I am glad you are here. Welcome. Let's begin by me telling you a little about myself. In this way I can assure you we can work the steps together in a way that is accessible to you. There is no obligation other than the one you have with yourself. I will not ask you for money and I will not ask you to do anything you do not feel comfortable with. I will only give you suggestions, and what you do with those suggestions are up to you. With clear boundaries with each other, I think I can help anyone who is willing through the 12 steps.
On December 10th 2023 I delivered a sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Chattanooga on the first 3 of the 12 steps. For a better understanding of my interpretation of the 12 step I recommend watching this "sermon" that I have posted in this blog. I have isolated it from the service it was delivered in and reposted for your convenience.
After I delivered my sermon, I began to reconsider a suggestion that had been often asked of me, Why don’t I take others who are not comfortable with 12 step fellowships through the steps? I myself have struggled at times to find meetings that are accessible to me, but I have the luxury of being able to do without them. What I have missed from meetings is the ability to work the 12th step consistently. So here is my attempt to do so.
Let me begin with with my story. After all that is what is included in most great recovery literature.
Hi, my name is Camille (she/her), and I am an alcoholic and addict. I am also a recovered co-dependent and recovering from eating disorders.
Before I really begin my story, I need to give a disclaimer. This disclaimer is based on the 11th and 12th of twelve traditions of 12 step communities, which are like a covenant to these communities. These communities have no central authority, no central government, and members all have an exclusively erratic nature that brings them together. They use this covenant to keep their fellowship alive.
The last two of the 12 traditions state that “our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion, and we need to maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.” “Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, reminding us to place principles before personalities.” I am not an authority on 12 step fellowships, nor am I a spokesperson for them. There is no spokesperson or authority on the 12 steps, not even the man who wrote them was a formal authority of the 12 steps. I will only be speaking of a particular 12 step fellowship by name when used in a quote. When quoting 12 step literature, I will use the name of the author and not the work. I will also ask you to remember that the quote is being taken out of context and is my own interpretation. I will use terms like “12 step fellowship,” or “in the rooms,” or “meeting,” or ”program” when referring to a recovery community rather than calling the community by name. I will also not be using the last names or omitting names altogether of those in the 12 step fellowships.
Lastly, before I really dive in I will ask you to set aside any previous prejudices or experiences with 12 steps, which I am confident come from valid experiences. 12 step fellowships have a lot of personalities, which is why the 12th tradition asks us to place principles before personalities. I often tell newcomers, if you attend a meeting and feel uncomfortable, try another meeting or fellowship. No one in the meeting is an authority because no one in 12 step programs is an authority. Meetings are run democratically by whoever showed up at the last committee for that meeting. The chairperson has little to no control over who showed up to that meeting or what was said, because “the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop” … whatever addictive behavior. The only thing 12 step meetings have in common is how they began, with two people in recovery, a coffee pot, and a resentment.
My sobriety date is 12/07/2002
I credit the 12 steps, and the continued support I find inside and outside 12 step fellowships and other resources and communities to my sobriety today. Upon writing this today, I am 21 years sober, I had a decade long career in the mental health field, and I was a substance abuse counselor before I became a stay at home parent. I have a bachelor's degree in Philosophy with a concentration in Religious Studies and Psychology.
In 12-step programs, we share our own stories to teach others about recovery. We do this by sharing our experience, strength, and hope by telling what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now. Let me tell you a little about my personal theology now before I tell you who I was then. Today my personal theology, which began with the help of the 12 steps, does keep me sober and recovered. I think that 12 steps are an inclusive path to finding a personal and practical theology. By practical I mean can be applied daily in all my situations. And by personal, I mean one that works in a way that is customizable to my own understanding. One that makes sense to me. One that I seek out and find to be comforting and healing. One that adapts as I grow and change. One that I am willing to take on. One that is what I need it to be. Sometimes I call this thing god. Sometimes I call it the universe. The name of it has no meaning to me.
I guess this is where I tell you about my upbringing and childhood. How my disordered eating, drinking, and everything else began. I am sorry World Wide Web, but I will save that for personal one on one conversations. Just know that is was dysfunctional and rife with generational trauma. What I have learned from my years of being in recovery communities personally and professionally is that the reasons for addictions and disorders does not matter. Often there seems to be no rhyme or reason for who suffers and who does not. Just know that I suffered, greatly. Some for a long time and some for what seems like a short time on paper, but did not feel that way. In a way my disorders gave me an ability to survive and when they no longer served me they almost killed me.
Time for another disclaimer. I am going to now tell you about my process of finding a higher power. This was my path and it does not have to be yours. I ask you to read it, and maybe keep an open mind. But you don’t have to read it. You can skim over all of it until I get to my recovery from my eating disorder. If it all still sounds like garbage or something not for you, just hang on and I will describe a “work around” I found years later. Something that takes the higher power thing out completely.
Now let me time travel with you again by telling you what my personal theology, or lack thereof, looked like when I was first introduced to the 12 steps.
When I first read the 12 steps it was 2002 and I was 19 years old and it was right after my intervention. I was sitting in a hospital cafeteria with my very understandably emotional parents. The 12 steps were posted on these huge posters on the wall. I was having none of it. I was defiant. There was no way I was going to allow this into my life. There was no way I was going to give up my power, control, my autonomy, and I was definitely not going to drink any kool-aide. I was making this very clear to anyone whom I encountered that night. It was an awkward dinner to say the least.
“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.” I could admit my life was unmanageable. I mean, that was everyone else’s fault though. If they would just leave me alone. But powerlessness….. The humanist in me was not going to allow me to admit powerlessness. At least my understanding of humanism at that time. I had decided many years before this that I would strictly believe those things proven through the scientific method and I would not believe in God or any deity unless it could be scientifically proven. When I expressed this conviction to my first sponsor, who is a mentor who guides you through the 12 steps, she pointed out that the scientific method does prove my powerlessness. I had no control over the laws of physics and yet they affect and influence me every day. Every day as I drive, I place my fate in the other motorists on the road. I certainly can’t control my parents, and they were still able to exert enough control over me to place me in a situation where I was talking to her. And then she pointed me to something Bill W. wrote, “Why don’t you try some controlled drinking.” Right there, Bill W. had written out a repeatable experiment. “Step over to the nearest barroom and try a little controlled drinking. Try to drink and stop abruptly. Try more than once.” Ok, thank you for your permission, Bill, not like I needed it. I tried a few times, my own version of it. I’m not going to go into what substances I was consuming or a play by play. That’s not the point. You don’t need my drunk-a-log. Trust me, I qualify as an alcoholic and drug addict.
What does matter is that the result of these experiments were not the outcomes I had hypothesized. I realized that when I consumed a mind-altering substance, I had no control over what happened next. I also could not stop myself from using mind altering chemicals for any significant length of time. I could “Just say no” once or twice but eventually Nancy Reagan’s advice was no good. This, I realized, was the definition of insanity. Which left me in a space called in between a rock and a hard place. For what I had realized is that I had completed step one, which meant that I was… screwed. To get unscrewed I would have to continue to step two. “Came to believe that a power greater than Ourselves could restore us to sanity.” That’s a big pill to swallow for the fundamentalist humanist atheist that I was. But being an aspiring academic, I knew this meant I had to start researching. I began with literature. Right there in a forward of literature, Bill W. gave me some relief. He said that these steps were not the only path to recovery. He said, “Upon therapy for the alcoholic himself, we surely have no monopoly.” That made me feel that I was a little less likely to be brainwashed. I read some more including the Chapter to the Agnostic. What I gathered from these writings was that this was not the god I had been introduced to in private Catholic School. I found compassion and empathy for my humanist atheist convictions and maybe even some room to keep them.
With that I felt comfortable enough to attend a meeting and there I brought up my concerns about being brainwashed. I was told that maybe my brain needed to be washed. While funny, that didn’t really help ease my concerns. I was told to keep an open mind. Listen for what I had in common with those who were talking, not the differences. Take what I related to and leave the rest. This was the best advice I could have been given because these people demographically were nothing like me. They told their stories. I listened and I could relate to the hopelessness, the powerlessness, the despair. They described how I felt. For the first time in my entire life, I felt seen and understood. They described how it felt like I was in this pit that only got deeper every time I tried to claw my way out. But then they began to describe their lives now and I could no longer relate. And this is where I am going to use another triggering word. Miracle. If they had been where I was and then got to where they are now, then it would have been a miracle. They used another phrase that triggered me. Spiritual Experience, and they told me that it didn’t mean what I thought it meant. They showed me an appendix that said a spiritual experience, spiritual awakening, or personality rearrangement is “the personality change sufficient to bring about recovery” and it can manifest itself in many forms. I let them know that that sounded like brainwashing, and I was not going to believe in god. They then pointed out that none of them had said anything about god but if I needed god, it would be one of my own understanding. That I could use the group of them as my higher power. After all, here is a group of people that have been able to do what I couldn’t… recover. Or I could use a doorknob as my higher power. It didn’t matter.
The spiritual principle behind steps is not one of subjugation. It is the idea of interdependence. An example in recovery literature is electricity. Here is something we cannot see directly but depend on daily. Look at all the things we are able to do with a throw of a switch. In this way, if it works for us, we can think of our understanding of god is, god is a tool. Then we look at step three, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of god, as we understood him.” Lots of triggering words there. First, making a decision is again just willingness. Second, turning our will and our lives over to the care of god is just using a tool. It is just simply doing the next right thing and letting go of the results. Or in Grover’s case, turning to the next page. Some think of god as an acronym. Good, Orderly, Direction. My sponsor asked me to just begin with asking in the morning to stay sober and at night to give thanks for staying sober. I said, this sounds like prayer. She said you can call it that. I asked, who am I praying to? She said, It doesn’t matter. I then said this sounds like it is just some kind of placebo effect, and she said, ok, so what if it is, if it works.
Still, I was an intellectual, and I was not going to just believe in a doorknob, or a group of people was going to restore me to sanity. No, I had to figure out god and I had the ego to do it. So, I set about attempting to meditate, writing, researching, and recalling some experiences I had with fungi and began a theory. I went to my sponsor with my theory, which I could tell she was humoring me and waiting for me to finish.
She did eventually grow tired of waiting for me to finish and interrupted me. She said, 12 step programs do not require you to believe anything only that you are willing to believe. You are obviously willing to believe because look at all the seeking you have done. You don’t have to seek anymore. Just lean into that willingness and leave it there. If you dissect a frog, you kill it. I thought she was so incredibly wise and insightful, and then I learned that Bill W. has written countless chapters on this exact principle. The principle of there being no requirement of belief, just a willingness to believe with a direct quote of “Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything.” Still, they did ask me that for the time being that I stop arguing and just do the rest of the program as enthusiastically as I could.
Of course, being asked to stop arguing was difficult. Obviously, this was a temporary request as I have since begun arguing again as my favorite hobby and I got a 4 year college degree in the subject. I actually Now find that my personal theology benefits from spirited debates.
Now I need to tell you about another phrase in the rooms for context which is called “the burning bush experience.” It is the least common of Spiritual Experiences that Bill W. describes in the appendix that I referred to earlier. It simply means that the psychic change, personality rearrangement, whatever you want to call it, to induce recovery is sudden. Rarely is it sudden. But as Bill W. tells us in his story, this was this type of sudden spiritual experience.
Looking back, it took me until I was around 10 years sober to realize that I had an actual “burning bush experience” on December 7th, 2002. And warning, this might get a little dark. I was asking myself if I was willing to believe. My sponsor seemed to think that I was, but I was not sure. They were asking me to take it easy, let go, to stop fighting, to surrender, and to trust. I didn’t know this at the time, but looking back they were asking me to trust the universe and trust life and I could not do it. I was scared. So, I decided to try some more controlled drinking. It’s not a relapse if I am just trying to run an experiment. Right? I could not accept Step 3, to turn my will and my life over to the care of god, as I understood them. I Could stop arguing, I Could accept that my understanding of a higher power was something that I could not understand. But I could NOT accept that I had to trust and that I had to stop playing god. There is a part in literature, and I would love to just read it. It is right after where the 12 steps are printed in AA literature. Right after where the steps are read in most meetings as “How It Works.” But it is quite long. I will do my best to paraphrase my own interpretation. Basically, it says I am selfish. I am selfish because I am full of fear. I demand from others and manipulate others because I fear others and I fear life. I may do it kindly and virtuously and other times I may do it cruelly or carelessly but even when I act selflessly, I am only doing it out of selfish and fearful motives. When doing so I “Step on the toes of others and they retaliate.” I hurt others. I could not let go “of the delusion” that I “could arrest satisfaction and happiness out of life” if I could just “figure out how to manage well.” I had “moral and philosophical convictions galore” but I “could not live up to them.” I hurt people because of my fear. So, I checked out. I used mind altering substances to escape. But this time it didn’t work. I found myself physically standing at a great height on a balcony. Emotionally I was in that pit that I could not claw out of. I was thinking about the great height I was at physically when I looked at my Nokia cellphone. My cell phone glitched and every number I had erased, including those who did not have the best intentions for me. The only ones I could remember were the ones that would want me to be sober, like my sponsor. I know, weird. Then the thought, “There is a Solution” ran through my head. I don’t think that I even knew at that moment that there was an entire chapter in literature called “There is a Solution.” I thought of those people I had met in that meeting. They had gotten out of this pit. Maybe if I just tried what they did I could too. Like following a recipe. What would I lose? Now I realize I had to choose between two choices. I had to choose which direction I would go if I was going to move from that spot I was at physically and emotionally. Spoiler alert, you know which choice I made.
I learned that doing god’s will to me meant doing the next right thing and that is always the loving thing. I had to be brave and loving, and trust the results. The next right thing was to “launch on a course of rigorous action,” which was the following last 9 steps of the 12 steps. I did not do that. I did follow the recommendations of my substance abuse counselor and moved to a long term facility in Phoenix, AZ. But I sat on my 4th step for a whole year, and somehow I still stayed sober. I did not have all the gifts or promises of sobriety during that time. Pain is a great motivator and I believe a hallmark of quality sobriety is not only being motivated by pain. I have since completed the 12 steps multiple times in different 12 step programs. Even though I am not active in all the 12 step programs I claim recovery now, I still work the steps, carry the principles with me and I am no longer only motivated by pain but by my higher purpose
Speaking of higher purpose. This is where if you cannot accept a higher power, even one of your own understanding, you can stop skimming and start reading. It was upon the recovery from my eating disorders that I became introduced to the concept of a higher purpose in place of a higher power. Maybe if I had had this to begin with… I wonder if my recovery would have been any different. Honestly there is no point in wondering, it is what it is and I wouldn’t change any part of it.
It took me a while for me to admit to myself that I had eating disorders. When I first heard of 12 step programs for eating disorders, by body dysmorphia would not allow me to admit to myself that I had one disorder and only another. So I tried using what I knew of the 12 steps on my eating disorder without seeking fellowship or sponsorship. I had too much shame. I thought if I could have high enough quality sobriety then it would spill over into eat disorder recovery.
Eventually I did seek out a 12 step program but only one that would allow me to admit one form of disordered eating while allowing my other eating disorders to continue to run wild. This abstinence based program was not for me. It only lead me to develop other eating disorders.
So I gave up on 12 step recovery from eating disorders, but eventually was lead over time to dismantle my internalized fat phobia and diet culture. I was finally admitting to myself that I had more than one eating disorder. Actually I had almost all of them at some point in time in my life. I was definitely being lead. I guess this is where a concept of a higher power does work for me. There just doesn’t seem to be room for coincidences of this magnitude. A series of events lead me talking with an old friend who reminded me of a different 12 step recovery fellowship that focused on balance. Another new friend was also on the same path as me and our paths crossed. Next thing we knew we were working steps and starting the only in-person meeting in our area.
It was through this 12 step fellowship literature that I learned of a higher purpose in place of or along with a higher power. The idea being that if I can find a purpose that is bigger than me, be it justice, helpfulness, freedom, that I can work towards and be of service to then I can free myself from the constant focus on myself and focus on something bigger than me and gain recovery. It works. Atheists and many others recovery this way. It has deepened my spirituality without me feeling I have to deepen my reliance on a higher power. I would love to share that literature with you.
I have found my current higher purpose in this way. This is why I am writing all of this. My current higher purpose is to help others find their own liberation. Currently I believe this means I should do whatever I can to make the 12 steps accessible to anyone who will have them. Notice that I frequently repeat "currently." This is because like my understanding of a higher power, my higher purpose will evolve and change as I evolve and change.
Let me be clear, this is my path to my personal theology. Yours will be different from mine. Yours will be unique to you even if we follow the same path. Many have followed this path before me and after me. Some of them are my friends who are still militant atheists or are now children's ministers in protestant churches. That is the beautiful thing about the steps. They lead us to a theology that is for us alone.
I often borrow from other theologies to explore my own truth. I strongly believe the principles of 12 step programs can be a theology to borrow from. For example, willingness to change ourselves and our world, seeking to understand rather than to be understood, having the humility to admit when we are wrong or when we need help (not to be confused with humiliation), that caring for and helping others in our community helps us too.
As I keep these principles I also get to keep the promises of the 12 step programs. Many of these steps have promises. Honestly, the 10th step promise is my favorite, which begins “and we cease fighting everything…” but I will end with 9th step promises which are more popular and illustrate what sobriety and recovery can be.
“If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down we have fallen, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will see that our service to God, our Higher Power, or the greater good has done for us what seemed humanly impossible. Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.” - Gisele B.
Here is the link to the entire service in which I delivered my sermon
Thank you for being understanding,
Camille W.
camillewinningham@icloud.com
@notaspiritualsaint