Episode 138 -- August 9, 2021

Help Wanted: Higher Power

For many of us new to Twelve Step recovery, the first couple Steps made sense. We could see how unmanageable our lives had become, and we were painfully aware of our limitations when it came to getting sober. We understood that we needed something bigger than us to restore our sanity. Then came the talk about God, and some of us shut down.

In the following excerpt from her book Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice, psychotherapist Ingrid Mathieu helps us see that our ideas about God are often carrying the baggage of our upbringing—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Those of us who have been hurt or betrayed by people with more power than us can have a hard time trusting the idea of a Higher Power that is actually on our side.

Developing trust in a Power that can (and wants to!) help us recover involves trying on new ways of imagining and describing God. Dr. Mathieu's examples show us that we don't have to be stuck on unhelpful definitions and images that don't serve our sobriety. We don't have to place faith in something that's unworthy of our trust. We get to be free to choose our own conception of a Higher Power.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

Projection is a defense mechanism that occurs when you ascribe your unwanted thoughts, feelings, or behaviors onto another. For example, if you are feeling guilty for stealing something, you might be suspicious that people are stealing from you. The same can be true of positive qualities we hold. Perhaps, for example, you are not able to own or identify your intelligence, but you can readily see it in others. There is a saying in AA that can help you discern when you are projecting something onto someone else: "If you spot it, you got it."

Projecting human attributes onto God, such as being judgmental or fallible, is a common theme in recovery. This defense serves to protect us from our fear of being hurt and is especially common if a person has a history of being abused or neglected. I have witnessed this phenomenon many times in my clinical work. A person's original concept of a Higher Power was his parent(s) or caregiver(s), so the person has a natural tendency to project the features of this primary relationship onto God. If a parent was punishing or unavailable, it is hard to understand how a relationship with God would be any different.

Conceiving of a loving Higher Power if a person has never felt truly loved can feel like an impossible task. It is easier for that person to fit God into his current paradigm of having to fend for himself than to risk being let down yet again. Italian psychologist Roberto Assagioli expressed this sentiment when he talked about the fear of annihilation and wrote, "One just does not want to be swindled by life again."

Despite having a belief that a supportive and loving God exists, resisting practices that could bring conscious contact with one's Higher Power is an example of a person projecting her inability to trust onto God. The person knows intellectually that prayer and meditation are powerful tools, but the underlying feeling she has when involved in such practices is that she is putting her dysfunction in the spotlight—to be evaluated and ridiculed. She does not feel as though she is being seen in a loving, compassionate way but rather as though she is being caught red-handed for the imperfect person she is. She cannot trust that God will love her unconditionally. Thus, the conscious contact does not grow, and the inability to trust is amplified.

Growing up in an environment in which you couldn't trust your caretakers to "have your back" can make it extremely difficult to experience a loving Higher Power in recovery. You have to become vulnerable to dismantle the projection and to build an experience of trust and connection to something Greater.

We can see an example of this in Chelsea's story. She had an intellectual understanding of why she needed a Higher Power, but her history of abuse did not allow her to believe she could have a loving relationship with God. She ultimately feared true connection and did not want to become vulnerable to anyone or anything. As a way of distancing herself from the possibility of pain, Chelsea was angry with God. He was responsible for all of the harm she had encountered in her life, and thus he was clearly fallible and could not be trusted.

This belief system kept Chelsea stuck in her recovery for many years. She remained in a tremendous amount of pain and had no idea how to handle it. Eventually she became suicidal, which brought her to a "do or die" place of surrender. Before she was able to take her own life, she realized she was the sole caretaker for the dog she had recently adopted. Recognizing this bond was a powerful example of a true connection to something outside of herself. This spiritual experience propelled Chelsea out of her angry projections onto God and into a new phase of her recovery. Her story is a wonderful example of how someone can start with a seeming inability to connect with a Higher Power but, through amplifying even the smallest examples of connection in life, can build a robust foundation of faith.

Another method for finding a faith that works can be seen when we look at the positive benefits of projection. Perhaps you have no experience of love, support, or nurturance, but you want to build these aspects into a relationship with a Higher Power. Such attributes can be projected onto God to create an opening for a relationship unlike any other. In this way, projection can be a useful tool to create the Higher Power you have always wanted. This has been a means of working Step Two in the program for many years.

People have come up with many ways to use the positive aspects of projection. For example, you may want to write a "want ad," looking for a new Higher Power. Or you may design a wish list with the explicit instruction that you are to dream big and not restrict any of what you wish for, even if you think it is impossible. An example of such a wish list or want ad might read like this:

HIGHER POWER WANTED
Must meet all of the following criteria:

• Be much more powerful than my disease.
• Be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• Have my best interests in mind, even when I do not.
• Love me unconditionally, even when I do not know what that means.
• Never "teach me a lesson," but support me through whatever life brings my way.
• Be my biggest cheerleader.
• Give me a shoulder to cry on.
• Have a great sense of humor.
• Be so accessible that I feel you as a part of me.
• Give me the courage and strength to show up for life on life's terms.

When you have come up with your own list, you can choose to believe that your Higher Power already fulfills these criteria. Chelsea did this when her sponsor told her that her conception of a Higher Power was her Higher Power. Bill Wilson had this experience when it was suggested that he could choose his own conception of a Higher Power. In "Bill's Story" in Alcoholics Anonymous he writes,

The difference between unconscious projections of things that do not serve and conscious projections of things that do can be quite vast. I hope our brief review of this topic can be a useful point of reference in your own recovery.

About the Author:
INGRID MATHIEU holds a master's degree in transpersonal psychology and a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California. As a psychotherapist in Beverly Hills, California, she specializes in treating individuals who are in recovery.

© 2011 by Ingrid Mathieu, PhD
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