard for me to imagine dealing with since you cannot actually fully abstain. But she has tried everything, medication, now she is a personal trainer and kicks ass at it, does all sorts of diets, but keeps running up against these breaking points. I just felt as she was talking to me about all this that part of the problem was that she was working to hard at it all. That seems so counterintuitive since I feel like all I am doing is working at sobriety but something is different, something in me gave something up. I don't really know what. I can't really explain it.

I am not sure about the higher power. I am not sure that I surrendered to a higher power, I am still struggling with understanding that or feeling that. But surrender— I do feel I surrendered and that was so key. To what and what I surrendered? I don't know. What made me surrender? I have no idea.

Interestingly, I am reading a book called Not God which is an intellectual history about Alcoholics Anonymous, so far it is good I recommend it. In the beginning there were two groups, the Akron group with Bob and the NYC group with Bill. The Akron group had many more members get sober. The Akron group required this surrender or conversion; the NYC group did not. It seemed the surrender aspect was the main key of to keeping members sober.

I just wish I had better language to lend to it. I wish I understood it better. But I find that is the thing about my recovery— there is a lot I don't seem to logically understand. For someone who always needed to understand everything, maybe this is a good thing and a key thing.