Recovery language has the word surrender in it. Said out loud it sounds like taking your hands off. What actually happens at that point is not that.
A part that insists it owns the whole
There is a formulation that the ego has to die in front of the Self — the whole of you. The ego does not oblige. It stays alive in us the entire time. What is going on is that the part has shoved the whole aside and is insisting that it is the owner. Jung’s account of the process has this same passage in it.
So the dying being described is not an instruction to get rid of yourself. It is the part climbing down out of the owner’s seat. What kind of seat that is I have written out separately in You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God.
Settle it at step one and half of it is settled
What is the first step of the recovery program? In the end it is denying yourself. Without denying yourself, nothing new begins. Ask which step matters most and the answer is step one. Someone who cannot get through step one gets nothing out of moving on to step two, and someone who settles it at step one alone has nearly half of the whole thing settled.
Denying yourself is not an instruction to hate yourself. What is denied is not your existence — it is the judgment that you can solve this yourself.
First counselling of his life, and already there
There is a case of a man who had been using cannabis. It was the first counselling of his life and he had carried out step one before he walked in. What he had arrived at on his own was this: this drug has wrecked me, and I cannot cut it off. And if I cannot cut it off, my life comes apart. Then he went to the prosecutors and wrote out a confession, told his parents everything, confessed to his wife. He had never once been caught. He had worked out that if he could not stop he would die of it, so he settled his mind and came in prepared for prison, with no idea what sentence would land.
A good man when he smoked
Cannabis had been, by his own account, a genuine saviour. And he had used a great deal of it. At the beginning there was a flash of something, an ease it handed him. Repeat it long enough, though, and the eyes go loose. Anyone looking at him could see that he was not right. And he came apart in two: a very good man while he was smoking, and, when he was not, irritation and a raw, extreme sensitivity. At home nobody could work out why he was like that. Why a person cannot stop at the line he drew for himself is a separate question, and I have gone into it in Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Make You Feel Safer, Not Smaller.
I can’t. I am not able to.
So he reaches it: I am someone who cannot solve this. And he goes down in front of other people. I can’t. I am not able to. That is the posture. And it is when a person goes down like that that a new start actually happens.
Not turned over — decided to turn over
The third step of the recovery program comes with a commentary, and that commentary begins from a fact about the addict: his will and his life had already been turned over, to the addiction. It describes the addiction driving that will and that life into extreme despair — and only then did they go looking for another way.
The sentence that sits in that place is the third step itself. It does not say the will and the life were turned over. It says a decision was taken to turn them over — the step’s own words are “made a decision”. The commentary puts weight on exactly that — “it was not that someone decided for us; we decided.” It calls this the first decision he had made for himself since the addiction took hold, and adds that deciding requires action.
The clause in front of the word God is not decoration either. It is not God flatly. It is God “as we came to understand him” — which is to say the content of that word is left with each person. The commentary is plain that nobody had to be religious to take this step, and that each person has the right to believe in God as he has come to understand him.
And it may still be sitting in your hands
So this step is not a matter of handing the thing to somebody else and walking away. The commentary says that even after you have said you turned it over, your will and your life may still be sitting in your own hands — and that you may find yourself angry that God permitted that to be so. It expects the questions that follow, and writes them down: “If I turn my life over, what on earth is going to happen? Will I become complete?”
The word to listen for is surrender
Further on, the passage restates the step without the decision clause: “We turned our will and our lives over completely to the care of a God greater than ourselves.” And then comes a line telling the reader where to put his attention — “listen to the word surrender here”. Then: the helpless despair, the kind that had looked past hope, begins to lift.
The place where that lifting starts is the place where somebody goes down and says he cannot.
Surrender is not taking your hands off. A man who has given up does not write out a confession and carry it to the prosecutor.
Related
- “That’s Just Me”: When Looking Back Turns Into Self-Attack
- So I Was That Angry Too: The Rage I Couldn’t Name
- You Gave Past Your Limit. That’s Why You Resent Them.
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board