Needing Grace

MMN,

Welcome!

You're doing wonderful work looking inside yourself and connecting feelings to your addiction.

I also really relate to your difficulty accepting your own capability of being loved by God.  I remember thinking, in essence, "Yes, God is said to love me, but if He knew what I know about myself, He wouldn't be able to.  I know better."

I engage in a Buddhist practice called metta (or lovingkindness) meditation, in which one forms aspirations that beings might be blessed.  "May you be joyful.  May you be free.  May you be released from suffering and the causes of suffering, etc."  Traditionally one begins with oneself, then people who are friends and benefactors, then people toward whom one is neutral, then people one finds difficult.  For me, the only really challenging part is that first step.  I can wish joyful freedom for Mr Bin Laden and his associates, but for myself?  That's much more challenging.

For me, the real change started when I finally accepted in a deep and total way that I couldn't by myself get out of the disaster I had made of my life, but that others had gotten out of the same sort of hole, and that I had better start doing what they did.  If I really was an addict, I thought, then I had better do what other addicts in recovery have done.  I started reading about the 12-step program and started attending meetings, first online and soon face-to-face.  What I found amazed me.  Here were people just like me who were not only finding freedom from addictions, but were building new relationships with God, with the people around them, and with themselves.  They were finding faith, lives of spiritual blessing, peace with others, serenity with themselves.  I had never imagined being able to have any of those things, and here were people, thousands of them, who had found them all and who offered a path for others to follow their way.  It seemed to me like the greatest hope one human being could offer another.

That path started with surrender - stopping fighting, putting one's whole life in God's hands, and becoming ready to follow wherever God might lead.  In order to make that kind of surrender, though, I had also to start surrendering to and trusting other humans.  They had found a way I hadn't, and I needed to start listening, even though that listening meant doing things that felt pretty uncomfortable - being absolutely honest with others, daring to look into and face myself, starting to work with a counselor, and so on.

As I began to do that, I found an amazing thing.  The God whom I had never really trusted (though I thought I had), whom I resented, by whom I felt judged, who I thought hated me, that God had been there all along.  He had been standing beside me all those years, waiting in sorrow until I could finally let go and accept His love and guidance.  He had always been there, but I had not been able to let go and fall into His arms until finally 40 years or so of addiction had left me utterly hopeless, on the verge of suicide.

So I'm pretty sure your doubts and fears are fears about yourself, not about God, and not about other people, either.

I don't want to make this path look like it's a matter of having some huge momentary revelation, after which everything is better.  That's not how it works.  For me, it's been years of hard work, some of it very painful, but all of it ultimately joyful.  It's been (and it continues to be) a lot of counseling, a lot of meetings, a lot of getting honest with self and others, a lot of fixing damage done by years of abuse of self and others.  And what we get is not a magic experience that fixes us once and for all, but a daily reprieve as long as we keep living mindfully.  It's not an eternal fight, though.  People really become happy, joyful, and free.

So I think there's enormous hope.  People recover from addictions of all kinds, every day.  We can't do it alone, though.  Addiction, especially this one, is all about isolation, and one can't overcome isolation alone.  I've really needed all those meetings, all that counseling, all that honesty with friends and relatives.

Welcome to what can be a wonderful journey.  May you find a path that works for you, whether it resembles mine or not.  A counselor I've worked with says that recovery and change begin when we become willing to trust and follow somebody absolutely, and that it doesn't much matter who we follow.  May you find a way.

Tim M.