Restoring Sanity
The first thing when talking personally about restoring sanity is to admit a bit of insanity.
This accidentally got published earlier, so I’m putting it out again today. Hopefully enough time has passed so you will be ok reading it again. This allows it to be available in the archives.
Now I have never been institutionalized and protected from injuring myself, but this is not to say I have not done some stupid things resulting in hurting myself and others.
My point is, it isn’t useful to believe my thinking is always rational.
So how can we think about our thinking, to include our emotions, so we can determine where on the sanity-insanity continuum we might be?
In step one of twelve step recovery I admitted life had become unmanageable and that my best efforts only enabled me to hit a bottom I couldn’t climb back out of. Since I have already admitted this was true it logically follows that my thinking is not my friend, and what I need is to be restored to sanity another way.
Now there are choices.
Always choices.
And I have to choose to take the next step. What’s so funny about step two is it seems to be offering me a choice between two nutty options.
Do I want to remain in the mess my best thinking has achieved or do I want to connect with someone I can’t see or touch? It seems as insane as believing in the Easter Bunny.
But there are work-arounds to feeling forced to believe something injurious. That’s right, many have been burned by religion and religious people to the point where the idea of having to believe in God is repulsive.
So what to do?
The offer of WE is to just come with us. Believe that the group can be your guide to meeting the God you never knew; that the one who restored us to sanity will do the same for you. Remember, that’s why you came in the first place. You hoped to find a way out of the mess for you as well.
All you have to do is choose to keep coming back.
Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.
Revelation 3:20 (ESV)
Step Two
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon