RECOVERY: THE ART OF NOT PLAYING GOD

The 12-step program as a spiritual practice

- BY RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO

Hi. My name is Rami. I am a recovering food addict. My true addiction, however, as Bill W. writes in the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous, is playing God. In my experience, playing God means bending reality to my will, ignoring the karmic law of cause and effect, and creating the life I want through sheer force of personality, aided by conscious intentions, affirmations, and visualizations.

When that fails, which it does 100 percent of the time, I blame my failure on others who, also addicted to playing God, resist my attempts to bend reality to my will by trying to bend it to their own. They oppose my creating the life I want through my conscious intentions, affirmations, and visualizations by creating the life they want through their own conscious intentions, affirmations, and visualizations.

Exhausted from this endless and futile battle of opposing wills, I eat compulsively. The core of my recovery isn’t about stopping compulsive eating but about letting go of playing God. To that end, I’ve been working the 12 steps as a practice for 20 years. Here’s some of what I’ve learned about them along the way.

STEP ONE:

We admitted we were powerless over our addiction—that our lives had become unmanageable.

While those who follow the 12 steps to achieve sobriety focus on the first part of step one, the second part reveals a deeper truth: Whether we are an addict or not, life is unmanageable. Life is tohu va-vohu: wild and chaotic (Genesis 1:1), and each moment is havel havalim: as fleeting as breath (Ecclesiastes 1:2). Playing God—trying to control the chaotic and impermanent—is the insanity that drives our addictive behavior. Admitting that life is unmanageable frees us from this insanity. But then what?

STEP TWO:

We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves would restore us to sanity.