Step 3

“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand him.”

 In our active life as an addict, it is seldom the case that we know what is best for us and frequently the case that we act against what is in our own best interest. We have tried endless experiments to make our use of mood altering substances succeed and have seen these all subsequently end in failure. With our mind and thinking distorted by her disease and controlled by the mindless obsession to use we have created lives of great unmanageability and futility. What should be apparent, is that we have lost our way in life and certainly in regard to our use of drugs and alcohol. What is needed, is a new system of guidance to help us regain awareness of what is in our best interest and we need a new attitude of openness and willingness to try new things, to do things differently, to take necessary risks. This is the central theme of the third step. The founders of AA realized that they could not survive unless they turned their will and their life over the care of a higher power. This is still true for all of us in recovery today, but we can have many different ways of understanding God and a higher power. One of the best acronyms that I have heard in AA about God is: “Good, Orderly, Direction.” This was a very good way of understanding higher power for those of us who had a lot of negative baggage and ideas about God. No one can fully understand the idea of God, for it is beyond the capability of human conception to fully realize this. But we can most certainly have a pragmatic or practical understanding of God and higher power for the 12 steps of the AA program. What we need to find is a new system of guidance and support. We need to find people or information to help us become aware of exactly what it is that we need individually to be healthy and optimally functioning human beings. Whatever our problems or difficulties are, we can find someone who knows a lot about how to deal with such things, and they can provide us very helpful guidance and suggestions about what to do. We may also begin to rely on the improving awareness of our own intuition which is a form of guidance that comes from the healthy part of our mind and being and seldom will lead us astray. Fact is, that we do not know everything, we do not understand everything, and we are not aware of everything. If we do not know what is best for us, we must find this out. Because it is critical in recovery and in life to understand what are true needs are as well as what we must do to get these met. Third step is suggesting that we quit relying on our limited, previous knowledge and understanding of ourselves and everything else-because this was certainly inadequate in solving our alcohol and drug problem. If we can open up our mind to new possibility, and new suggestions, and new guidance, we can certainly come to learn what is best for us. And once having understood this adequately, we can have a new attitude of openness and willingness to take whatever action is necessary to do what is best for us, to meet our true needs, and to strengthen our recovery and enhance our lives.