We came to believe -- through personal experience -- that a Presence – greater than ourselves – could restore us to sanity.
Healing Presence begins with Step One: We admitted and experienced that we were powerless over external outcomes – and over our internal perceptions and reactions of external outcomes ..... we are not only powerless over external people, situations, and things, but also over our perceptions and reactions to these external “things” .... we are helplessly insane ....
“Insanity” = unresolved/unhealed traumas – separations – from our past, that leaks, floods, or explodes into our present .... contaminating our perceptions ..... causing us to hallucinate emotionally and mentally .... so we are unable – helplessly powerless -- to alter our perceptions, reactions and actions by a sheer force of will ....
Neurological research shows that trauma – painful separations – alters the programming of the non-thinking, non-reasoning, impulse driven limbic primitive brain –which simply acts automatically at the perception of possible loss and pain .... and the cerebral thinking brain has no power to override the resulting reactions....
Trauma induced viral programming of the instinctive brain creates our uncontrollable addiction to outcomes – or Codependency ....
Religion offers the solution of “belief” – “faith” -- in “God” .... belief/faith is essentially “thinking” that something is true ... but the part of our brains that thinks is not the diseased or the dominant part of the brain .... and so religious belief/faith becomes typically the mental creation of an imaginary person who is neither real nor has any real influence over our disease .... a God of thought ....
What spirituality and the 12 Steps offers, in my experience, is an experiential alternative to “Santa God” and insanity .... a Presence/Power greater than our selves that we come to believe and experience personally and intimately, beginning with the intimate sharing of our pain, and of our individual experiences, strengths and hopes with each other .....
We seem to receive healing of our damaged neural pathways through intimate “conversation” – interaction – with others, our God, and with our selves .... Higher Presence ....
