Neural Networks and The 12 Steps

This article describes how learning and living the 12 Steps of recovery creates a neural networks that provides an alternative to the network of addiction, Chronic Depression, Self-Sabotage, etc. - a new steady-state of recovery!

NOTE: The following are my own ideas about how the 12 Steps work. There are no experts because there is no "one-way" to do the Steps. I think this is what makes the 12 Steps so successful...everyone has their own map of the world.

Introduction

To switch off a chronic neural network such as addiction, self-sabotage, or chronic depression and establish one of recovery takes lots of motivation and effort... We will not find the motivation (energy) unless we give ourselves internal permission to make this change.

Pain is the only thing that can break through the wall of denial - deletion and distortion - long enough to allow us to see the truth.

Our values give us the internal permission and motivation to change... But we must be able to see how that one most important value (addiction) has compromised all others in order to get that permission and motivation.

When we have "hit bottom" there is an internal shift where the door to recovery is open if we’d only walk through... Step One of the 12 steps helps us begin to explore the role that our object or activity of choice has played in causing our pain.

It is through looking at these realities that we uncover the damage done to the people, places, and things that are important us. The remaining 11 of the 12 steps establish, strengthen, and maintain our new recovery network.

In recovery circles they often refer to the 12 Steps a "program of recovery". In a neurological sense, the terms "network" and "program" are synonymous.

This reminds me of a time in January of 1986. I was in treatment - soon to meet with my counselor for about the third time. I was all set for a big argument because... as my wife and kids will attest - I love to debate things.

I told my counselor that all this stuff with the PROGRAM and the 12 Steps sounded like brainwashing to me... He just looked at me, smiled and said... "Don, don’t you think your brain could use a little washing?"

...There was no debate.

Step One

We admitted we were powerless over [Addiction, Self-Sabotage, Gambling, Shopping, Etc.] – that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step One of the 12 steps is a critical step in the recovery process involving the Contemplation and Preparation stages of change. The three key words are admitted, powerlessness, and unmanageability.

None of us like to admit when something has power over us, especially when it’s something important. Nor do we want to look at the unmanageability that this powerlessness causes in our lives.

However, three things are required in order to open up the door for change – Honesty, Open-mindedness, and Willingness (HOW). Without these and the 12 steps it is certain that the damage to our lives and to those we care about will continue, eventually ending in tragedy.

• Admitted:

  Denial - deletion and distortion - provides us with a set of filters that protects our ability to continue our unhealthy relationship with our object or activity of choice.

  If we could see the truth we would be forced to take action, i.e. say goodbye to this unhealthy love-and-trust relationship with our addiction of choice.

  It is therefore of utmost importance that we go back with honesty, openness, and willingness to search our history with a fine-toothed comb looking for any information that we had previously deleted and/or distorted.

  This is what they call "rigorous honesty" in recovery... we apply it in each of the 12 steps.

• Powerlessness:

  Powerlessness is evidenced by loss-of-control. Early in our addiction, loss of control can be so subtle it is hard to notice.

  For example, with work addiction I may decide I am going to take time for me this weekend - but first I have to finish that "one more thing". I end up working through the weekend, wondering where the time went.

  In the case of alcohol addiction, it is easier to see loss-of-control when I have to take a drink the first thing in the morning than it is when I decide I am only going to have two beers and end up drinking six.

  With eating, many broken promises to stick to a diet and begin that exercise program are the most frequent indicators that we have lost control.

  Whenever I determine one thing but do another I have lost control. I may also find evidence of loss of control when I begin to set rules such as I will only gamble when I am on vacation and/or out of state.

• Unmanageability:

  Unmanageability is evidenced by life damaging consequences or "wreckage of the past" such as:

  • Health problems,
  • Broken relationships,
  • Ruined careers,
  • Lost opportunities,
  • Financial,
  • Emotional,
  • Social setbacks,
  • And wounded children

Step Two

Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity

Step Two of the 12 steps is about change on the level of beliefs...especially those beliefs having to do with spirituality.

Beliefs are very powerful and three specific types of beliefs will stop us in our tracks... They are limiting beliefs about our capabilities, about the possibility of change, and about our identity.

If I believe that I do not possess the capabilities to change then I feel helpless...

If I believe that I have the capabilities to change but that it is just not possible no matter what I do then I feel hopeless...

If I believe I have the capabilities to change and that it is possible for me to change but I don’t believe that I deserve it then I feel worthless...

• Helplessness:

  Helplessness is the easiest of these three limiting beliefs to address, primarily because in the case of addiction it’s true - if I did possess the capabilities to change I wouldn’t be powerless.

  I have developed network of capabilities to support my addiction – I have come to recovery a zebra... If I am to become a Giraffe I need to change my habitat - I need to be with a group of 12 step giraffes...

  I need to gather from them the tools I need to make the change - I need to eat what they eat... believe what they believe... value what they value... do what they do and - most importantly - experience what they have experienced through applying the 12 steps of recovery.

• Hopelessness:

  Hopelessness is more difficult to address because if I believe it is hopeless then I do not have the motivation (energy) to change even if I do receive the internal permission.

  It's easy to feel hopeless if I do a good job on Step One.

  Looking at the truth about my powerlessness and the unmanageability in my life helps me accept that I have an addiction network so powerful that there is nothing I can do to stop it or control it – I am truly powerless over it.

  There is nothing I can do - nothing anyone on this earth can do for me... Powerless means that it is in my very nature:

  • To suffer miserably,
  • hurt everyone I care about,
  • lose thing that are important to me
  • and ultimately to die in my addiction.

  If I am an addict - these things are in my nature just like it's in a fish's nature to swim.

  Step One takes away our hope that we will somehow just spontaneously start to live successfully and happily.

  Thank goodness for Step Two - Do not begin working on Step One unless you fully intend to go on to Step Two!

  You do not want to stay where Step One takes you... Just as Step One takes away our hope - Step Two gives it right back to us.

  But Step Two gives us back our only hope... there is no other hope for us... We cannot change our nature and no one on earth can change our nature for us... I must change from a Zebra to a Giraffe.

  We need a nature changing miracle - This point is where many people begin having trouble because they get religion mixed up with spirituality of the 12 steps.

  Spirituality is simply a personal understanding and relationship with a power greater than us...in whatever way seems right for you.

  If all of this is too much to consider right now then it is suggested to keep things simple and accept that a 12 step group of recovering people is a power greater than you.

  Some who do this think of god as "Good, Orderly, Direction" from others who know the score.

• Worthlessness:

  The emotional infection of shame as described in the "Iceberg", Part I – is responsible for feelings of unworthiness. Through the 12 steps of recovery this core of toxic shame begins to heal.

  The woundedness of abandonment, shame, and contempt creates that false sense of self (False Self) which becomes our identity from a very early age.

  Addiction, which was meant to salve our pain, actually makes it worse... Love is the only medicine that will heal this pain... People in recovery love us before we are able to love ourselves.

  It is their love and the love of a Higher Power that will clean out the infection and promote healing. Eventually we will begin to learn to love ourselves.

  And remember that love is a verb, an action word. We need to love and take care of ourselves as we would our own children... its called self-care.

  If you have read this far, then you have already taken a loving action for yourself. Since love is an action word, you can do it even if you don’t feel you deserve it.... Don’t give up – shoot for "Progress not Perfection".

Step Three

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

Step Three of the 12 steps is about making a decision to live according to our values and spiritual beliefs.

An important part of this step is to just simply make the decision... From there we learn one-day-at-a-time how to actually carry out that decision.

Trying to live the way we think our Higher Power would want us to live puts us in touch with our values. Making a concerted effort every day to live according to those values gives us the practice we need to develop that part of our new recovery network.

With regular practice living the 12 steps way of living becomes as automatic and natural as breathing... a new steady-state.

A simple way to remember Step Three is to adopt this motto – "Do the next right thing."

Step Four

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves

Remember that we cannot solve a subconscious problem with a conscious effort...Step Four of the 12 steps is about bringing those subconscious problems into our conscious awareness...

Step four is a writing-intensive step where we put pencil to paper - we list the personal values that we violated... all the actions we now regret... all the people we’ve hurt... and all the mistakes that we made.

An inventory is a listing of assets and liabilities. This personal archeology pulls our problems out of our neurology and puts them on paper out in front of us giving us a close look at the elements of our internal addiction network.

But we don’t stop there - we must also have on our list of all the good qualities that we have found... all of our values, talents, skills, abilities and other resources (assets) that will be useful in establishing our networks for recovery.

Many people have a lot more trouble coming up with assets than they do liabilities. This is only because our assets are buried with our True-Self... Our liabilities come out of our False-Self ... the voice of shame which is louder and closer to the surface of our awareness...

Doing this work, we take stock of all of our contempt, shame, and abandonment - both of ourselves and of others. Step four helps us to identify these patterns which are all elements of our addictive neural network.

Step Five

Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Step Five of the 12 steps is about trust and intimacy...

Admitting our wrongs to God and to ourselves is not the hard part of this step... Our Higher Power already knows about our wrongs and - once we have completed Step Four of the 12 steps - we do too.

Having to admit all of these things to another human being is the hard part...

This involves significant level of trust and intimacy. The beauty of this step is that it gives us a wonderful opportunity to begin to develop the ability to do healthy relationships...

While simultaneously allowing for release of such things as the inability to trust, fear, shame, contempt, and finding out that some of the limiting beliefs we had about people do not fit anymore...

We have a corrective emotional experience when we are able to complete this step with someone who listens in a caring, supportive, non-shaming, and nonjudgmental way.

For many who have grown up in a dysfunctional family in this may be the first time they have experienced healthy intimacy... It's a major foundation on which to build a new recovery network.

Step Six

Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character

Step Six of the 12 steps is about readiness for change on all levels. Just because we have character defects does not mean we are defective characters... Many of these defects or "flaws" reside in our False Self and come out of our woundedness.

There are some behaviors that we may not be ready to give up just yet. Many of them are behaviors which have been with us most of our lives - some of them even helped us to survive an unhealthy, dysfunctional situation.

The operative words in this step are "becoming entirely ready". Notice it does not say "wildly enthusiastic"... "Becoming" implies that we are preparing to be ready.

In step six of the 12 steps we prepare through spending time alone in prayer and meditation... Having turned our will and our life over to the care of God in Step Three, we now ask Him to help make us ready to let go.

Step Seven

Humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings

Step Seven of the 12 steps is about releasing old habits, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors that no longer serve us well.

After our time of quiet preparation in Step Six, in whatever way seems right for us, we enter into the presence of our Higher Power and ask Him to remove our shortcomings.

If you remember our discussion about how to "burn something into our neurology" then you may remember there are two ways to do so - one way is through intensity and the other is through repetition...

...The experience of releasing shortcomings and being changed somehow by a Power Greater than ourselves is very intense.

Step Eight

Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step Eight of the 12 steps is about accepting response-ability in our relationships.

We all have the ability to respond to others in any way we choose. Healthy responsibility means we are not response-able for others, but we are response-able to others.

We are responsible to decide and to stick to our values about how to treat people. In this Step we must go back through our inventory looking for people we had hurt in the past - We may have broken promises, stolen from them, lied to them, rejected them, betrayed them, etc...

Once we have made our list we must look to make sure we have the right person on the top of that list – ourselves. When we look closely at the damage addiction has done to our lives we can see that we have hurt ourselves as much or more than anyone else.

Step Nine

Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Step Nine of the 12 steps is about interpersonal healing.

When we go to others and take ownership and accountability for our behavior, no matter how long it has been since the incident took place, we have finished some internal "unfinished business".

Someone once said that “Whatever is not worked-out gets acted-out”. Working our unfinished business means getting honest about it and clearing it up in whatever way makes the most sense.

If that means we go back to someone and apologize for something we did to them ten years ago, then we do it – we finish our business.

When we make amends we get closure and we hope the other person does too. Many times they do get closure and respond with grace and gratitude.

However, the other person has the ability and choice to respond in any way they choose. Maybe they continue to hold a grudge or maybe they accept the amends and move on – it’s up to them.

There is one catch to Step Nine - we don’t try to make direct amends to someone if it will cause harm to come to them or others. This would simply be trying to clear our own conscious at their expense.

There may be another way to make amends in such a case. One way is to make a living amends by doing something indirectly to atone for our behavior... such as giving a charitable donation in that persons name.

Step Ten

Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it

Step Ten of the 12 steps is about maintenance of our new networks – internal and external.

We must "keep doing what we are doing in order to keep getting what we are getting". If we like what we are getting in recovery then we have gotten off the merry-go-round and are in the Maintenance Stage of Change.

Steps Four, Eight, and Ten are inventory steps. We can think of them as housecleaning... Step Four is our first long-overdue housecleaning and Step Eight is our second major effort making these the steps that get the house clean.

Step Ten is how we keep the house clean. We must be vigilant in staying with our new behaviors and beliefs because repetition does not work well on a sporadic basis.

We need to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. We look back over our day for things we did well and things we could do better.

When we notice we have automatically slid back into an old way of doing things, and we will, Step Ten gives us a means of undoing that right away and getting back on track.

Step Eleven

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out

Step Eleven of the 12 steps is about self-actualization and growth.

Through the daily behaviors of prayer (talking) and meditation (listening) we improve our conscious contact with God. There’s that word conscious again - it means awareness.

We are to improve our awareness of God and include him in our daily activities. In doing so, we enter into a relationship with our Higher Power.

Remember that the word ‘relationship’ is a nominalized verb. When we denominalize that word we get the action word "relate".

We relate to our Higher Power through prayer. He relates to us through meditation and numerous other ways throughout the day.

In Step 11 we are reminded to meditate on the good things rather than the bad things. This will help us achieve that new steady-state of serenity rather than the old one of chronic stress.

One recent example I can give is the experience I had last fall as I sat out on my back porch...

I was sitting there soaking in the warmth of the sun and enjoying the smell of autumn in the air... when a beautiful little green humming bird came right up to me, 6 or 8 inches from my face, and just hovered there for a moment.

I think of such things as my Higher Power, whom I choose to call God, saying good morning!

Another example is one I will carry with me forever. It’s a memory of a time a few winters ago when I was driving down a country road during a snow shower...It was the kind of snow with huge white flakes just hanging there, floating in the air like in a snow globe.

Everything was white with snow and just as I thought it couldn’t get any better, I rounded a corner and had to stop because there were at least 20 wild turkeys slowly making their way across the road, one flew right over the hood of my Jeep as I just sat there in awe - I was in a live Norman Rockwell painting.

These moments are "burned into my neurology” because they were intense... I can see, hear, feel, and smell the entire experience just by taking to time to sit quietly, close my eyes and think about it again.

In these quite times in solitude and awe, we can receive direction from our Higher Power regarding his will for us...

As Rick Warren points out in his book A Purpose Driven Life, "My purpose is not really my purpose at all – It’s His purpose for me."

Step Twelve

Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry the message to [others], and to practice these principles in all our affairs

Step Twelve of the 12 steps is about integration.

It is my firmly held belief that my spiritual awakening means I have recovered my True-Self - that part of me that was buried under the wounds of abandonment, shame, and contempt.

There is a saying, “If God feels far away – who moved?” If my True Self is who God made then that is where my spirit resides. If I don’t have full access to my True-Self, then I don’t have full access to my spirit.

My spirit is how I connect with God, so if I don’t have full access to my spirit I may not feel God’s presence in my life.

As a direct result of applying the 12 Steps, I am to have a spiritual awakening. When enough work is done and enough healing has occurred then my True Self emerges from isolation bringing with it my spirit, giving me full access to my Higher Power.

The 12 Steps have been working for millions of people world wide since the early 1930’s and continues to be the most effective way of overcoming addiction, codependency, chronic depression and anxiety.