In which one of the most spiritually defunct individuals of all time, suffering from an unbecoming existential and addictive panic, goes fumbling desperately back toward God.
Step One: We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol / drugs; that our lives had become unmanageable.
Step Two: We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
In this photo taken during a vacation with friends in the mountains outside Beijing, I don't see Brian looking at the camera; instead, I see Terminal Addiction staring back at me. At the time, I had essentially unlimited access to oxycodone and diazepam. Unfortunately, the oxy formulation that I was taking contained only 5 milligrams of oxy but 300+ milligrams of acetaminophen (Tylenol) per pill, which meant that I was habitually taking a massive overdose of acetaminophen (I sometimes took as many as 70 or 80 of the pills in a single day in addition to benzos and sometimes phenobarbital or a drink or two).
This led to liver and kidney failure, which left me unable to take in solid food for several weeks, during which I passed out randomly throughout the day. In addition, I couldn't sleep for longer than three or four hours at a time because the oxy wore off so quickly that my withdrawal symptoms would wake me up (with cold sweat-stained sheets and chattering teeth). I began to wonder, to consider in all seriousness, if I had died during an overdose and woken up in Hell.
There is something in my expression here that I fail to recognize as me, a combination of a ravening need and a cold, hard appraisal. It's uncomfortable for me to look back on this photo, and I hope that I never have this expression on my face again.
The Starting Point
To set the stage for my second-step reflection, Ben Franklin’s oft-repeated but seldom-heeded definition of insanity: “...Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
In my two-part series on the first step of AA and NA (part 1; part 2), I discussed what powerlessness in the context of the first step means to me: That I have as little control over my drug use as I do over the actions of another person; that it is essentially like having a sinister someone who I seldom like but sometimes love hold a gun to my head and dictate all of my words and actions.
Step Two reads as follows: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”*
*For those of you who would like to read all 12 steps now, they can be found here.
Remembering the emotional and spiritual context - the state that my addiction brought me to before I approached the Program and engaged with the first three steps - is essential to understanding and explaining exactly what a life-saving paradigm shift they represented for me.
Incomprehensible demoralization is two words and twelve syllables. If a high school student used this phrase in a paper, my first inclination might be to recommend simplifying the language to make it accessible to a wider audience. In this case, however, the expression serves because it is such a perfect encapsulation of advanced, untreated addiction.
“Incomprehensible” means more than simply inexpressible, ineffable. It isn’t that I can't articulate just how low addiction brought me. It is far beyond that. I cannot even fully wrap my mind around what addiction cost me; there is a fundamental inability to grok the damage. Like the size of the universe and the nature of God, the profundity of the soul-rot caused by addiction is so deep that it is beyond my capacity not just to express, but even to completely understand.
Demoralization is an apt double-entendre, for not only had I become incredibly depressed, often to the point of feeling nothing at all*, but I had also lost all sense of right and wrong. I lied and manipulated without guilt and humiliated myself without shame. During those rare moments when I emerged from my using fog, the surge of self-hatred that I experienced simply served as a convenient excuse to go right back to using.
*William Burroughs, one of the most famous junkie writers of all time, wrote of the “fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction.”
Can you imagine looking anyone else in the eye once you know that you can't trust yourself to keep a promise? During advanced addiction, anything that came between me and my drugs was ultimately sacrificed. Point-blank, period. Often with a kind of sociopathic calculation that was truly chilling to behold from others, let alone from myself.
During the lowest points of my addiction, there were times when allowing myself to do the wrong thing (to lie and manipulate to further my addiction) almost felt like ceding my will to another person, a Dark Brian who relieved the pressure on me by assuming control. In that abject state, I could no longer count on myself, and because of that, no one else could count on me, either.
As hazy months of active addiction grew to substance-fogged years, I would commit to my umpteenth effort to stop using, swearing to myself that when the next bundle was gone, I would buy three days' worth of Suboxone and use it to taper off of opioids for good. Sometimes, I would get as far as stockpiling the Suboxone, but when it came time to actually make good on my plans, my own hands would refuse to obey me.
This came as a particular shock because I am a disciplined person in many ways: I'm an avid distance runner, an intense and successful student, someone who is no stranger to delayed gratification and who has never had trouble implementing healthy change in other areas of his life (for example, in terms of diet or mindfulness practices). When it came to addiction, however, I might as well have been possessed for all of the good that my planning and self-promising did me.
When I talk about not being able to look at myself in the mirror in that condition, I'm not being hyperbolic, and I hope that it doesn't come across as cringey. I'm trying to express that I had gone so far down that to look at the bedraggled, soulless shell that remained was in itself an awful punishment. (“You just made a real face for the first time in so long,” my mom once remarked upon visiting me in rehab; “The light in your eyes is back; you look like yourself again,” many a loved one of an addict has said).
The dream of every advanced addict is simply to use and to be alone with that feeling. Under the spell of this obsession, I devolved into a revenant. My enjoyment of my greatest passions, reading and running, left me almost entirely during the depths of my addiction. My body became a prison and a torture to exist in, and I could no longer use my mind to escape into other worlds and other lives. The things that make me me - my quirks of personality and expression, my connections with loved ones, my roles and responsibilities in the world - addiction stripped me of all of them, leaving behind a manipulative, heedless, drug-seeking husk.
It became clear to me that nothing within myself could save me. I don't want to go too far astray along a scientific tangent, but again, the neuroscience supports this conclusion. Advanced addicts show severe dysfunction of the Prefrontal Cortex, responsible for executive decision-making, planning, and weighing of risks and consequences, as well as of the mesolimbic reward system, which reinforces behavior into habit. Addiction damages the hardware and software that we would need to make different decisions.
You Need a Weird God
So, what is the Program’s answer to this untenable mess? In a word, the solution is God. As the second step states, the Program is based upon connection with a Higher Power that can restore us to sanity.
It’s a shining concept, to be sure, the idea that a deity can swoop in and save us from our hopelessly corrupted selves. The problem is that not too many active addicts retain a strong, actualized faith in God because the selfishness of addiction is anathema to robust spirituality; another way to say this is that people who are spiritually healthy seldom, if ever, become addicts.
Step Two is particularly challenging in that it requires a leap of faith. It was complicated for me because when I came into the Program for the first time, I was not only what philosophers call a hard determinist (someone who rejects the concept of free will, in my case on scientific grounds). I was also agnostic to the point of near-atheism, and I had been cut badly by the realization that many of the leaders of the church that I had been raised in had abused our trust in them in awful ways.
I also had a chip on my shoulder about the Roman Catholic Church's position on homosexuality. I loved my small-town priest growing up, and hearing him tell me that homosexuality was incompatible with how the Catholic Church interpreted God’s will was one of the defining moments of my youth. Having a trusted elder tell you that an essential, unchangeable part of you is wrong will do anyone’s head in, I think.
So, my first sponsor, an anthropology PhD student named Ben, had his work cut out for him when we began our second step work. I was able to set aside the hard determinism part fairly easily. For hundreds of years, prominent determinists, including the brilliant British philosopher David Hume, have frequently conceded that the truth of their philosophy doesn’t impact daily life and non-technical language very much. On a practical, workaday level, we almost always live and speak as though free will exists.
On what I began to refer to as the "God Issue," though, I was unyielding. I felt no connection to a benevolent Higher Power, I averred, and it felt disingenuous and pointless to fake one.
Ben was wise; he started small.
“God could be literally anything bigger than yourself. He could be that rock over there," he suggested one day. Ben's blue eyes varied in wattage according to how invested he was in a conversation, and I always felt that my own stock value was soaring when I got him interested in one of our chats*.
*Although the Program recommends not having a sponsor of the sex that you're attracted to romantically - particularly not someone who you find desirable - I believe that my attraction to Ben actually kept me coming back, motivating me to do well and to make him proud. Perhaps in the long term this undermined the foundation that I was building for my recovery by making it dependent upon external validation, but in the short term, it saved my life.
“Okay, but what’s the use of believing in that?” I responded. “That rock over there isn’t going to save me from addiction.”
I voiced the same basic objection when Ben suggested that I approach God as the fundamental motive force of our universe, what Aristotelian philosophers referred to as the unmoved mover, meaning a cause that was not itself an effect of another cause.
I expected Ben to roll his eyes when I responded with a rejection of cause and effect rooted in Einsteinian relativity, under which there is no objective before and after, as those terms change depending upon one's frame of reference in space-time. Instead of getting frustrated, Ben smiled a little bit as his beautiful blue eyes - any hue that you'd care to imagine - brightened. Later, I'd realize that he was taking heart to see that this broken kid in front of him, who had swollen purple tracks in the crooks of his elbows and a concentration camp physique, wasn’t entirely shut down. I was at least sparring with him, and in those first few pivots of our intellectual repartee, he saw hope.
There was something stubbornly principled in my refusal to believe in God, I insisted. Okay, God could be a Sense of Connection to Something Greater or whatever, but that didn't mean that He had a plan for me that would save me from the horrible fates that had befallen many of my addict friends (and a good many non-addicts that I had known who were wonderful people screwed by life, as well).
I refused to make myself special, to believe that I was somehow different from all of these beautiful people who suffered and lost. And let's suppose that there was a God and that he had a plan... If God wasn't the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent deity that I had been raised to believe in, the all-loving being who intended only good for us - what was the guarantee that me dying in active addiction wasn't part of the plan?
By the time that we reached this point in our talks, Ben was completing the third revision of his doctoral thesis; he looked a little bit like a junkie himself from his endless hours in the library. I wore him down a bit with all of my protests, I'm sure, and after a couple of weeks of theological debate, he changed tactics. His next suggestion was that I consider God as embodied in the goodness of other people instead of as a separate spiritual entity. GOD stands for Good Orderly Direction, some 12-Steppers say; a Higher Power can be as simple and practical as the collective will of a home group or the beneficent guidance of a sponsor.
“What about the dangers of giving control of your life to others?” I wondered. “There's dangerous stuff that happens in cults when you let other people make your decisions for you.”
“What are you so afraid of?” Ben replied pointedly. “It’s not like you’ve been doing such a good job of keeping yourself safe lately.”
It was a touché moment, I had to admit.
Emerging from active addiction in early recovery is like waking up in this cave above a river in Guilin, China: Surreal isolation and the certainty of absolutely no recourse.
God Appears on Scene as Requested, Almost as Though He Exists
I never had a lightbulb moment, a headlining spiritual epiphany, which some 12-Steppers are lucky enough to experience. For me, developing a connection with a Higher Power meant overcoming doubt through deliberate daily action. This involved praying regularly - not in the rigid, formulaic manner of my Catholic upbringing, but in a more conversational way (sort of like blogging with God, if you like).
“You need a weird God,” Ben suggested sagely. The idea that I was building a strange altar to my makeshift deity became our inside joke. It was weeks later, and by this time in our sponsor-sponsee relationship, the truth is that I trusted Ben so much that I would have accepted him as my Higher Power. I had seen how he lived his life, and I wanted what he had, as we say in the Program. However, I would've been mortified to admit this to him. I was still very raw, and it felt uncomfortable to depend on someone so direly (I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Ben to reject me or to reveal some ulterior motive for helping me). Plus, I knew that Ben couldn't be by my side forever; I needed a bigger, stronger God to sustain me in the long run.
During early recovery, I sometimes received unpredictable jolts of spiritual sublimity as I hiked, wrote, taught. I was reawakening to the world, and I found that as soon as I began to make an effort to connect with my Higher Power, a door was opened to spiritual experience. On some level, it really was this simple, for me: Ask and you shall receive.
I came to see that for me, God wasn’t so much about the head as He was about the heart, my intuition. I could debate the intellectual fine points all day and night - and in fact, my cerebral life had acquired disproportionate importance in my life as a whole - but if I got really quiet, it did seem to me, sometimes, that there was something outside of myself that I could connect with, something greater and better.
In time, my spirit was soothed and quieted; I began to receive intimations of the still, small voice that Elijah hears in Kings. This force, like the demoralization that I had felt in active addiction, was both incomprehensible and ineffable, but this time in a good way. It guided me along the path that was appearing step by step as I trod through early recovery.
My mom is a lawyer and one of the smartest people that I have ever met - two things that rarely go together in contemporary America - and her attention to verbiage borders on the psychotic. In the end, it was this inheritance from her that saved me where the second step was concerned. The formulation of Step Two is an ongoing “came to believe” rather than a completed “believe," and I realized that this was significant; as long as I was headed in the direction of earnest, honest spiritual development, things were on track.
Most of all, rediscovering spirituality required me to be of service to others. Starting with a commitment to help set up and take down the chairs for our Wednesday night meetings, I made helping other people a sincere priority in my life for the first time in a long time (ironically, I was studying medicine so that I could heal other people, but in my day-to-day life, I was doing very little to help other people right now; the volunteering and charitable efforts that I did make time for would all be listed on my medical school app someday, of course).
Helping others was the cure to virtually every problem that I encountered in early recovery. Nothing so reliably and completely drew me out of my own character defects, my own sore history, my own endless spiritual doubt as small, practical efforts to help others. As I made service a regular part of my life, I started to have experiences - some people would say that I received signs - that seemed to me to be spiritually significant. Almost as though there were a beneficent Higher Power talking back to me, after all.
Argument From Necessity
I don't currently go to church, although I am reconsidering this. I am still ambivalent about organized Christianity. While I appreciate many of the positive aspects of being raised in the Catholic Church and I admire the character traits of many of the lifelong Catholics that I was raised by, I believe that the Church has moved too far away from Christ's legacy. In the New Testament, Christ made it clear that he stood for radical love of our neighbors. Love that requires us to renounce material things, to repudiate worldly power structures, to embrace the people who disgust us most.
Christ associated with prostitutes and drug addicts; he forsook the many in search of the few. In the kind of conservative, suburban Church environment that I was raised in, this aspect of Christ's legacy sometimes seemed to have vanished. Many modern Christians enthusiastically cite Old Testament prohibitions such as the one against homosexuality found in Leviticus, failing to recognize that it is the New Testament that defines Christ's paradigm (the Old Testament was mostly included for historical context and to establish Christ as the prophet whose existence was foretold in ancient Abrahamic holy traditions). The Old Testament is, after all, the same set of books that condones slavery, stoning, and so on, so it's hard not to view such selective Scripture-wielding as bigotry in search of confirmation bias. I remain in need of a Christ-like Christian church.
On another note, during recovery I became interested in a transcendental interpretation of the Bible, which moved me further away from the Catholic Church's well-polished dogma. From this perspective, the Kingdom of Heaven is a metaphor for a state of bliss that we can access on Earth through mindfulness combined with diligent spiritual work. This is a conceptual framework that early Christians, including the Coptic Christians of Egypt (the so-called Gnostics) gave credence to.
Those of you familiar with the Gospel of St. Thomas are probably already acquainted with transcendental Christianity without necessarily knowing it by that name. If you've never heard of this text, which wasn't included in the Bible despite its historical validity, than I highly suggest that you give it a read. Again, I remain in need of a Christ-like Christian church, and I am certainly open to suggestions.
In closing, I would like to reiterate that the strongest argument for God, in my opinion, is from His necessity: I cannot live the kind of life that I want to live without faith to sustain me. On this view, it is not the objective reality of God that matters, but the fact that my belief in God lets me bear light that would otherwise be extinguished by the sin and sadness of our world. I embraced the Higher Power referred to in Step Two, in short, because I would be dead without Him. Whether He exists or not, He has saved my life multiple times; the truth of this lends a form of reality to Him in and of itself.
I'm curious to hear about other people's conceptions of their Higher Powers. I still struggle with maintaining a connection to the God of my understanding, and I'm grateful to anyone who is willing to share on this powerful, immensely personal subject.
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