Page 24 of All the Way to the River

They discovered that the question “What is thy will for me?” seemed to open the door to divinity quite nicely.

Whenever they asked that question with sincere humility, they actually heard and felt guidance arriving from the beyond.

And when these seekers followed that inner guidance system—and surrendered completely to its will—many of them were restored to sanity.

Even some of the most desperate alcoholics and addicts among them were able to find peace and sobriety at last.

Over time, the group’s members also discovered that the problem of self-centeredness could be alleviated through acts of service to the community, and that salvation from fear could be found through an ongoing series of “conversations” that members had with one another each day, in which they revealed their darkest terrors and resentments, knowing that they would be received with kindness.

If all this sounds like an AA meeting, that’s no accident—because the Oxford Group (which did indeed get Rowland H.

sober, and which eventually sobered up Bill W.

, as well) was the model upon which Alcoholics Anonymous was ultimately based.

And AA—along with its many twelve-step grandbaby programs, including the fellowship to which I belong today—still upholds these same principles: that selfishness and fear are the cause of all our mental troubles; that sharing your darkest inner thoughts on a daily basis with a group of understanding friends will keep you out of hell; that there should be no hierarchy or fees within an “organism” of like-minded fellows; and that surrendering your will to a higher power of your own understanding ultimately sets you free.

This subtle yet emboldening concept—that the only higher power that can set you free is the higher power of your own understanding—has always been one of the keys to the success of the twelve-step program.

It doesn’t matter whom or what an addict feels to be their spiritual archetype; the essential thing is only that they give themselves over to some sort of intelligence that is bigger than their own, laying down their inflated ego by admitting that their life has become unmanageable and that they definitely need some new management around here.

I stand in constant awe of the infinitude and diversity of the higher powers I have encountered in the rooms of recovery.

For some of my fellows, God is a feeling —something they might experience in the presence of art and music, for instance, that lifts their spirits and makes them want to continue living.

For others, God is nature (as indicated by the helpful acronym GOD, for “Go Out Doors”).

For still others, God is a consciousness that can be found within the guidelines and collective wisdom of the twelve-step meetings themselves (as indicated by the equally helpful acronym GOD, for “Group Of Drunks”).

Some of my fellows still believe in the Gods of their cultural upbringings, while others have radically broken from their original religious systems—especially if those systems were abusive or oppressive.

Some feel that their higher powers are male, while others take direction from divine holy mothers, mighty goddesses, or a host of ageless, genderless spirits.

Some see God most simply as reality (“that which is”)—an immovable and nonnegotiable force against which they have ceased fighting.

Others find divinity in silence and meditation—in a space they call “wordless oneness” or “noncritical observation.” Others experience God as the act of waiting in humble faith through difficult moments, rather than acting out of impulse.

(“God is in the pause,” we are often told, and I’ve also been taught that PAUSE stands for “Perhaps An Unseen Solution Exists.”)

Some recovering addicts believe that they are being guided by angels, while others call out to their ancestors for help.

Some see God in signs and dreams and visions.

I myself hear my higher power—whom I choose to call God—as an unconditionally loving, incredibly affectionate, and infinitely wise voice that speaks to me from within my own mind.

Each addict gets to decide for themselves to whom or to what they are surrendering, but surrender itself is essential for the miracle of recovery to occur.

Surrender.

That’s a tricky one, though.

Surrender is a difficult concept for anyone to face—and seems an especially unlikely notion to have arisen from a group of early-twentieth-century privileged white Christian men born into a capitalistic, individualistic, and militaristic society that had promised them happiness through power, influence, and never-ending quests for wealth, status, and material gain.

Yet capitalism’s promises had failed these men miserably, as they fail so many of us, and had left them spiritually bankrupt.

Rowland H. himself (born Rowland Hazard III) was the scion of a wealthy family of textile merchants and a graduate of Yale.

He was married to a Chicago banking heiress and had briefly served as a state senator.

But living at the very pinnacle of society had not spared him from a life of alcoholism and suffering, and the finest doctors in the world had been unable to straighten him out.

It was surrendering his will to a higher power that saved his life, restored him to sanity, and gave meaning to his soul.

“Ego-collapse at depth” is the powerful phrase that Bill W.

uses in his letter to Carl Jung—referring to the utter breakdown of self (more commonly known as “bottoming out”) that an addict must undergo before admitting at last their powerlessness over their addictions.

All the external scaffolding that you have been using to prop up your fragile yet stubborn identity must fail and crumble before you are finally able to admit that you just might be out of control and that there just might be a power greater than yourself out there—a power greater than anything that your own distorted thinking could ever provide.

Jung agreed. Remembering his patient Rowland H.

from many years earlier, he wrote back to Bill W.

: “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in mediaeval language: the union with God.” Without that powerful feeling of spiritual union, Jung went on to say, the ordinary man “cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil.”

This is why Alcoholics Anonymous—for all its faults and its creaky old 1930s language—is still the best game in town by far when it comes to sobriety.

Recovery rates from addiction are dismally low, but AA has been estimated to be 60 percent more effective than any other program at getting addicts clean and keeping them clean—precisely because it guides people toward a spiritual and communal solution to a disease for which, after all these decades, there is still no better course of treatment.

And even after all these years, it’s still completely free.

But many people cannot stomach the language of spiritual surrender.

And the stronger the constructs of one’s ego, the more difficult it is to release the fantasy of self-will and self-power, and to give yourself over completely to the flow of what some recovering addicts call “life on life’s terms” (or, as nonaddicts apparently call it, “life”).

Reading Rayya’s journals today, and comparing her secret pain with the “mighty” persona she presented in public, I can see that she did not wish to admit powerlessness to anyone—not even to the God of her own understanding, whoever and whatever that may have been.

She didn’t want anyone knowing her business, she wasn’t making time for any spiritual practices, and she definitely didn’t want anyone telling her she shouldn’t be drinking.

There was no “life on life’s terms” happening here: The terms were all Rayya’s.

And since Rayya was the biggest, toughest, smartest, coolest, most badass bitch around, her terms were always some extremely convincing version of “I got this.”

But she didn’t got it, was the problem.

And instead of asking for direction from a higher power, she just kept asking herself .

“Am I lazy?” she writes. “When I think of lazy, I think of someone who doesn’t want to do anything for anyone or for himself. Only wants to sit around watching TV and eat and schlub.”

“I’m an addict,” she writes. “I’m a shoe addict, a food addict …”

“It seems to me that I’m slipping,” she writes. “What a pity that I can’t just do life.”

“What do I want?” she wrote in her journal in 2009.

“I know what I want—to be rich and famous, to get chicks and have people admire me and fawn over me. To have my friends say, ‘I knew it! I knew you would be famous! I knew you’d make it!’ There, I said it.

It’s actually liberating to have finally spit it out.

I WANT TO BE FAMOUS AND RICH WITH MONEY AND HEALTHY AND WANTED AND LOVED AND SOBER AND IN A HOT AND HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP AND ENJOYING EVERY MOMENT OF THE DAY! !!”

I want, I want, I want —there it is: the ferocious drumbeat of the ego, pounding away within the blistering furnace of the self.

But all that wanting did not keep Rayya from hiding and suffering.

Nor did it keep her from drinking.

And even as her triumphant recovery memoir was being published in 2013 to rave reviews, and she started getting everything she’d always wanted, Rayya was writing in her journal: “Shit happens, life happens, and you adapt or change, or get lost in the vacuum that becomes your dark reality. All the should haves , could haves , or wishes get sucked up into the high-priced melee that is your life. You start looking really good on the outside while your insides are rotting.”

Just as Rowland H. could not be saved by wealth, privilege, a dynastic marriage, a senatorial position, and access to one of history’s most brilliant and legendary psychiatrists, Rayya Elias could not be saved by the public success and acclaim she had always longed for—and that she was finally receiving in abundance.

Nor, for that matter, could all my great success save me from my anxiety and love addiction.

Things did indeed look “really good” for both of us during those exciting and busy years, but things were not good at the core.

And as Rayya wrote to herself back then, in secret resignation, “At least when you’re a drug addict, everything matches. You look bad, you feel bad, and the writing is on the wall.”