Episode 142 -- August 23, 2021

Letting Go and Letting God: Sobriety and Self-Will

When we're early in our sobriety, it's hard to imagine what healthy and positive goals are or could be. For a long time, our energies have been dedicated to keeping our addictions fed while also pretending that our lives are normal or functional. That didn't turn out well for us. When left to our own devices, or resources, we crashed and burned, or hurt people we care about. We thought we were in control, but it was an illusion. The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous offer a path out of this fruitless and self-centered cycle.

For decades, the book A Program for You: A Guide to the Big Book's Design for Living has helped millions of people understand and apply the Twelve Steps to their lives and find an authentic path to recovery. In the following excerpt, the anonymous authors guide us through the concept of giving up our self-will and letting our Higher Power take control. This is what the slogan "Let go and let God" means. Releasing our stubborn grip on outcomes can help us find balance in our lives. We can begin to have goals again—goals that help us maintain our peace of mind and serenity.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

We need to talk about self-will for a bit, because a lot of people misunderstand what it is and how it works. First of all, self-will is a part of everyone's life. We are not saying self-will is bad, and the Big Book doesn't say it is either. In fact, self-will is a God-given part of who we are. We wouldn't be complete human beings without it. A sense of self is necessary and vital in life.

Our instincts are all forms of self-will. We have instincts for survival, for food, for shelter, for companionship, for sex, and even for self-esteem and pride. If we didn't have these, the human race wouldn't survive. But when our basic instincts get too big and out of control, they become destructive to us and to others. If our sense of self is not controlled, it becomes the single most destructive thing in our lives.

Each of us is like a house. To be livable and complete, a house needs utilities—running water, electricity, and perhaps natural gas. Most of the time, these utilities make your home more comfortable and your life more pleasant. But if one of these utilities gets out of control, you end up with a fire or a flood, and your house can be destroyed.

Your will and instincts are like the utilities in a house. When used properly, in the way they were intended to be used, they can make your life smoother and more fulfilling. But if they are uncontrolled, they can do terrible damage to you and to others. In fact, by far the single most destructive force on this earth is the unregulated will of human beings.

We can get ourselves into the worst trouble when we set goals for the wrong reasons. As children, most of us are taught to set goals and then to work hard to reach them. We are also taught that it's often necessary to make sacrifices to reach those goals. When we reach a goal, suddenly we're rewarded—with money, security, sex, love, status, or the respect or approval of others. We are also rewarded with a feeling of success and achievement. It all feels wonderful.

There is nothing wrong with setting goals. But let's look at what can happen once we've achieved the goal we've set, whatever it might be. At first, it feels fantastic; we're on top of the world. Unfortunately, more often than not, this feeling doesn't last very long. A little while after we've gotten whatever it was that we wanted so badly and worked so hard to attain, we may find ourselves looking around and saying, "Is this all there is to it?"

So we set a new goal for ourselves, and we work hard and strive toward it. We eventually reach that goal, and it feels good again for a little while—but, like before, that feeling doesn't last very long. So we set another goal, and the whole process just starts all over again. It has become a treadmill.

The funny thing is that we're not very satisfied with actually reaching our goals. Instead, all this goal-setting and effort and striving seem to create within us an insatiable desire for more power, more recognition, more prestige, more sex, more whatever. Then we start feeling like we're not getting there fast enough; other people aren't giving us the rewards as quickly as we want them or in the way we think we ought to get them.

After a while, we might start taking a few shortcuts. Maybe we start doing a little lying, a little conning, a little manipulating. Of course, anytime we do this, we hurt other people, and they usually retaliate against us and create pain and suffering for us. And we wind up in pretty deep conflict with other people.

This cycle can occur with any one of our instincts: social acceptance or financial security or sex or anything else. Whether it's prestige and respect, more money or something else that you're after, you eventually find yourself tempted to hurt other people or get in their way as you pursue your own goals. If you give in to this temptation, most of these other people are going to retaliate, and pretty soon you'll be in the midst of pain and suffering.

Does any of this sound familiar?

It is plain to us that a life run on self-will can almost never be successful and happy. Left to our own resources, we find the fulfillment of our basic instincts to be pleasurable, yet so temporary and fleeting that we're driven to fulfill them over and over and over. Almost invariably we overdo it, and fulfilling our instincts becomes an obsession. And when we overdo it, we come into conflict with other people and cause them pain and difficulty. That robs us of any possibility of peace of mind. Instead of gaining anything, we end up robbing ourselves—and hurting others, to boot.

Here is what Dr. Silkworth said in "The Doctor's Opinion" in the Big Book: When we alcoholics are sober, we're restless, irritable, and discontented. Often, too, we're filled with shame, fear, guilt, and remorse. And here's the worst part: Left to rely only on our own resources, we will always remain that way because of our instincts and our will.

But if we can let our Higher Power control our will and instincts so that they operate at the level at which they were intended to operate, then maybe we won't feel so restless, irritable, and discontented, and maybe we can live without so much conflict and without doing so much harm to others. Then we won't have to feel the shame, the fear, the guilt, and the remorse that come from hurting others.

Finding Freedom from Selfishness
As human beings, every one of us has self-will. The point of Step Three ("Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him") is not to eliminate that will or to try to stop being human—that would just be another obsession, another form of insanity. Instead, the task for each of us is to let our Higher Power be the director of our will. If a Higher Power directs your will, then that Power will direct your actions. And if that Power directs your actions, then it directs your life, and you can at last live with some peace of mind and serenity.

As the Big Book says on page 62, selfishness and self-centeredness are the causes of our troubles. Our troubles are basically of our own making. We cannot, however, solve them on our own. Our problem is that we let our self-will control what we do; the solution is to give over the control of our will to our Higher Power.

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