Think about what recovery has added to your life and what was missing before. How has your recovery changed the hole in your soul once filled by addiction? With what has your recovery filled that hole?
Whatever recovery brings to a life is what that life lacked before. The more those needs are met before a person is taken over by addiction, the less chance there is that a person will escape into the chemical of choice. It’s the truth of the old Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) saying, “Every alcoholic hopes to find God at the bottom of the bottle.”
In more than 40 years of recovery, I have never seen anything make more difference in a recovering person’s life than finding love. “There is no spiritual side to AA; it’s all spiritual.” I’ve heard this fundamental truth about recovery frequently, and it’s true. It is all spiritual. And at the core of spirituality, at least an understanding of spirituality that is powerful enough to transform a personality, is always the growing ability to love and be loved. Strip both addiction and recovery to their core and what a person is looking at is the consequence — one glorious and the other tragic — of love and love denied. Love denied cripples. Love found supplies the foundation necessary to build a new, healthy life.
That foundation of healthy living consists of three things: trust, honesty, and service.
Trust
Active addiction destroys the ability to trust. A person who can’t learn to trust cannot recover. Growing the ability to trust is at the heart of staying connected to God, self, and others.
Honesty
Honesty, especially honesty with self, sits at the core of trust. Trusting a dishonest person always leads to tragedy. Recovery is all about learning to be honest with God, self, and others. Define honesty as taking responsibility for actions.
Service
Our culture is full of chances to be selfish, self-centered and ask, “What’s in it for me?” To fight those selfish tendencies, at the heart of recovery is service work. The founders of AA said, “The only way you can keep it is to give it away.” We all learned in recovery that we are responsible to reach back whenever a brother or sister reaches out a hand.
What’s Missing ?
Recovery is finding love and then giving love to others with the same passion someone gave it to you.
Zack is a tall, handsome young man of 19, a student in a Salvation Army recovery program class I teach. He approached me after class one day and stated, “I got it.” “Got what?” I asked. He said he finally understood why he kept relapsing.
He said, “I am afraid to be loved.”
Every active addict is afraid to be loved. That’s the hole in the soul that fuels addiction.
I asked Zack where he learned to be afraid of love. He said his first memory is from when he was 3 and his parents were going through a nasty divorce. He heard them shouting at each other. One said, “I’m not going to take him.”
The other screamed back, “Well, I’m not taking him.” No one wanted him, and as soon as he could, Zack ran into the arms of drugs looking for relief.
What is ground zero of recovery? Where does the magic and mystery happen? When all is said and done, all the books and research, all the talks, seminars and retreats — strip addiction and recovery down to its core — what is left?
Is it anything other than the spiritual awakenings promised in Step 12 that lead us to fellowship, belonging, and the amazing discovery that “I am a good person and have something important to give others?”