The Murky Fog

After groping around the murky fog of rebellion, stinking thinking, and despair, we will come up with our answers. Honest and sincere as we try to make them, they are usually most confusing. When we overlook the fact that we are ill, it is easy to see only moral offense in our conduct and decide religion is the answer to our problem. But those of us who have tried to exclude A.A. generally end up drunk.
The Little Red Book;
A Hazelden Publication,
Step Three, pp. 36-37

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If religion were enough there would be no drunken preachers, priests and nuns. I know from personal experience that religion worked for a while but with it came a feeling that, because my drinking was morally reprehensible, all I needed was forgiveness and to “sin no more”. This sort of morality and atonement boomeranged into guilt and shame when I eventually returned to old behaviors. The fact was, I found, that these weren’t old behaviors. Returning to drinking and drug use, in spite of the consequences;… lost jobs, ruined relationships, failed marriage… and on and on, were all signs of denial of a mental illness that wasn’t being treated. Once in AA I began to see the layers of self-deceit unravel and I took the first steps on the road to recovery. I had turned my will and life over to a Higher Power before but I had always took that will back because I had no program that would assure that I wouldn’t do so. The Third Step of surrender was followed by a Fourth one, whereby I started to understand that my will and my life had to be turned over to the process if I was ever going to be able to keep the commitment I had made from the altar of despair.
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