Step Three of Twelve Steps: Spiritual Maintenance through Surrender: Workbook

STEP THREE: Active Surrender of Perceptions, Reactions, Actions and Outcomes to Our Caring God

Made a decision to turn our wills and our lives

over to the care of God as we understood Him.

One Day at a Time February 9th

When living with an alcoholic overwhelmed me, I didn’t know which way to turn or how to make a decision. I rejected God because I resented what I considered unfair punishment. Yet I found that “going it alone” made matters even worse. At a still later stage of desperation, I turned to Him again and placed my life and my will in His hands. Once I had surrendered, trusting Him completely, my burdens were lightened. I cannot profess to understand how such things happen; I want never to forget that he is ready to befriend me, but only to the degree that I trust Him.

If instead of trusting in God I trust only my own intelligence, my own strength and my own prudence, I will not find my way to Him and His help. He has offered me the gift of faith. In accepting it, I must put aside my own human will and trust in Him. Dante, in the Divine Comedy wrote: “In His will is our peace.”

Trust in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him and he shall direct thy paths.

Proverbs

There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening, we shall hear the right word. Certainly there is a right for you that needs no choice on your part. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into your life. Then, without effort, you are impelled to truth and to perfect contentment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Before Step Two, we are unable to make sound decisions, and especially to follow through with them with our actions. So we always begin, after the first two steps, to make better decisions and to take action relevant and appropriate to trust in God’s care and current circumstances. Otherwise our primitive brain dresses up the same old actions with different thoughts, and we continue to do the same things over and over, hoping for different results.

“Turning over”
Instinctively, under the influence of alcoholics and other unconsciously dysfunctional persons, our primitive instinctive brain took “control” of our lives by constricting the mental and emotional energies our brain was experiencing. Spiritual recovery involves releasing this inner constriction and resistance -- control – by conscious and deliberate acts of faith and trust in a higher Presence of our own personal and individual experience. We reconnect consciously with ourselves and feel our pain and fear – Step One. Then we reconnect intimately with our God’s higher Presence – Step Two. And then we relinquish our control over our perceptions and reactions – outcomes – by taking actions that connects us to the caringness of our higher power.

”Will”
Our “wills” are our perceptions, reactions, and our illusions of our abilities to make decisions. Our brains experiences sensations – sight, sounds, smells, touch, and taste. These sensations are filtered through the constricted pathways of our brains, creating perceptions embedded with wounded and unresolved injuries from our pasts – contaminated organizations of what is. Then, from these contaminated organizations of perceptions, our brain experiences the expression and painful pressure of stored emotional energies – reactions.

Based on this process, the brain is rendered incapable of making sound and healthy decisions. So we and our brains must be surrendered to our God for awakening and empowerment.

“Lives”
The mental illness that results from relationships with alcoholics and other dysfunctional person is one of addiction to outcomes. Our diseased brain is programmed to predict, prepare for, and prevent perceived undesirable outcomes. These painful outcomes are perceived and experienced with the same intensity as death.

In this Third Step, we are relinquishing the control of the outcomes of our lives. We are turning them over to the care of our God. We are developing a serenity network of higher caring Presence to allow us to stop squeezing life events in an attempt to insure an outcome that is perceived as necessary for living.

“To the care of God as we understood Him”
In this step we take the action necessary to have an intimate relationship with a higher Presence, and to release our cares to God’s care.

This understanding is not thought or intellect based, but heart based. Our brains cannot conceptualize such a caring intimacy. It can only be experienced – understood -- with our hearts.


Worksheet:

Before each item, take four deep slow breaths in and out, as an act of trust in your higher power.
1. Identify a relationship or life situation about which you are currently experiencing a conscious level of discomfort.
2. List what you have to date done about the situation.
3. List what you could possibly do about the situation.
4. List what you would be doing if this were not a concern.
5. Discuss situation/relationship with another person (e.g. sponsor). Is there something reasonable that you can do that you have not already done.
6. With help of other recovering person, decide if more action is indicated, and if so what; and decide what you would do if this concern did not exist, and plan/act to do it.

Returning to the Secret Garden of Lost Selves

I was in a spiritual support group today where the topic was Step Five of the Twelve Steps:

We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs (the nature and symptoms of our emotional illness).

This step is the continuation of Step Four:

We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

The Fourth Step is a spiritual inventory of
1. What we perceive others did to us that was “harmful” to us because they separated themselves from us – some form of abandonment or abuse.
2. Our lasting resentments and anger as reactions to each memory of each separating event or series of events.
3. Our fears that the harm activated and intensified.
4. Our harmful behaviors and actions – our behavioral symptoms – caused by our perception of being “harmed” – separated from others.

This spiritual inventory lists and identifies the symptoms of our human illness.

My experience is that we have experienced “harms” -- separations of abandonment and sometimes abuse – as emotional traumas of varied intensity. When these harms or traumas occurred, our brains responded instinctively to protect us, and our wounded selves were separated – placed in protective custody -- to an unconscious place inside of our brains. These parts were -- and are -- lost selves -- sacrificed and put away from our current self in order to protect them and to protect our current self.


These lost selves are lonely, sad, scared, and angry – lost and disconnected from conscious intimate Presence. When we feel angry, scared, sad, or lonely, we are experiencing a brief, yet frequently powerful contact with one or more of our lost selves. They are the so called “committee in our head” – the voices that we hear in brains -- talking, shouting, crying, pleading for attention, and relief to be restored to the “sanity” of being consciously a part of who we are.

The Fourth Step is an organized way of beginning to identify and re-experience these lost selves by remembering the harm that caused them, by listing the angers and fears that the lost selves are experiencing, and by observing patterns of separation – abandonment and abuse – that our lost selves exhibit as symptoms of their woundedness.

As I listened in the meeting, I experienced my lost selves as being imprisoned in a Secret Garden. The door is hidden by painful growths and debris of past separations. The walls are solid, hardened thoughts mortared tall and strong by obsessive thinking – the protective place of the lost and mostly forgotten selves.

I have experienced the Fourth Step as a starting place in the process of reconnecting with and regaining my lost selves. In Step Four we begin to identify and consciously experience their painful presence again.

In Step Five, we reach out to our God through the flesh and blood of another human being, and together we move away the debris that blocks the door to the Secret Garden, willingly swing the door open, and together, the three of us step inside. With our list of lost selves, we begin to seek those we have identified, and when we find them, we bring them out and allow them to be restored to our Self.

Otherwise, we would be doomed to live the rest of lives without the presence of these parts of our selves – doomed to live the incredible loneliness, pain, and desperation of all our selves being separated and abandoned from each other.

Without improving conscious contact we relive the traumas of the past -- over and over -- without the possibility of “parole”. We must take our God’s hand and return to our Secret Garden of lost selves. We can’t do it alone. And we don’t have to try.
:
A person in the meeting shared about having just gotten a dog. The dog had been used for breeding for six years, and had been kept in a 2 by 4 foot space, had been “debarked” (rendered unable to bark), and had a serial number permanently etched in its ear. I experienced how my lost selves have been imprisoned in a small space, silenced from communicating and being part of my Self, and reduced to a label without a name and without an accepted or recognized personal identity.

The dog seems to be coming back slowly because she is increasingly wagging her tail, and moving happily around – but she is still guarded and easily frightened. The higher presence of her new owners is giving her a chance to come home to love, safety and presence.

We can come home, too. It starts with having an intimate relationship with our God, and can result in our lost selves beginning to ”wag their tails” with the excitement and joy of coming back home -- experiencing being loved, cared about, and safe – empowered to be and to become who we really are.

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Step 11 of Twelve Steps -- Finding God's Will Through Fear

Anxiety is the natural result when our hopes are centered in anything short of God and his will for us.
Billy Graham

I struggled the greater part of my life, trying to determine what God’s will was for me. I didn’t realize until the last fifteen years that I was wanting to know the terms of the contractual relationship that God was seemingly offering everyone. If I could determine “His” will and do it, God had to give me what I wanted – primarily to be loved and cared about.

To know and fulfil God’s will had become my will, and it was failing miserably – no matter how much I tried to sacrifice and martyr myself to please “Him”.

Anxiety was a given. I was not measuring up to my expectations of how I believed I should please God, and I knew – from religion – to expect my impending judgement and my imminent destruction.

Over the past twenty years, I have begun to learn and experience certain “truths” – at least for me.

First of all my God, as I experience Him -- and Her -- has no rules by which They judge and punish me. Their love is unconditional and constant --irregardless of my actions and thoughts. My problem is my judgement and punishment of myself based on the rules that I have been programmed to believe they have for me.

Second, God’s will is exactly what I would want, if I knew myself, and what I wanted as They do. In the purest sense, God’s will and what I really want are the same.

Third, God’s will is a natural result of living in intimate closeness and love with Them. Their intent is for me to know and experience my truest selves, and with their loving support, to live increasing complete in that spiritual enlightenment.

Anxiety is the beginning of spiritual enlightenment, because it reminds us that we are still not yet completely connected to our God’s higher Presence and love. It is the beginning of a “faith” beyond thought, and hope beyond understanding – not the opposite. To conscious feel anxious is to become present and available for their love to flow into our hearts and being.

The maintenance of spiritual presence and spiritual enlightenment requires the following: experience our feelings – especially anxiety; increasingly connect ourselves to Their loving Presence through daily inspirations and precious moments of experience and hope; and consistently take the action necessary to stay intimately connected to their loving care.

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