Twelve-step programmes, which people use to recover from addiction, talk about surrender. When people first hear the word used this way, most of them picture giving up: throwing up their hands, deciding they are finished, letting everything go. But what actually happens when a person surrenders is not an ending. It is where something new begins.
One part of you insisting it runs all of you
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung describes a process in which the ego has to bow down before the Self and die. The ego is the part of you that you call “I”; the Self is the whole of you. But in all of us the ego is still very much alive. It is only a part, yet it has pushed the whole aside and is insisting that it is the one in charge.
So the ego’s dying is not an instruction to get rid of yourself. It means that the ego, the part that has been acting as if it were in charge, steps down.
Get through step one and nearly half the problem is solved
The first of the twelve steps is admitting that you are powerless over your addiction and that your life has become unmanageable. At bottom, this step means denying yourself: saying no to the ego, the part of you that insists it is in charge and can deal with the addiction by itself. Without denying yourself, nothing new begins. Of all twelve steps, the one that matters most is step one. Someone who cannot get through step one gets nothing out of moving on to step two, while even someone who gets no further than step one has already solved nearly half the problem.
Denying yourself is not an instruction to hate yourself. What is denied is not your existence — it is the belief that you can solve this yourself.
His first time in counselling, and he had already taken step one
A man who had been using cannabis came to see me. He had never had counselling in his life, yet he had already taken step one before he walked in. He had seen it for himself: this drug has wrecked me, and I cannot quit it. And if I cannot quit, my life will fall apart. In Korea, using cannabis is a crime. He went to the prosecutors, turned himself in with a written confession, told his parents everything and confessed to his wife. He had never once been caught. He did all this because he had realised that he could not stop by himself, and that if he did not stop, it would kill him. When he came to me, his sentence had not yet been decided, but he had made up his mind and was ready to go to prison.
A nice man when he smoked, on edge when he didn’t
By his own account, cannabis had been a real saviour to him: at first it gave him a brief glow, a sense of ease. It felt so good that he could not see why it should be forbidden, and he used a great deal of it. But the more he used, the more glazed his eyes became, and anyone looking at him could see that he was not right. He became like two different people: a really nice man while he was smoking, and, when he was not, irritable and extremely touchy. His family could not understand why he was like this.
When a person admits, “I can’t do this”
He had come to know this about himself: I am someone who cannot solve this. In confessing, he humbled himself before other people. His stance toward everyone was: I can’t do this. I just can’t. And it is when a person humbles himself like this that a new start actually happens.
Step three: not “we turned our will and our lives over” but “we made a decision to”
Skip ahead to step three, which reads: “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over completely to the care of God as we came to understand him.” A commentary on the twelve steps, written in the voice of addicts themselves (“we”), opens its account of this step with something they had already done: they had turned their will and their lives over — to the addiction. The addiction ruled their will and their lives and drove them into utter despair. Only then did they go looking for another way.
Look at the wording. The step does not say we turned our will and our lives over. It says we made a decision to turn them over. The commentary stresses exactly that: “It was not that someone decided for us; we decided.” It calls this the first decision addicts had made for their own sake since the addiction took hold, and adds that deciding requires action.
The words that come with “God” matter too. The step does not simply say God. It says God “as we came to understand him”, which leaves it to each person to decide what that word means. The commentary says plainly that you do not have to be religious to take this step, and that you have the right to believe in God as you have come to understand him.
Even after you decide, you may still be holding on to your will and your life
Because deciding requires action, this step is not a matter of handing your life to somebody else and walking away. The commentary says that even after you have said you are turning your will and your life over, you may find they are still in your own hands — and you may even be angry that God has left them there. It also lists the questions that come up at first: “If I turn my life over, what on earth is going to happen? Will I become perfect?”
The word to listen for is surrender
Further on, the commentary states the step again, this time as something already done: “We turned our will and our lives over completely to the care of a God greater than ourselves.” It says that those who have truly practised this step will be grateful for the change, and that as their fear lessens and they learn what surrender really means, their faith begins to grow. Then it tells the reader: “Listen to the word surrender here.” The surrender it means is this turning over of your will and your life. And it goes on: “Little by little, we begin to climb out of the helpless despair that once seemed impossible to escape.”
That climb out of despair begins when a person humbles himself and says, “I can’t do this.”
Surrender is not giving up. A man who has given up does not write out a confession and hand it in to the prosecutors.
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