“We came to believe that powers greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” Paraphrase of Step II
Ever catch yourself thinking the same thing over and over again and expecting,………..a different solution to come to your mind”?
A Change is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke
We can think ourselves crazy,…………
First things first – no doubt our thinking was insane when we lived as active alcoholic/addicts, deluding ourselves into a sea of errant stuff-addled nonsense about how, “it didn’t matter, we could change anytime we wanted to, it was nobody’s business but our own and on and on until we just had to yell: “STOP THE MADNESS”!
And so we looked for a way to do that, hearing about recovery; it’s group therapy found in meetings, the hand-up of sponsorship and spiritual advisers; recovery literature and the liberty to seek the energy, force or power we searched for to be our strength “as we understood it” – having a free choice of selection.
But now, after some time clean and sober, we’ve found that lifelong habits and conditioning have led us to discover other forms of pre-programmed insanity. Maybe some of these:
- Dishonesty
- Worry through Paranoid and Irrational Future Projections
- Self-Pity, unexplainable Depression and Remorse
- F.A.S.T. = Frustration, Anxiety, Stress and Tension
*Go ahead! Get out your pen and paper and add your own specific descriptions of minor madness……
But there are solutions we know of. Prayer, (no matter to whom, where or how you send it) Meditation: a calming of one’s spiritual center as practiced on a regular basis; these can ease the adjustment roller-coaster emotional process of both short and long term sobriety and being clean in recovery.
This was, in part, a reason that I wrote “Living the 12 Steps of recovery for us all”. To give us daily reminders; to reinforce and repeat our intention and method for change from insanity to something calmer, doing it in parallel, reminiscent of our time honored principles.Â
Here is an excerpt of it for today:
February 10
We Lose in the Battle of Wits
Our presumptuous intellects, our lofty credentials, tall IQs and university degrees, these forms of our sheer brainpower have often stood between us and a reliance on faith.
As self-sufficient men and women, our “with high honors†attitude
may have been acquired through the University of Life. We thought experience and tenure were the truest of our credentials but have we discovered we were far too smart for our own good? Did we secretly feel we had floated above the rest of the species on our brainpower alone?

You can think yourself dirty and drunk
The spoils of superiority were ours for the thinking, or so we thought. Almighty knowledge was ours, we surmised, providing certain conclusions that allowed our intellects to disavow the God of our fathers.
Then smarter, more cunning and baffling authorities overcame us: drugs and alcohol. The debate was over, the issue resolved; they had outwitted the best of us.
There are, however, higher and greater powers than drugs and alcohol, in which we can find reasons to believe. They will help us right-size ourselves, overriding our ego-driven and disproportionate wits. Try as we may, those wits were unable to save alcohol and drugs threat to our sanity.
Want some more?