Author: Andrew Arthur Dawson

“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.”

If I was to pick one step out of all 12 step recovery programs that I feel is the most important, it is this one, the 3rd Step. After coming to the acceptance that there is a Power that can restore all of us to sanity, this step emerges. I call it a pivot step because the rest of the 12 Steps effectiveness is dependent upon how fully one practices this one.

Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith discovered the key to recovery was in turning over one’s entire life to a Higher Power. Through much trial and error, in other words, living in some part of self will, they found nothing else worked. When left to one’s own devices and self will, time and time again, an alcoholic or addict would relapse back into their addictions. Even though I knew what the Third Step meant and understood what history said based upon the AA founder’s experiences, I still tried to find my own version that would work for me.

It didn’t work.

Self will is also known as free will and it’s a funny thing, especially in the minds of alcoholics and addicts. Most of my life I had heard through my religious upbringing that God gave us free will to do with our lives as we wished. I also remember words from that upbringing that said while each of us had free will, that true happiness would only come through obeying God’s will. I think to some level that is part of why my addiction based mind had me trying to trail blaze my own recovery. I always thought of God as some old man sitting above me on a throne, pointing his finger and making bad things happen so that I could learn lessons the hard way. Many addiction based people today talk about the “punishing God” syndrome which I suffered from as well. Sadly, churches have really done a number over the centuries to give the belief that God is a vengeful and wrathful God. Because I held that belief for a long time, the idea of turning my will over to God and fully practicing this Third Step was out of the question. The result was disastrous in my life. While I lived in fear of God and his supposed punishing ways, I punished myself instead and lived in a world of toxicity and darkness. I did that for 17 years sober and while I wasn’t drinking or drugging during that time, my addictive ways grew worse and I more sick.

There are two keys to this step that are important to understand. The first is turning our will over to God. I never got beyond that part of the step because of my fear of God and the thoughts of what I would have to go through if I turned my entire will over to God. Because God and the word punishing were synonymous in my brain, I misinterpreted the second part of this step. “…as we understood God.” The way I understood God was warped from my own upbringing. I never thought about creating a new image of God that was all loving, caring, and kind and not punishing, wrathful, and vengeful.

As all those long self will based years dragged on doing my own version of this step and recovery, there were percentages of how much of my life I’d give God on any given day. Sometimes it was less than 5%. Sometimes it was as high as 95%. On most days it was somewhere in the middle. The key is that I never gave God 100% because I couldn’t seem to get over my fears of God in the first place.

When enough brokenness happened in my life and when enough pain was rampant within and around me, I gave up and decided it was time to believe in something different. That’s when I decided God knew what was best for me and that God always did. And that’s when I decided to turn my entire will and life over to a God that always loved me just as I was and had a path for me to follow that would bring me ultimate happiness.

Today I start every single day off with turning my entire will and life over to the God I understand. While I once despised and loathed God for what I thought God was, today, I see things so differently. I love God. I don’t want my own free will anymore. I don’t want my own self will anymore. Living in either of those destroyed my life and never brought me peace, happiness, or joy. It only brought me more pain, more addictions, and more destructive paths. Living today in a life where I turn my full will over to God as I understand God has finally brought me that peace, happiness, and joy that eluded me all of my life.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

“Came to believe a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity…”

I was brought up in a family that exposed me to church and religion from the day I was born. We were active members of the Community United Methodist Church in Poughkeepsie, NY where my mother was an ardent participant of the bell choir and my father was one of the layman. Going to church every Sunday morning for the 11am service meant putting on my most uncomfortable clothes, sitting in a very hard wooden pew, being ushered to the alter steps to hear the Pastor’s kids talk that never made much sense to me, spending at least 30 to 45 minutes after that listening to a lecture in a hot Sunday School classroom, and finally having to spend at least 10 to 15 minutes shaking all these strangers hands in Fellowship Hall while they ate donuts and drank coffee. The best part of my Sundays were when we drove out of the church parking lot and headed to brunch.

While I may have been exposed to God during all those Sundays in the first 18 years of my life, I didn’t absorb much of it. I thought God was a person that the pastor only communicated with and that I would one day be able to if I gave enough money to his church. I also thought God was the one that allowed all those bad things to happen to me in my life like being molested, having alcoholic parents, watching them die at their own hands, or seeing one of my best friends pass away from a terrible illness. Even worse, I had done many bad things when I had been active in my addictions and I was deathly afraid of what God thought of me. So when I finally decided to enter recovery for my alcoholism and drug addiction, I hesitated at Step 2. How was I going to believe that a Power greater than myself could restore me to sanity when the idea of God brought out so many feelings of anger and fear? My first sponsor in AA helped me to get beyond this dilemma. She said something so profound and yet so simple that I became able to move beyond any hesitation with this step.

“Believe that I believe that a Power greater than myself will restore you to sanity…”

All she was asking for me to do was believe that she believed. For a God that seemed so distant all my life and one that I felt caused me great pain, believing that she believed differently, was much easier to grasp. So I did that. I believed that she believed in a Power that would restore me to sanity and I believed that it was a different Power than the one I had been exposed to my whole life.

There are tons of reasons why Step 2 can be challenging for people to grasp and get beyond. Some people may be atheists or agnostic and find it hard to do this step because of that. Some people may be lesbian or gay and find it hard to believe in a Power when they’ve been told so often that their lives are a sin and that this Power says so. Some people may have done so many terrible things in this world that their shame and fear of what that Power thinks of them prevents it from happening. And others may have been so overexposed to religion as children that they’ve gone in the complete opposite direction from ever seeking out that Power.

The 12 Steps, and Step 2 specifically, is not religious based. It’s not based upon any sect or denomination or specific walk of faith. It’s not based upon any type of church or cult. It’s simply just a belief that a Higher Power is there and can restore everyone to sanity.

If you are finding it still hard to believe that any Power exists higher than you to restore you to sanity, believe that I believe there is. I was once you, and today I believe.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

“We admitted we were powerless over our addiction and that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Facing the first step in any recovery program can be a daunting task. Many people who find their way into recovery rooms for whatever addiction they face usually arrive because of great losses that have already happened. Most have found there was no where else to turn. And almost everyone in the beginning of any recovery program feels downtrodden, depressed, and hopeless. This can be a good thing though for someone beginning their journey of recovery.

During the good times of any of the addictions I have battled in this life, I generally felt upbeat and on top of the world. In the beginnings of each of them, the low times were greatly outweighed by the highs. There were moments in the low times when I was approached by those who had found recovery and I was extremely close-minded to listening to what they had to say.

Take my alcoholism for example. In my senior year of college, things got out of hand twice with my drinking. During both of those times, I blacked out and created some problems for myself and for others. For the first incident, I was only given a warning and simply laughed it off. For the second, I was put on a level of academic probation where I had to speak to a person from AA once a week for three sessions. I still remember sitting in my apartment on the couch half listening to a guy tell me about how I might have a problem with drinking and that maybe I should go to a meeting with him. I wasn’t open to hearing what he had to say because I wasn’t broken yet from my addiction. I wasn’t regularly feeling depressed. I hadn’t landed in jail. My grades were excellent and I was quite the overachiever in my fraternity. There had not been enough consequences yet in my life to see that alcohol was making my life unmanageable. That period actually came much later.

When I finally went to my first twelve step recovery meeting with an open mind and open heart, it was in September of 2007. By then, I really was broken and had hit rock bottom. I had quit drinking and drugs twelve years before but had decided back then I could recover on my own. After twelve long years of believing that and getting addicted to many other things, I had lost pretty much everything and my life felt completely out of control. Suddenly the first step in AA made sense to me and I was ready to listen to what that man had once said to me all those years back in my college apartment. I finally knew at that point I was powerless over my alcoholism and my addictive personality. As for my life being unmanageable, at that point, my business was in financial failure, my health was deteriorating rapidly, my seven year relationship was over, and I was forced to live in my sister’s guest room as I had no where else to go. So was my life truly unmanageable? Absolutely.

I don’t believe that there is any way the first step can be understood unless one is truly in a place of brokenness. Throughout the five years of active drinking and drugging that I did and the twelve years that followed after that where I found other substitute addictions, I never quite got to that place of feeling shattered on every level. Thank God that it came before I actually relapsed or before something even worse then that happened.

Step 1 could be compared to climbing Mount Everest. For a mountain that has the highest peak in the world, many try to tackle it, but few ever reach its top. Through my journey of finding a deeper connection to God and seeing how much destruction all of my addictions did to my life, I have been able to ascend that mountain that Step 1 was for me. While Mount Everest’s pinnacle has only been reached by a small number throughout history, there are many in the rooms of recovery who have been able to reach the summit of Step 1 and are now able to look back at how far God has taken them in the healing from their addictions.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson