Coming to Believe

I’m grateful for lucky bounces. I’m grateful for Fall finally arriving. I’m grateful for the horizon, where I am and not confusing the two. I’m grateful for a sunny morning and pancakes for dinner. I’m grateful to be sober today.

I have often said that I believe my best writing is found in the text on the “Subscribe” button, and sometimes the footnotes. In case you missed it, the “Subscribe” button is the thing you just scrolled past. For many of you, that button will say something like “Upgrade.” We very, very, very much value all of you subscribers, free and paid. But, I’ll be honest, we have extra special feelings for the people who support us with paid subscriptions. We do incur expenses to publish this and run the podcast.¹ More importantly, Jane and I put a lot of ourselves into this, every day. If you read this, or, even better, share it with friends, that makes us so happy, but we’d really like you to consider being a paid subscriber. Thanks.²

Click and Subscribe!

Having tried to make the Second Step hill as daunting as I could yesterday, what with all of the workplans and segments and even suggested homework, today, I’m going to tell you I really have no idea how I “did” the Second Step. I realize this is perhaps a bit of a let-down after all of the pronouncements about the exhaustive nature of the coming Second Step slog to sobriety.³ Don’t worry, that’s all still on. Today, it’s mystery-solving time: How did someone like me, someone who literally tried everything and could not stop drinking, sarcastic, jaded, somewhat hopeless, finally come to believe that there was a Power greater than myself, who could restore me to sanity? Seriously—I don’t really know how that happened.

The words of the Second Step are kind of enigmatic, think about how amorphous the phase, “Came to Believe” is; What does it even mean? We alcoholics and addicts sometimes get tied into a view of the world where it’s all about counting days and meetings and “doing” steps, “working” the steps. I talk about “working” the Steps all of the time, but somehow that seems a little off for the Second Step.

“Came to believe,” sounds like a process, a gradual realization. The Step doesn’t really amount to a personal proclamation of faith, I think it is more of a personal commitment to develop faith. I think the genius of the Steps is expressed in the judo-like nature of them. What do I mean by that? My best friend growing up, my co-conspirator in the tank design process, and lots of other capers that I’m not going to confess to right now, was also pretty serious about judo. He actually broke a guy’s elbow at a tournament once. Think about a broken elbow for a second—that’s movie stuff.

Anyway, this is not about broken elbows, my scant understanding of judo is that a principle behind it is re-directing your opponent’s force, or something like that. I think the Steps take the characteristics of alcoholics, the things that kept us in the rut all of those years, and turns them into the building blocks of a happy, sober life. Assuming I’m right about the judo part, that really is f****** genius.

I think the Second Step is a great example of this. If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone complain about how they couldn’t do the Steps or AA because they had a bad experience with religion as a child, or didn’t agree with the philosophy, or didn’t believe in the God that everyone is supposed to believe in or just couldn’t reconcile all of the bad stuff that happens in the world with the idea of a loving, caring benevolent God, well, I might not have enough to buy a coffee, but still a lot of nickels.⁴

Speaking of buying me (or Jane) coffee…

But all of that is beside the point, the Second Step doesn’t require the adoption of anyone’s views, beliefs, or dogmas, other than your own. And I think that’s the secret command of the Second Step, it’s about believing in something other than what we’ve been drinking or snorting or smoking or whatever. It’s a process that asks us to commit to a process of replacing those beliefs with building faith in another proposition. People talk about addiction reflecting a spiritual hole, something we tried to fill with alcohol or coke or whatever. Of course, that hole requires way more of whatever that substance is than we can ever lay our hands on. Coming up with a spiritual answer for that hole is definitely the longer-term aim, but the Second Step starts by taking on something more tactical,

The belief that alcohol was what let us manage our lives.

This is an extension of the First Step, where we first acknowledged that this might not be factually correct. I think the Second Step is where we have to recognize that we actually did more than believe this, we organized our whole lives around this. It is natural that confronting such a core belief, especially with the notion of replacing it, would provoke quite a bit of fear, and it does. To be fair, for a lot of us, this was THE organizing principle of life, and unmooring oneself from that, to drift and see where the tide and wind take us, is just profoundly terrifying. I think that’s why the Second Step preaches gradualism, and also why it can’t be done in a weekend.

You have to come to believe in a new way of life.

The good news is that we alcoholics have the capacity to believe in tremendously ridiculous propositions, and believe in them really, really hard. Everyone has their First Step proof of powerlessness stories, the insane stuff we did to keep the ball rolling. I’d like to point one thing out. A lot of the insane decision-making occurred when I was not drinking. I made the decision to relapse a ka—jillion times and every time I made that decision,

I hadn’t been drinking.

I was acting on a really powerful belief, the one that Dr. Fox identified in 1955 as the first characteristic of a “Primary Addict:”

The Primary Addict, from [her] first introduction to beverage alcohol, uses it as an aid to adjust to [her] environment. From the outset it is for [her] a magical substance…

Alcoholism: Its Scope, Cause and Treatment (Random House 1955), p. 142

That’s what I believed. The Second Step is where I realize the mistaken nature of that belief, and begin to re-direct my prodigious ability to believe in nonsense, to something slightly more productive:

That a Higher Power could restore me to sanity.

But the hardest question is left unanswered, how does one trigger this “Came to believe” thing? That’s something I ponder a lot and I think the only answer I have is that it begins with simple willingness. We’re going to get to the quote from Bill’s Story (we always do), but what is willingness?

For me, willingness meant nothing more than deciding to keep an open mind, to at least consider the possibility that this could work. “This,” has to be way more than just not drinking. Here’s how I deconstruct it. If you’re an addict/alcoholic and you’ve operated on the assumption that alcohol or whatever was a critical component of your life, one that was so essential that you would literally lie and steal to get it, do you really think it’s enough to say, “you’re right, that’s pretty f****** up, I’m going to stop?”

I could never do that.

As long as that poisonous belief is running around in that alcoholic brain, even if it’s out on AA-supervised bond, every moment of not drinking is going to be accompanied by that greek chorus in my head, “Are we sure this is necessary? This has never worked? This will never work. We know how this ends, have a drink now. It’s not that bad. It’s completely necessary. Everyone else drinks and they’re way worse. It’s not fair that I can’t drink. We need to drink now.” The Second Step is about replacing that belief and silencing those voices. Until we do, the not drinking thing is going to be excruciating.

That is an uphill struggle and one that I could never maintain, much less win. The beat-down that usually accompanies “coming in,” and addressing the First Step helps produce some willingness: “Maybe there is another way to look at things?” And that’s all willingness is, looking around and considering the possibilities. That willingness is appropriately, if somewhat tritely, described as a small flickering flame in a very windy environment. Turning that little flame into a cozy fire, heating the hearth of sobriety, that is quite a challenge. It is accomplished, I believe in tiny increments of progress and self-exploration, fueled by the mystery ingredient of Step Two:

Love and Acceptance

For many of us, the other core belief is that there was something that made us unloveable, something we needed to conceal from the world in order to make our way in it. That’s a very heavy burden to bear, and drinking becomes a pretty frighteningly welcome accomplice. The hidden, unexpressed nugget of the Second Step is that we are loved and accepted. I know we’re focused on the first three words, “came to believe,” but it’s ok to peek to the end of the sentence and ask yourself this question:

Why would this majestic Higher Power care enough to want to restore you to sanity?

Again with the non-broken elbow judo analogy: The genius of the Program is its ability to turn the worst of what we thought about ourselves, the worst of what we did to ourselves and others, the worst of what we had to live through, into some kind of magical something that is enough to keep us sober and maybe even someone else. It’s a friendlier version of Rumpelstiltskin spinning dross into gold.

The process of “coming to believe” didn’t immediately kick in after a certain number of sober days or meetings, I “came to believe” as I saw that my efforts to recover myself and then show myself, were met with love and acceptance. I moved here to NY in the middle of the pandemic, when we were officially discouraged from spending time with “other people.” Maybe I thought of this as my Alamo a bit, but it’s been anything but. My sober life has not been some kind of dramatic fight that has me nobly, but maybe futilely, battling the forces of continued darkness.

People just showed up and loved me for me.

That was how the miracle began for me I found the willingness to look for a different path, to be open to possibilities, to be open to the idea that people might love me, not the alcoholic avatar I’d been working so hard to project. That I might find a way to make peace with myself, to love myself. Once I gave up what I thought I knew, the beliefs that had organized my life and had enshrined alcohol as the demi-god of my existence, the real boss showed up and I saw how things could be. That’s all that willingness is, and all that is necessary to start the “come to believe” engine. Willingness was the only thing I needed to make my beginning.⁵

1. Do you know how much pancakes cost at NYC’s finest diners?

2. Yes, you’ll notice that we don’t have paywalls for any of the content, we’d like to keep it free for everyone, which is why your support matters. I stole that from WNYC.

3. Actually, I very much don’t view it that way.

4. Don’t worry, I’m almost done being heavy-handed.

5. I didn’t put quotes around it, but do you recognize it?