When Addiction Steals Your Identity: The Role of Willingness
by Jonathan Benz, MS, CAP, ICADC, CDWF onSeptember 12, 2015 in Alcoholism Expert Blogs, Drug Addiction Expert Blogs
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” So goes the old adage. And probably nowhere is the saying truer than in the world of recovery, where rebounding from the disease of addiction must begin with a willingness to heal on the part of the person whose identity addiction has stolen. Friends and family may be able to help in the recovery process to a degree, but ultimately, recovering your identity requires your own willingness to heal.
The Willingness to Heal — What Is It and Why Is Tougher to Attain Than You Might Think?
Willingness to heal may sound easy enough to attain, but it’s really not. If you’re in doubt about that, just spend some time with toddlers, for whom “unwillingness” can seem like second nature. Not getting their way, or being unwilling to let go of something they’ve been instructed to give up, can unleash a full-fledged temper tantrum.
The same can be true with grown-ups, even if our temper tantrums may manifest themselves in other ways, like acting out in the same unhealthy patterns that rob us of our very own selves. Maybe we’re not getting what we want. Maybe we’re clinging ever-so-tightly to something we simply cannot give up. So we fall back on destructive behavior that we think will get us our way but really doesn’t at all — and very likely is actually driving us further away from the thing we all ultimately desire.
And what we all ultimately desire, I believe, is love itself (another name for God). Gerald May says something similar in his book Addiction and Grace. He says that regardless of our religious status, we all, by virtue of being human, long deeply for this love, and this love is what defines what it means to be human.
This love is also what we need in order to heal.
The question then is, “why is willingness to heal so hard to attain, if we all ultimately are longing for love?” And that, I suspect, can be answered by the fact that so many of us have misdirected wills. We may recognize that we long for love, but other fears, motivations and drives can get in the way of our surrendering to that love. Our propensity for such distractions can bend our wills in the wrong direction.
Willingness to heal, therefore, is not just a passive acceptance of things as they are; willingness to heal is hard precisely because it involves an activerealignment of our will in accordance with what God (love) wants for us, rather than what we ourselves think is best for us.
Willingness to Heal and Step 6 in AA’s Big Book
Step 6 of AA’s “12 Steps” addresses the importance of willingness in the recovery process. If in step 5 we admit to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs, in step 6 we become “entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.”
Willingness to let God remove these defects once these wrongs are known and in the open involves an intentional, daily process of letting go of our need to have our own way. When in prayer we submit our wills and our very selves to God and ask that God’s will be done, not ours, we can trust that our will gradually will come into closer alignment with what God wants for us, which is to heal from a debilitating addiction and rediscover who we are as loved children of God.
Tips for Developing Willingness to Heal
If unwillingness to let God remove your character defects is posing an obstacle in recovery, the following tips may help. These I’ve compiled using the acronym, SANE, to help you remember them:
Surrender your unwillingness. Right now you may not be willing to give up an addiction or various character defects associated with it, but you can ask God to help you surrender even this posture of unwillingness. Ask God to help you let go of it. Visualize letting go of this and anything else that may be keeping you from experiencing the peace and freedom of surrendering your will and life to God.
Ask God to transform your desires so that they align with God’s desires for you and for those around you. Once you’ve surrendered your unwillingness to heal from the things that feed an addiction, ask God to transform you more and more into the likeness of God’s image as love itself. Ask God, in other words, to give you healthier, more life-giving desires — like, for example, a desire to love your neighbor as yourself.
Notice how God answers your prayers. Pay attention to how God answers these prayers. Write down what is revealed to you. Sometimes our unwillingness to heal is as much a problem of inattentiveness to how God may be calling us to change and experience new life in the process. If we paid even just a bit more attention, we might see how truly liberating that change can be.
Every day, repeat this process. The active, intentional process of laying down our own will in order to say “Thy will be done” is not something we do once but every day, in a lifelong process of recovering the person God wants us to be.
God’s will for God’s children is that we move beyond our temper tantrums and addictive behaviors into a more life-giving experience of who God is and who we are in the light of God’s love. To do that, our willfulness must give way to willingness and our control to surrender. This path to freedom may be hard. Scripture calls it “the way of the cross.” But at the end of it, we will find our very selves.
Jonathan Benz, MS, CAP, ICADC, CDWF
Jonathan is a clinician, author, public speaker and ordained minister. He has served as a leadership consultant to various agencies in the U.S. and U.K. and has carried his message of strategic, spiritual living to 40 countries. Jonathan is a certified addictions professional with a master of science in counseling psychology and is the director of Three Strands℠, the Christian treatment addiction program at The Recovery Place, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is also a Certified Daring™ Way Facilitator and Certified Sex Addiction Therapist Candidate. He is the author of Live A Legacy: Spiritual Principles for Strategic Living, and his newest book, written with Kristina Robb-Dover, The Recovery-Minded Church: Loving and Ministering to People with Addiction, will be available in fall 2015.
Read more from this expert's blog: Faith-Based Recovery