Step Two. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
In Overeaters Anonymous’s version of the Twelve Step classic Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, we read, “‘Restore me to sanity? I don’t need that. I’m perfectly sane. I just have an eating problem.’ But how sane are we, really?”1
It’s a good question. How sane are we when we deprive ourselves of breakfast, knowing that we’ll pay later by eating too much at lunch and losing energy in the afternoon? How sane is it to spend three hours playing games on the computer when we’re already tired from a day of work? How sane is it to stop taking a medication that has been helping? How sane is it to put off a recovery experience that could lift us out of our self-defeating ways?
Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. We go shopping when our credit card is maxed out and we already have enough clothes to last us till the next millennium. We turn to a tool addiction to feel better, knowing in the long run we’ll only feel worse about ourselves and have lost yet more time and money.
So maybe we do need to be restored to sanity.
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. For some misery addicts this is the hardest part. People who feel betrayed by God don’t have much interest in trusting God again. People who were harmed and twisted up by religion don’t want anything more to do with it.
That’s fine. Misery Addicts Anonymous—MAA—is not a religion. You don’t have to believe in God or even in religion. You just have to pick some Power greater than yourself.
Here is what people in recovery will tell you:
We didn’t have to believe from the start. We just had to be open to the possibility of believing. We had to give ourselves room for belief to grow. By being open we could let in the evidence of the people sitting right in front of us. They had surrendered, and then they let themselves believe that something greater than themselves could do the impossible. And it worked!
They got separated from their addictions, and their lives turned around, and they were sitting right there, happy about it. Some even stated they were grateful to their addiction because without it they wouldn’t have found this great way of living that had led to such riches in friendship, joy, and serenity.
We didn’t have to actually believe in this Power. We just had to make room in our minds for the possibility that a Power greater than ourselves was powerful.
What’s so hard about that?
As writer Joe McQ says in his wonderful book The Steps We Took, “Believing is the state of mind we must have before beginning any project…. Belief is an awesome force.”2 McQ points out that believing sets limits. If someone believes she can’t get a better job, then she can’t. On the other hand, someone believed we could reach the moon, and we did. Further expanding on the concept of a Higher Power, the Hazelden text A Program for You says the following:
That there is a Power greater than our self—our individual ego—is as much a fact as our physical existence. This Higher Power has been here all our lives, and throughout the lives of everyone who has ever lived on this planet. It’s nothing new. We can call it our conscience, our inner intelligence, the Spirit, the Supreme Being, or God. What we call it isn’t important…. Most of us have experienced this Power from time to time—as an inspiration, a presence, or an intelligence. Often, it takes the form of a voice somewhere within us, usually deep down…. Now if it’s true that God dwells within each human being, that means that each of us has his or her own personal God or Higher Power. And each of us and our own Higher Power can come together in simple and understandable terms. You don’t have to worry about whether the God of your understanding is the God of the Baptists or the Catholics or the Jews or the Hindus. You don’t necessarily need a priest, a complex philosophy, or someone else’s sanction to have a Higher Power. You don’t even have to call your Higher Power “God.”3
First we surrendered. Then making room in our hearts for belief in restoration from a greater power created an impetus that began moving forward under its own steam as long as we kept ourselves connected with the recovery community. Renewed connection with recovery meetings provided the fertile soil for belief to grow.
Week after week we heard surrender and belief applied to every problem under the sun and then working every single time. It’s not just that someone without a job got a job or someone who had no place to live found a home. It’s that while jobless or homeless and maybe even scared, they were still trusting, still surrendering, still taking essential steps while releasing the outcome. It’s so inspiring we found ourselves believing without even working at it. There was too much evidence proving the process works.
Step Three. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God
We just make a decision. That’s it. Make a decision and our Higher Power (which, again, doesn’t have to be anyone else’s idea of God) takes it from there.
Step Three is about willingness: our willingness to let go of control and give our Higher Power a shot. We can always take it back if we don’t like the results.
In fact, sometimes we will take it back even when we like the results. That’s why we have to stay in touch with recovering people on a regular basis. Left to ourselves, the old thinking will creep in, and we’ll start doing things that cause our recovery to deteriorate.
The decision we made was to turn over our will and our lives, not just the addiction. Why does it have to be so comprehensive?
Because, once we are addicted to something, the addiction takes over our entire lives. If we say we want to quit smoking, the addiction doesn’t care. It doesn’t pull back and go on its way. It calls us back to the tobacco twenty-seven minutes later on its usual schedule.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions reminds us that the more we depend upon a Higher Power, the more independent we actually become.4
The Overeaters Anonymous version of Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions puts it this way:
It is impossible to take step three until we have taken the first two steps. Once we have fully acknowledged our fatal powerlessness and have come to believe that there is a solution, however, the third step is simple. If we want to live free of the killing disease of compulsive eating, we accept help without reservation from a Power greater than ourselves. We now say yes to this Power, deciding from here on to follow spiritual guidance in making every decision.
Note that we have said this step is simple; we have not said it is easy. It is not easy, because for every one of us this decision means we must now adopt a new and unfamiliar way of thinking and acting on life.5
In A Woman’s Way through the Twelve Steps, author Stephanie Covington adds, “Step Three tells us we can let go of our burden…. We can’t grow in our recovery if we keep trying to change things beyond our power to change. We get weighed down trying to do the impossible. This distracts us from attending to what we really can change.”6
What a relief to stop trying what can’t work! What a relief to be able to let go. We let ourselves sink into the benevolence of our recovery community, and we start listening.
Nine more Steps follow the three previous ones. When you go to a recovery meeting, you’ll learn what they are. These first three have to be worked before proceeding to the rest. And while you might work most of the others for certain periods of time and then move on, these first Steps must be returned to routinely.