Life in Paradox
Real Deep Recovery 9 July 2025
“I kept asking myself, ‘Why can’t the Twelve Steps work to release depression’ By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer… ‘It’s better to comfort than to be comforted.’ Here was the formula, all right. But why didn’t it work?
Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence — almost absolute dependence — on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.” ~Bill Wilson, Grapevine, January 1958
Any of us who has been around the 12 step rooms for a period of time is familiar with the paradoxes of AA. How often is the solution to a problem the opposite of what one has convinced themself it is? How frustrating to awaken to find we have been going in just the opposite direction we needed to go.
In one of my step studies, we confronted just this demon in addressing our character defects in the seventh step. Whoa is me, we cry, needing love, needing attention, needing our bottomless pit of needs met as we sober up. We even need more and more and MORE of God’s love as we enter the spiritual realm. In this enlightening article, Bill wakes up to his own dependencies, and realizes that the solution has been in front of his eyes all along.
He brings us back to the beginning — that original step of helping the suffering alcoholic! He reminds us of the feeling of losing one’s self in service, the amazing sense of joy that comes from self-forgetting in that moment of service. He points out the blessing of that moment of self-sacrificing love offered to the still suffering drunk, and the lack of demand or dependency.
He says, “I could not avail myself of God’s love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn’t possible do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies…the real current can’t flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken…Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.”
As I was reading this article, it occurred to me that we rarely have a chance to do the type of 12 step work Bill was describing. We don’t go into bars, hospitals or hotel rooms and hunt up drunks to help anymore. Our newcomers mostly arrive fresh from rehabs, maybe from court, and sometimes from jail stints. They often have a head full of jargon learned in treatment and maybe they even think they know better than us.
We are often judgmental of their platitudes. They are often in a rush to “return to the mainstream of life. Is this a set up? How are we to immerse ourself in the work that will bring us all to this paradox of self-forgetting and relationship that is designed to give us the spiritual awakening our individual higher powers intend?
How can we best be of service to this modern newcomer? Ultimately, our job is to stay sober, one day at a time, so we can keep the doors open for the next person who walks in the door. Simple, right?
If that’s true, why is the relapse rate still so high? The answer is that only the first few months are about putting down the drink or drug…then life becomes the issue. Living clean and sober is a whole other story. For that we need a new way of life. Emotional and Spiritual recovery comes as we dig into the steps and learn another way of living. That’s what Bill is getting into in this article. Bill points out that in the first six months of his own sobriety, he worked hard with many alcoholics. Not one stayed sober, but he did. He says his stability came from trying to give to another, not trying to receive. That’s the essence of the Prayer of St. Francis, found on p. 47 of the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. That principle worked for my own recovery, and I’d venture to say it has worked for millions of others as well. It’s the essence of well-grounded recovery.
An old friend of mine, long passed, often said, if you want to have a friend, show yourself friendly. If you want to be trusted, show yourself trustworthy, if you want to learn honesty, stop lying… These are some of the basics of learning to live a new life in the program. Simple but not easy.
If you want peace. Sit still. Stop running. Be willing to learn a new way.
Namaste.