Just For The Day
Just For The Day
#20 - September 2, 2025 - Higher Power and Identity
Jay and Diane read the daily reading from the NA Daily Reader which focuses on finding our new sense of purpose by better understanding our higher power.
They discuss the identity of an active addict and how alignment with a higher power can create a new sense of purpose and direction. They use the idea of a North Star and the scripture about training a child in the way they should go to demonstrate how to find one's purpose.
Question: How has your relationship with your higher power changed your sense of identity and purpose?
Jay and Diane's Just For The Day podcast is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Just for Today, any 12-Step program, or any other recovery-based product or organization. They should not replace your regular group or sponsor meetings.
The views expressed are solely those of the hosts and guests. Take what you like and leave the rest.
Welcome back to another episode of Just for the Day. I'm Jay and I'm a recovering addict.
Speaker 2:I'm Diane and I am codependent. Today is September 2nd and we're right in the midst of harvest season for so many good fruits and vegetables. That's right. I was just thinking how much I love cherry season, only surpassed by pomegranate season for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the mangoes have been really delicious.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been loving that so the topic is higher powered and the quote says daily practice of our 12-step program enables us to change from what we were to people guided by a higher power some of these, some of these quotes the toppers the grammar is just struggles, yeah who have we been and who have we become?
Speaker 1:there are a couple of ways to answer this question. One is very simple we came to narcotics anonymous, as addicts, our addiction killing us in na. We've been freed from our obsession with drugs and our compulsion to use, and our lives have changed but that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 2:Who have we really been In the past? We were people without power or direction. We felt like we had no purpose, no reason for living. Our lives didn't make any more sense to us than they did to our families, our friends or our neighbors.
Speaker 1:Who are we really becoming Today? We are not merely clean addicts, but people with a sense of direction, a purpose and a power greater than ourselves. Through daily practice of the 12 steps, we've begun to understand how our addiction warped our feelings, motivations and behaviors. Gradually, the destructive force of our disease has been replaced by the life-giving force of our higher power.
Speaker 2:Recovery means more than cleaning up. It means powering up. We've done more than shed some bad habits. We are becoming new people guided by a higher power.
Speaker 1:Just for today, the guidance I need to become a new person is ready at hand. Today I will draw further away from my old lack of direction and closer to my higher power In born again. Christianity is a good example of this, where the focus is on becoming a new person. Right, leaving behind the old, letting the old die. A newness in Christ, quote, unquote, right. So I think this is a fascinating thing where in this reading, there is an acknowledgement of the identity component of ourselves that we are the conglomerate Is that the right word of the sum of our actions, the sum of what we spend our time on and in addiction? We're so consumed with our addiction that it defines our identity.
Speaker 2:You kind of become single focused.
Speaker 1:Well, people are single-focused, like, and I guess there's, I guess maybe that's what I'm trying to highlight is that it feels to me like the focus of our obsession. Our current obsession defines our identity and in addiction, the addict defines us and you know, it's these questions of who have we become, who are we really and who are we becoming.
Speaker 2:Once you get rid of the addiction, what's left? Yeah, what's next, and I think people who are in active addiction may not think there's anything left. This is all there is.
Speaker 1:No, and who they are is stuck Likewise, and part of the benefit of the program is that I the guidance I need to become a new person is ready at hand. I can remake myself right. And then the ability to draw on a higher power to gain that direction. And it's defined. Your direction is. Your identity seems to be somewhat tied up in your direction if that makes any sense. Okay, right, at least for a man. That that that resonates with me is is that, you know, men are very mission focused right. Purpose driven.
Speaker 1:And when we're in active addiction. It defined that direction. The addiction direction defines my identity and now, with freedom from addiction, my identity is my own and I get to define it in conjunction with my higher power, defined by my new purpose and direction in life which I really like that.
Speaker 2:Well and that's the part that stuck out to me too where it says we're not merely clean addicts, but people with a sense of direction, a purpose and a power greater than ourselves.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:That there's. There needs to be. You need a purpose in life. If you don't have a purpose in life, what's the point? Right? If you're just meandering through each day, then why not just get up in the morning, eat your food and watch tv all day? Right, you have. You have no, no point, right? Yeah, but if you want to actually develop yourself and become a person, then you need to decide what is your. This is just like when you were in therapy years and years ago, when we were having some issues and you were going through your little faith crisis and not sure what was going on with who you were, and all this, yeah, and. And you had a therapist tell you that you need to find your North star. Right, and he's like you. You. You just need a North star, something that you can say. This is unchanging in my life and this is my point of contact that I can come back to.
Speaker 1:That's right. Interestingly enough, though, that was the second topic we focused on with that counselor. The first topic was who I was. Okay, because that's where the and that's, I think, what's interesting to me. What's highlighting for me is is that your purpose in life arises out of who you are. Your purpose in life arises out of who you are, but there's this link between it that who you are is somewhat defined by the direction you're headed. So the North Star, fair enough to your point, you know.
Speaker 1:Gives you that sense of direction, gives you that sense of direction and thus a sense of identity and purpose, which is fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it reminds me also of a Bible scripture that says I don't remember the reference, I can't tell you the reference, but it's a Bible scripture that says raise up a child in the way they should go and when they're old they'll not depart from it. And just based on the context of what that chapter is about, it's basically saying help your kids figure out who they are.
Speaker 2:And they'll stay true to who they are Right. And so, as as parents, one of our main goals is to help our kids figure out what are their strengths, what are their interests, what motivates them, and help them figure out how to align their interests and their strengths with some sort of monetary value, like where they can start to learn, make money doing things that they love, so that their their work isn't tedious, right and and learning, helping them develop their passions and their hobbies and those kind of things, and I think that a lot of people in our generation didn't grow up with parents that were that focused on that.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:That a lot of our parents' generation was just survival, Like their parents were in war and depression eras and so they all had this PTSD. So a lot of them were in survival, and I think our generation and the one right after us, we're the first generation that's actually paying attention to mental health and paying attention to you. Know how can we help our kids to thrive, not just survive?
Speaker 1:Well, it reminds me of that adage where it says strong men create nice times, nice times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Hard times create strong men.
Speaker 1:Strong men create nice times it's different, it's a cycle right, and we are in a period of time where we've had a prolonged period of affluence. Right, we are in, despite the media, how the how the media might try to portray. If you're in a first world country, despite the way the media might portray your life, you are actually in the richest time up on the planet in history. Yeah, if you are in a first world country, you are among the most privileged group of people, no matter, even if you're homeless, right?
Speaker 1:like there are people who are homeless in America live better than many people across the planet, and so that's a little bit of an extreme example. But, point being, you have an opportunity as a parent where your children are being raised in in affluence that is really you can't compare it to any other time on the planet and so your children are gonna be one of two things they're either going to use it wisely or they're going to be little shits and they're going to destroy themselves and generations to come.
Speaker 1:And you, as a parent, get to somewhat decide that if you buy and you, you called it out which is your job as a parent is to help your child figure out who they are, which encompasses their skills and talents, which helps define their unique direction in life, where they'll add unique value and thus gain a sense of purpose to thrive, and that's how you create great people.
Speaker 2:Well, to follow up with that before we move on to another topic. Do you feel like addiction may be a symptom of people not having that sense of identity?
Speaker 1:Absolutely At its core. That's what it is.
Speaker 2:It's the feeling of worthless or not knowing who I am or what is my purpose, or whatever.
Speaker 1:I either don't know who I am or who I think I am is so crappy One of the two. And that's somehow linked to connection, Right, Because identity you start to form on it. If you don't have an identity, well, you start to form it around the group and around people who care about you, and that's why a home group is important, right. And so I have found personally that, you know, my addiction is not gone, but my addiction is significantly. The power and influence of my obsession is significantly reduced and it has become significantly reduced as I have further defined who I was in a positive light, not in a negative light, in a positive light, and that's a choice.
Speaker 1:by the way, that's interesting because you know you can. There are two views of the world. You can look at the world as purposeless and useless and nothing, and you will see nothing but ugliness.
Speaker 2:You'll become a nihilist.
Speaker 1:You become a nihilist right, and the other side, you choose out of the chaos of nothing to create goodness and say, okay, well, what good could I be and what is good about me, and how could I bring more of that and anchor something? Might be a point in the planet that says I'm bringing forward something special and that's the other, the opposite, choice, right, and so addiction. Addiction, I personally feel, spawns out of a lack, of a complete lack of that identity and so I'm just going to destroy my life.
Speaker 2:So part of recovery is finding that identity, finding that purpose, and that will make it easier than just surviving. So we've been watching a lot of alone lately, right, and you can see the people who are thriving in the, the mental health and in the survival techniques and in the way that they're interacting with their environment. You can see the people who are thriving and you can see the people who are just trying to wait it out until everybody else fails. And I think that sometimes that's very relevant to addiction that if we're not doing the steps and the works to figure out who we are, to get our new purpose, to get our new identity, then we're literally just hanging on by our fingertips waiting for that addiction to catch us again.
Speaker 1:That's right one other thing I needed, I wanted to highlight before we left, was the connection between that direction, purpose, meaning, identity and a higher power. It's intricate, intricately linked it seems to be. I will draw further away from my old lack of direction, closer to my higher power, as I do, and, and then that's the, that's the, just for today quote. And then, as you do that, you get a greater sense of purpose and direction. You know, you've heard, everyone is well, most people at some point have heard Is it a 12 step version of God, good orderly, good orderly direction? I don't feel like that's the first time I heard that.
Speaker 2:It is. That's the first time I heard it was in program and it was somebody saying that they had issues with God, the higher power, so they just looked at it as good, orderly direction.
Speaker 1:I find that most people's iterations of a higher power are the best versions of themselves far in the future. The qualities like a person's higher power typically will subsume the qualities with which a person does not have and wants to obtain, like charity. You think that's a?
Speaker 2:general statement. Or you think that's a you thing.
Speaker 1:No, I think, as I've you know. I mean, people will call it whatever they want, they'll give their label to it. But essentially, what ends up happening and I'd be interested to have that discussion with someone who feels differently typically what ends up happening is that they'll give god an identity that is the summation of the qualities that they wish they could obtain or that they're working towards, whether that's greater degrees of charity, love and and most religions will encompass that in one being right um, but you know, point being why I'm highlighting that is that, regardless of what your deity of choice is, your religious, your sect, your preferred Sunday service that you go to, there is this, there is this, un, you can't get away from this link between people's higher power and the pursuit of something greater, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Right. It's true that your lack of direction can be overcome by finding a higher power and aligning yourself with a higher power, Because then you have to figure out well, what does the higher power want from me? He definitely doesn't want me passed out on the sofa all day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, my higher power is going to want something bigger than that.
Speaker 1:Which is why it's a spiritual program, right, you can't, and it's interesting. My experience has been I threw God out and then, when I came back into the program, I did not accept him back and then, as I worked to improve my life, I slowly readopted a higher power that was different, but I would say a better version, because it was more grounded in spiritual principles, principles of honesty, openness, willingness, charity, long suffering, kindness, and I don't think you know it's interesting. I would love to have a conversation with the addict that still clings to atheism, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:With the active addict or the recovering addict who still clings to atheism?
Speaker 1:Keep bringing it up. It's interesting when I say addict, I just we're all addicts. I don't differentiate between active and non-active. Okay. We said that the other day. I accidentally said that I'm an active addict or something like that. You're like what does that mean? You didn't talk?
Speaker 2:about it. I'm like, oh Jade, did you slip up Right?
Speaker 1:well, that's like I will always be an addict and I see lots of people who don't agree that they're addicts as addicts, and so it's like when I say that and I say I just don't differentiate between those categories, if that makes sense. Okay.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I'd love to have the conversation with an addict active or non-active, regardless, but I guess preferably active someone who has worked the program and progressed, who has been able to maintain their atheism, atheistic viewpoint right and that doesn't mean the opposite, that is, I believe in a man in the clouds with beard.
Speaker 1:That's not what that means right but a person who has been able to stay away from the spiritual side of the program and still gain recovery. Because I don't think you can do it, because I think it's linked to this, like well, spiritually it's about direction and progress and growth and moving towards meaning and purpose, and that's fundamentally what it is, and you can't. That is a that is a spiritual pursuit. It is nothing but that.
Speaker 2:So I don't know, if that makes any sense yeah, I like that this reading kind of takes a different perspective of the higher power. I think a lot of times when we talk about the higher power, the focus is on how you need to have something bigger than yourself that you can rely on. You need to recognize that you can't do it all and be able to have something to pass it on to, to have something else guide your life. And yet this perspective of higher power is you need direction in your life and connecting yourself with a higher power allows you to find that direction. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's just a different function for your higher power.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did be interested in before. Did you have any other thoughts? You looked like you responded to my definition of God and I'm interested if you had any thoughts about that, because that's my version of I don't see a difference between religions and deities and yet you know you're like I didn't look like you didn't agree with that or you know.
Speaker 2:I just don't think that I would generalize that most people believe anything about God. You said that most people would. Would they create this higher power, that it encompasses all the characteristics they wish they had? Well, I, I don't. I I would. It seems presumptuous to me to assume that most people would do that just because that's, yeah, maybe, what you're doing, or and I'm I'm thinking through. Well, okay, my relationship with my, my higher power, is it just the sum of the qualities that I admire, that I wish I had? I don't think so. I think it's more than that. You feel like it devalues it.
Speaker 2:No, I think it restricts it a little bit, that somebody who's listening may have a very different idea of their higher power may have a very different idea of their higher power, and so I don't want to restrict it and say your higher power is usually just the sum of these characteristics that you value, that you wish you had, that you don't have like compassion, like empathy, like tolerance, like whatever. And it may be that and the higher power may be that, but it may not be.
Speaker 1:It feels limiting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because that's interesting, because it's it, because it limits the higher power to like a subset of characteristics well, and, and some people's higher power may not have characteristics, some people's higher power is the mountains and the forest and the and nature right, yeah, nature maybe doesn't have compassion because it's a very maybe doesn't have compassion because it's a very survivalistic kind of thing, right, that's very true. So so I, yeah, I, it just seems sketchy to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting to do a general statement of what we think people would, may, you know, create a higher power to be yeah, I guess I'm hearing you pick up on that.
Speaker 1:Like I stated that as a fact and it was my observation yeah so and there's, and it's very possible that I guess I should have said. My experience has been that there have been people that, as I've listened to people from a variety of sect religions, not like there are all sorts of religions, but religions that kind of embody god as a being.
Speaker 2:I find that okay, so people whose higher power is interesting, is a personified. Yeah, to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good way of saying it, yeah, and it's not a way to limit or diminish it. It's simply like I noticed this a long time ago when my mother who you know I always had part of my struggles with religion was my struggles with my mother's belief and system of belief, right, and I eventually, you know, rejected that and then came back and kind of found my own way. And then when I came back and was kind of really digesting her belief system again, I realized that the God that she believes in is a really scary being.
Speaker 2:A vengeful God.
Speaker 1:It's vengeful, it's judgmental, it demands perfection. And what I realized is that all the things that she had demanded of us, of children, in our observance of her standards, were actually a reflection of how she felt about her deity and what her deity demanded of her. And there was this really weird like mirror between like, okay, what she deemed as the ideal and what the pursuit of the ideal and what was like good and what was and what she was giving to her her higher power.
Speaker 1:And I and I've noticed that a lot of people who personify a deity do a similar thing- whether it's good or bad, and it ends up being some form of a care, again characteristics that they wish they had. In my mother's case, it was perfectionism, which meant it was destructive for her mental health and then destructive of the people who she had power over. Right.
Speaker 1:And so you know, I've been really careful to really think about what. What characteristics do I give my higher power? Do I see my higher power having um, and, and mine has always, and it's a good point Good call out is that you know, my it's just been my experience that it has ended up being the ones that I'm pursuing, that I recognize that I wish I had, that I think are good and beneficial, Right, but that's not to say that other, everyone's is like that and everyone has their own higher power.
Speaker 2:So if that came across as a fence, as offensive, you know you caught the look on my face Cause I was like, well, wait a minute, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's why I asked, because, if other people are feeling that way, that was not what was intended and yet that's how I feel so, and because I think that there is some really strong connection between like I think it can proceed. It's I guess I brought it up because it can proceed in two ways. I can seek a higher power by trying to create one and trying to find one that fits my being right, whether you can go, you can do the sect version of that and try and find religions right, or you could pick a good direction and you'll find God in the pursuit of your meaning.
Speaker 2:Is that making sense? That's what.
Speaker 1:I'm meaning by that Because they're actually linked, so anyway.
Speaker 2:It's like in Frozen 2. Just do the next best thing.
Speaker 1:That's twice. You brought that up in the last Because it's so relevant.
Speaker 2:Okay, brought that up in the last, I know, because it's so relevant, okay. So just for today, friends, the guidance you need to become a new person is already at hand. Draw further away from your old lack of direction and closer to your higher power, whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you tomorrow.
