tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6192638010020585769.post4943954697021094172..comments2016-06-15T22:06:53.381-07:00Comments on Gregor's Journey Home: Is commitment the secret to recovery?Gregor Hinckleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04745180670827094460noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6192638010020585769.post-33523407754447699662015-08-07T12:14:50.489-07:002015-08-07T12:14:50.489-07:00I had somebody try and post a comment, I had Anony...I had somebody try and post a comment, I had Anonymous posts turned off. But I thought they brought up some good points in an e-mail. so I'm posting the comments on their behalf, and responding. I invite further comment. <br /><br />Comment:<br />I had a psychiatrist tell me once that expected one relapse a year in his patients. I thought of this when a drug addict I knew in one of my therapy groups relapsed, overdosed, and died. That’s a horrible thing to expect.<br /><br />What about the person who has a decade or more of recovery and is getting bored with the process? Commitment may be what helps them keep working the steps until they have a deeper spiritual experience.<br />-- Anonymous<br /><br />REsponse:<br />Commitment might keep you coming back, but is that all the recovery you want? If commitment is all that is keeping you, if there are no results you can point to, no motivation or some level of joy, then you are participating in a diet club. <br /><br />The secret as I see it is to find that joy, surrender what I have pent up inside. Surrender is an act of faith I’ll admit. And it is rooted in the idea that we are powerless. That what we have does not work. <br /><br />By committing to something, in the long term, I am only creating an opportunity to fail, based on past experience I know that about me. My commitment will always end up failing. <br /><br />You need to “Put the plug in the jug” and that does take a self-will commitment. In the beginning there is that white knuckle experience until we learn to surrender. So commitment may be a step, but only in so far as you stop the behavior in order to see what your life looks like without these solutions (addictions) that we use. By stopping the behavior we see how powerless over our addiction we are, then how unmanageable our lives are when we are not in our addiction. That is both sides of the first step. You can’t take that step if you are still in your addiction because you can’t see how little the addiction actually benefitted you. Folks that claim that you do the first step before you come in to the rooms (I thought that) are wrong. Coming in to the room is step zero: “Admitted I need help.” After the addiction is out of the way, you can start to see what life is outside of that comforting filter of food, drugs etc. <br /><br />If you never surrender, and only have commitment you can’t move on to the promise of being “recovered.” That is the trap of commitment. You seem to be losing weight, clean or sober, but you still have the obsession. Because your “sel-will commitment” keeps you that way, there is no motivation to “come to believe in a power greater then ourselves that can restore us to sanity.” Hence the rest of the steps are pointless. When you unconditionally surrender to the idea you can’t control your addiction, you are then free and motivated to look to the outside source of Power that even atheist seem to find if they do the steps and commune with their definition of a higher power. <br /><br />I hope that helps. <br />Gregor<br />Gregor Hinckleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04745180670827094460noreply@blogger.com