Episode 187 -- January 27, 2022

Before we were in recovery, our attitudes shifted with our moods. We ran hot or cold, angry or euphoric. Sometimes we just felt and acted blank or numb. As we step into this new life without drinking or using, many of us are rediscovering a wider range of feelings and attitudes. Some of us are learning these things by watching and listening to the people we're walking with on the road of recovery.

Earnie Larsen was one of those fellow travelers. In his book, Destination Joy: Moving Beyond Fear, Loss, and Trauma in Recovery, Larsen explores ways we can bring greater love, acceptance, and belonging to our recovering lives. The following excerpt details what he identifies as six "basic" and interconnected attitudes that support healthy and joyful recovery.

No matter where you are on the recovery road, honesty, humility, hope, gratitude, service, and surrender can be powerful anchors and rewarding ways of living with yourself and the people you love.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

Six Basic Recovery Attitudes
I'd like to suggest six basic attitudes we refer to in recovery all the time. They are as familiar to us as our breakfast cereal, but you'll more often than not go hungry looking for them in the "normal world." This list is best understood not in a linear fashion. Instead, it should be viewed as a circle where nothing has a definite start or ending, with one attitude blending into another.

1. Honesty
It's not just about telling the truth. That, of course, is a kind of honesty, but I'm referring to the basic stance a person in recovery takes toward his or her life. I'm talking about depth. I'm talking about the opening up of our whole lives to the power of recovery as it happens in "all our affairs." I'm talking about the kind of life we are led into when we have received the miraculous gift of the First Step. For then we enter a dimension that demands we go beyond glitz, sizzle, and hype to a deeper and more real level of life. We can't be in recovery and be seduced by show. Recovery takes us by the nose and the heart and rubs our faces in what really counts in life.

Honesty allows us to see and celebrate the very guts of life. We see the victory of someone showing up for group, week after week, whom others might call a bum or throw away. We celebrate every person who gets a medallion for whatever length of time in the program. Recovery takes us to the altar flame of what is real.

Honesty doesn't go into cardiac arrest over the insignificant. We learn to not sweat the small stuff, and we learn that almost everything is small stuff. But equally, we come to understand and pay attention to what is important. We have experienced that the banquet is about who is in the chairs and not what is on the table.

As we do our best to live out the basic attitude of honesty in our daily lives, we give witness to the importance of aspiring to the real for a truly human life. We are called to make our lives living, breathing billboards of what is important in life. Others see us. And in being seen, we give some small measure of the bread of life to the world.

2. Humility
This basic is about learning that "life isn't all about me." If recovery teaches us anything, it is this: "I am part. I am not all."

Humility allows us to rejoice in the good fortune and success of others without seeing it as a threat to our own.

Humility gets self out of the way so that there's room for others in our lives. We learn to say, "I don't always have to be talking about me!"

Humility is present when someone leaves our company feeling better about who they are, rather than feeling stuffed with facts about how great we are.

Humility is basic to that most rare skill of being able to listen. So few know how to or are able to listen. Maybe that is at least partly why there are so many lonely people haunting the world. But we try. We know that failing to listen may result in the death of a suffering brother or sister who came among us seeking a place at the table but were turned away because we didn't have room for them among us.

3. Hope
Tragically, many in our society live without hope. And as a result, they live lives full of violence, depression, and self-hatred. Life without hope truly is, as the poet Dante said, "hell."

Hope is the fingerprint of God among us and the fuel of recovery. Hope is a fundamental building block of recovery, a basic we gain as a reward when we exercise the options that working a program provides. Hope is always about options. As long as there are options, there is hope. We come to learn that no matter how hopeless the situation appears, there are options. There is another way.

Hope is the refusal to give up no matter what because there is a way out. And that way out exists because we are not alone. We have access to power beyond anything we could imagine.

Once experienced, hope becomes the motivation that refuses to let others live without hope. Since there was hope for us, there is hope for others. We give testimony to that belief by the way we live. And others see this.

4. Gratitude
In recovery, we either learn to be grateful, or we don't last. Gratitude is the air of recovery. Gratitude is what makes the lungs of recovery fill, the heart beat, and the life flow.

The attitude of gratitude focuses on what we have rather than what we don't. With gratitude, there is such a thing as enough. People filled with gratitude aren't good consumers because they don't heed the message "You need more stuff. Stuff will make you whole."

Gratitude makes us whole, not stuff. It allows us to make the abundant blessings we already have in our life not only count, but be enough. And not just enough, but more than we could have imagined.

Gratitude allows us to understand that there is enough for everyone so we don't have to hoard whatever it is we think we need. There is plenty.

5. Service
There is no recovery without service. Service is the means of paying back our debt to our Higher Power and all those who came to us in our time of desperation.

Service is not a substitute or a hiding place for us to avoid doing our own work by becoming overly busy.

Service works. It forces us to get out of ourselves and focus on the needs and lives of others.

Service provides the greatest of gifts. Through it, we learn that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. Anyone who would truly be of service to another has a front-row seat at the festival of miracles.

6. Surrender
Many seem not to understand the nature of surrender. They see it as failure, I guess. But the surrender of our lives to a Higher Power is the greatest victory of which a human being is capable.

Surrender is not an act of weakness but rather an admission of our limitations, which then opens the door to true strength. We have learned from bitter experience that there is no one weaker than the person who has only his or her own power to rely on. Others can call the attitude of surrender anything they want, but we know the truth. In that truth is the heart of our abundance and joy.

Surrender finally allows for letting go. Only by letting go can we ever be free. Our hearts are made for moving on. But fear would have us hang on and on and on. What we won't let go of will not let go of us, and it prohibits us from finding that something better that waits up ahead. We can't say hello if we don't say good-bye.

Once we surrender, we are able to become the conduit through which God acts in our world. There is no power greater than God. Surrender readily acknowledges that the wonders at hand aren't about us; they are about God through us. All we need to do is show up, get out of the way, and watch the show. No matter how much of "us" gets used up in the exchange, there is nothing quite so thrilling as watching God at work.

About the Author:
Earnie Larsen was a nationally known author and lecturer. A pioneer in the field of recovery from addictive behaviors and the originator of the process known as Stage II recovery, Earnie authored numerous curricula, DVDs, audio CDs, and books with Hazelden and other publishers, including his 2010 Hazelden book Now That You're Sober: Week-by-Week Guidance from Your Recovery Coach, written with his sister, Carol Larsen Hegarty. With degrees from Loyola University and the University of Minnesota, Earnie had been a counselor for more than forty years. He passed away in 2011.

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