Step 2

As a result of my daughter’s alcohol addiction, I went to my first Al-Anon meeting last night. The focus was on Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Though I have been familiar with Twelve-Step programs for many years, I had never attended a meeting. I suppose I had read the second step but I had never paid much attention to that last phrase -- “restore us to sanity”. I thought the focus was on believing in a Higher Power. When people began to talk about it, though, they all emphasized the fact that they had known they were insane or learned they were insane. Some mentioned the “greater Power” in relation to restoration, but it was clear that sanity was the goal.

It is funny that I never considered myself insane. I knew I was depressed but I thought I had a good reason for it. I could explain why I was depressed, and why any reasonable, sane person in my circumstances would be depressed. I could have explained to anyone who cared to hear it why suicide made perfect sense. I could explain why my irrational outbursts of anger were actually rational, and why I was justified in expressing that anger by smashing and destroying things. In all that, I knew with absolute clarity why everybody around me was insane, or, as my old Trig teacher used to relate, why “the whole world is insane; I’m the only sane one left”. As bizarre as it may sound, I have actually made that statement in the midst of ripping off my shirt in a fit of rage.

Sadly, none of that preceding paragraph is a joke, at least not in the usual sense.

Reason and rationality will not insulate or deliver a person from insanity. Instead reason alone will lock him into the tight circle of logic which keeps him trapped in the repetitive, destructive cycle of activities that perpetuate the insanity. A mind parasite, like a physical parasite, wants to live, sustain itself and reproduce. It wants to spread to the minds around it so that everybody is thinking in the same locked, but predictable pattern.

I was talking to my daughter this morning, and we noted that this is not limited to alcohol and alcoholics. The truth is that probably no one becomes an alcoholic because of alcohol itself but because of our lives in their entirety and how we deal with pain and fear (which is redundant because fear is painful, and we are afraid of pain). Many of us at times in our lives find insanity overtaking us, and we all need help breaking away. In the end, we must find a Power greater than ourselves we can trust to restore us.

It’s my sanity – not the sanity of those around me – that is the issue. Oddly enough this turns out to be a bit of a reprise of what I posted on yesterday, that is, that I am not responsible for what others think or how they view me.

It is wrong for me to ask God to fix somebody else so I can be OK. A couple of the people in last night’s meeting made the point by holding their hand in front of their face almost touching the nose. If we look beyond our hand we are missing the point. While I can pray for others and have faith that God is working in their lives, I can’t believe for them in the necessary, personal sense. I have to be sane myself instead of trying to make others act, think, or speak sanely.