Step Two tells us that relief is on the way. Our sanity can and will be restored by some "Higher Power." Newcomers (as well as old timers) who have a difficult time with the concept of God should keep the idea of a "Higher Power" very simple. Everyone has a different metaphor for a Higher Power and there is no one metaphor that you must adopt. A recovering person’s Higher Power can be their own support group, their sponsor, any one thing or concept that is larger than himself or herself. Preferably this concept is a loving power that watches out for you. Having admitted our lack of power over our disease , the 2^nd Step assures us that there is One who does have ultimate power and that One will restore us to sanity. What is this process by which we come to believe? What does it mean to believe—in anything? No one is expected to know. The beginner is encouraged to observe the old timers and simply believe that they believe, at first. Since the late 1930’s the original 12 Step movement, A.A, has been blazing a trail for the newcomers. It is wise to observe how they did it and follow in their footsteps, (holding on to their shirt tails if we have to) especially in the beginning.

Belief, or faith, is a learned response. Somewhere in childhood we came to believe that what people called fire would burn us. We came to believe further that a burn is a very unpleasant sensation of pain. It did not take us long to learn to have faith that when we grabbed the boiling pot we would be scalded. It also did not take us long to learn to have faith that when we did certain things we felt good–playing with toys, splashing in puddles, as well as wandering off into the woods to drink alcohol or smoke pot.

Many of us came to believe (have faith) that we had to buy and manipulate others in order to receive self esteem and approval. Repeated childhood experiences taught us the means by which we could gain the approval of family and friends. Buying things, saying nice words and doing sometimes inappropriate things for others was what we observed worked. It worked no matter how sincere or insincere we were. Ultimately we came to believe that we must be intrinsically bad, unworthy and unfulfilled people. We couldn’t believe otherwise because everyone always seemed to be concerned with how to fill their lives up with things. We learned that we needed as much money as we could get our hands on. We learned that we ought to be good looking. If we weren’t we should be ashamed and paint our faces and change ourselves anyway we could to be different from that which we naturally were. We tended to learn these things by repeated unmanageable experiences that often resulted in being rejected and disapproved of by others. We came to believe that our Higher Power (if one existed at all) must be angry and vengeful toward us. Our repeated diseased experiences made us appear worthy of anger, vengeance and guilt. The process of coming to believe is one in which we have been engaged in since the moment of birth. We are not bad people. We simply have been duped by our environment and our culture. From their first TV commercial, children are taught that happiness comes from things outside of themselves which naturally means that there must be an emptiness inside them that needs filling. This need to fill an imaginary void is at the heart of all addictions. They believe that something must be inherently "wrong" with them. We are all set up for addictive behavior and co-dependency from our first TV commercial and country western love song. Our entire economic structure depends upon convincing us all that we will not be happy until we get that new B.M.W. John Bradshaw, noted psychologist and expert in the field of addiction says in one of his tape recorded presentations, "Our culture is rabidly co-dependent." En masse, we have bought this very expensive belief that makes us spiritually poorer.

Given the dysfunctional nature of our childhood families it was inevitable that the things we came to believe were often very sick. It is important to realize that it is not our fault that we have some sick belief structures and some sick behaviors. It takes courage and strength to look at them in the face and become willing to heal them. The process of coming to believe that a Power greater than ourselves will restore us to sanity begins the moment we enter recovery and start to participate in group meetings. Coming to believe in a caring Power that exists outside of oneself is necessary for a happy and healthy recovery. Many long term recovering people will say that it is more a matter of discovering that a Power that was there all along.

A typically smaller group of us entering recovery think that we have the advantage over most others vis a vis this Step. We, falsely, think that because we already have an active religious life we clearly have taken the 2^nd Step already. This belief is dangerously untrue. Intellectual belief is a necessary beginning. But our behavior and our feelings come from what we believe on an emotional and spiritual level. Often we act out of second nature, habit, or rote, by what we are thinking or feeling at any given moment. Regardless of what we think we have come to believe, our actions are the true bellwether of what is really going on inside of us. Frequently we mutter through gritted teeth, "I’m fine thank you." and believe it, when actually we are hurting inside. This is a good reason why we need to be around people like ourselves. By going to meetings and talking to our sponsors we get an objective view of how and who we are. When we first come into recovery it does not matter how pious our backgrounds are. The undeniable fact of our addictive behaviors are clear enough evidence that we have not yet come to believe. Honesty, open-mindedness and willingness (HOW) are three powerful allies on the road to recovering or unlearning false beliefs from our past and discovering who our Higher Power created us to be in the first place. Some say that discovery is what we recovering people are really doing.

In time we will naturally come to believe that a power greater than ourselves will restore us to sanity. We do this by consistently listening to the experience, strength and hope of those who have gone before us. We observe people who are diseased in the same ways we are and have gotten healthier by applying the 12 Steps in their daily lives. We have the opportunity to come to believe that the 12 Steps naturally appear in our lives as part of who we were created to be in the first place. The 12 Steps are down-to-earth and make good common sense. They are not unlike the obvious wisdom in the Ten Commandments which says in so many words, "play nice, don’t kill one another, or sleep with your neighbor’s husband." Similar to the Code of Hammurabi, the 12 Steps are like a secret code transmitted to us culturally, but we drown out the message of wisdom with our addictive behaviors. The concepts are part of the natural way of healthy, happy living like rain nourishing the flowers. Those who realize the inherent existence of the 12 Steps in their lives and apply them are among the happiest and most symptom free of recovering people. Consistently meeting with hopeful people in recovery strongly encourages us to admit that something outside of our own force-of-will has restored them to some measure of sanity and the admission of this one fact is all that the 2^nd Step asks. It does not ask that we define the nature of this Power. Our task is to realize that a Power greater than ourselves exists and that It has the power to restore us to sanity.

What we repetitively experience we come to believe as truth. We cannot ultimately prove the truth of the existence of a Power greater than ourselves. Just like we cannot prove the truth of the source of the clouds. Water droplets mysteriously gather together with dust particles. Euclidean geometry postulates that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. This is a faith statement, one that has been around long enough for most everyone to believe is true. However, Einstein’s non-Euclidean geometry postulates that, since the entire universe is composed of curved planes, a straight line does not exist. This proves that the shortest distance between two points is a curved line. The two theories are mutually exclusive, but the logical mathematical systems built upon each one makes perfectly good sense. Both of these foundational principles are, by definition, faith statements which many people simply accept as truth.

All the disciplines of psychology depend upon the belief that the subconscious mind exists (remember that our definition of faith is repetitive learned response, not necessarily truth or falsehood). Most modern people accept the existence of the subconscious mind without question. There is no scientific way to prove this postulation, since we define "subconscious" as beneath the level of consciousness. It is impossible to devise any scientific test to prove the existence of anything which cannot be tested by our conscious minds. There can be no outside Archimedian point. The very existence of the subconscious mind is a faith statement. Such statements as "all men are created equal" are not subject to proof and are therefore faith statements.

Belief in anything ultimately rests upon the acceptance of faith. Things which cannot be proved sometimes must be accepted as truth. The force of what we call gravity, simply exists. We do not know how it works or where it comes from, but, it works. All disciplines of human thought ultimately rest upon the acceptance of unprovable assumptions. Fortunately, the 2^nd Step does not ask us to prove anything. We are simply asked to accept the assertion that a Power outside of and greater than ourselves does exist and that that Power has the capability to relieve our obsession—nothing more.

Old timers in recovery say that the longest journey is the one we take from our heads to our hearts. Similarly an old southern, black preacher reminded his flock, "The way you live speaks so loud I can’t hear what you say." Our learned, negative behaviors are called "character defects." We will have the pleasure of exploring these defects of character in later Steps. All of these character defects are ultimately based on what we believe to be true about ourselves and our relationship with our Higher Power as well as those around us. These beliefs are based on our previous experience of what we were taught as children. These behaviors are part of our disease and serve to protect, defend and nurture it. For example, let us look at dishonesty. Many come into recovery believing that their chronic tendency to lie is clear evidence that they are morally bad people. This is simply not true. There is an underlying chain of association that varies from person to person and usually follows a path similar to this: we lie whenever necessary to protect the supply of our drug. Our drug reinforces our illusion that we are powerful and in control of our lives, at least on a feeling level. This is a form of manipulation. When this control effort fails, we lie to protect ourselves from exposure to others. When the whole cycle falls into total unmanageability and we get caught, sentenced and jailed (in one way or another) we interpret the whole affair as proof that we are morally bad people and we will go as far to believe that we are deserving of punishment. This reinforces the original belief. Then, lest "God" mete out our deserved punishment, we best "Him" to it and punish ourselves by repeating the entire cycle again and again, thus proving the validity of our insane belief. Our reasoning is circular and therefore proves absolutely nothing except that we are fooling ourselves. All of our diseased feelings and behaviors will be found to exist solely to validate an illusion. This is the heart of our disease. Validating an illusion is a synonym for proving a postulation, which is a clear impossibility. What we come to believe is all that has any personal reality, so the question is not "shall we believe?" but, "what shall we choose to believe?"

The 2^nd Step does not ask us to prove anything for proof is irrelevant. We are asked to open our awareness to the existence of a (sometimes radically) different belief from that which we have known. One which can and will save our sanity and ultimately our lives.

Suggested Assignment: compose a list of experiences from your life in which the outcome of a given sequence of events turned out to be completely unpredicted and totally outside of your control. Do not specifically look for good experiences or bad ones. Do not qualify them by any value judgments whatsoever. Simply look for situations in which some cause outside of your expectations affected the outcome in an unpredictable way. These need not be spectacular or miraculous in any way. We are tempted to presume that the effects of a Higher Power will be seen only in the extraordinary events of our lives—big things like unexpected career changes and changes in our family structure. We should not neglect to examine the more ordinary events of everyday life in which we can see the effects of a power greater than ourselves and outside of our control.

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