The Freedom Room Podcast | A Conversation about God & Recovery

Topic - Talking about God A compassionate and real take on getting and staying sober.Join Rachel and Camilla on their journey, how they got sober and how they stay sober - and so much more. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Hi everyone and welcome to the Freedom Room Podcast. You're here with Rachel and Camilla. Hi. It's lovely to have you guys here with us again. And today we're talking about the God word and what does it mean? So, Rach, do you want to kick us off and talk about what God means to you in relation to recovery? Sure.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

The word God comes up a lot in recovery. It is in a lot of the 12-step work that you do. It's a part of the 12-steps. And for me, when I first saw the 12 steps and saw the God word, I just wanted to run. I remember thinking at the time, actually, you know, I've spent all this money and all you're giving me is God. Oh my God, I'm backed for the want of a better word, you know. And I never believed, I hadn't believed for a very long time. I mean, I wouldn't call myself an atheist, but um I certainly didn't believe in God. Um, obviously, when I got sober um back in 2012, um my dad had been um passed away almost 12 years at that point. Um, so in my mind, why the hell would God take away my dad? You know, um my dad was just so beautiful, and um yeah, so there was no God, happy God in my um in my world, that's for sure. I was brought up with God around me. My dad um was Catholic, my mum was Church of England, we were allowed to choose whatever we wanted to be. Um, I did go to church as a child, but yeah, I can say for me as a as an adult, God meant absolutely nothing to me at all. Um, it took a lot of time in recovery and going to um meetings and speaking to my sponsor and speaking to the people at the treatment centre about my views on God. But I was told very early on and very adamantly that God, yeah, it is a God of your own understanding, and thank goodness that it was. Um, you know, for me, they were telling me to turn my life over to a God of my own understanding. So for me to get sober, they're saying that I needed to turn my life over to a higher power, to a God. Um, and God was going to take care of it. Um, so I was then left with, well, I can't see it, I can't touch it, I don't know if it even is real. I just how on earth am I going to hand over the most important thing of getting sober to something that I can't even see? It seems like a bit of a cop-out if I'm 100% honest. Um, so for me, I had to be able to see it, it had to be tangible, I had to be able to touch it. So I actually used um a bottle of sauce, a bottle of HP sauce. Um, you know, even my girls would re refer to it as, you know, you need to go and have a word with your bottle of sauce, mum, you know. Um, now I'm not trying to say that that bottle of sauce kept me sober by any stretch, but what that bottle of sauce did was it made me understand that it just had to be a power greater than myself. So for me, whenever I was making the decisions, whenever I was driving the bus, I would be driving that bus drunk. I would be picking up the wrong passengers on that bus, I would be picking up, you know, drama passengers on that bus. Whatever I chose to do, whenever I made a decision, I messed it up. My thinking and my actions got me into recovery because they just got me drunk. So whatever I thought I decided that whatever I thought was always wrong, my first thought whip it out of my head, go for my second thought, you know, because my first thought back in the early days guarantee would get me drunk. So whenever I had a decision to make, whenever I had to, you know, hand something over because it was just getting too difficult, then I would turn it over to my bottle of sauce. You know? Um, and what I would learn about turning it over to my bottle of sauce was that when you turn something over, the picture on the back is always different. When you hand it to the brother, you're just giving the same, it's the same. But when you turn it over, it's different and you look at it differently. And I would turn things over to my bottle of sauce, you know, and think about what the outcome should be. If it was going to be something really big, if it was something real big in my life, I would just not do anything and wait and see what happened and have faith in that bottle of sauce, have faith in something other than me to make the right decision, you know. Um, for me, I talk about God, you know, a lot, um, but my God is not the high, not the man on the cloud with the beard, you know, it's not that God, um, it is a higher power. Um I use the word God because um we have to call it something, you know, and God is what everybody knows it to be, you know, but I just put my worries and my cares out there. And what I have today, when I think about a higher power today, you know, when I was a little girl, my dad would always make sure, like if there was a big crater or a big hole in the floor, my dad would always make sure that I got over that. But if I saw that big hole in the floor, I wouldn't worry because I knew my dad would get me over that. That is how I feel about my higher power today. You know, I know it's gonna be okay. So my God, my higher power is just faith, faith in knowing that it is gonna be okay, you know. Um, and it is such a comfort, comforting feeling. Um, one that I never thought I would have, because like I say, I was very anti-God, you know, um, didn't, yeah, flicking the bird, you know, not interested. Um, and it's just not like that today. Um, I have this higher power in my life that, like I've said, is very, very comforting. Um, and I'm nothing short of a miracle, you know, because when I have handed it over, turned it over to my bottle of sauce, my higher power, my God, you know, my life has has been amazing, you know. Um, miracles have happened to me. Um, and none of that is due to me. That is all down to my higher power, my bottle of sauce. Oh my god. That's probably as much as I've got on that today.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Well, it's a lot, and um, I think, you know, luckily I have heard how about your bottle of sauce before. So I do, I've heard the HP before and I love it. Um, and I think that it rings true in a sense for me of you know, it's a very difficult thing to ask people to do to turn or hand over their life to something they can't see, you know, especially when you first come into recovery when you're in so much turmoil, everything is upside down, you know, nothing is working, people are upset at you. It's it's you know, probably the worst time in your life. How then, like you said, can you uh hand it over to something you can't see? It's very difficult. And I know a lot of people get turned away from 12-step programs because of the word God on banners and you know that concept. And look, I I didn't come from a religious household either. My parents, you know, God love them, I'm sorry, mum and dad, but they kind of you know fudged that we I went to Sunday school so I could get into the school I did in Sydney. So we were not religious in any shape or form, but in saying that, you know, our we lived our lives that we tried to treat people with respect, respect and treat them well, like you know, we weren't a-holes. But when coming into recovery, I was so broken, I was so on my knees that I would have done anything. I would have done absolutely anything. And I luckily met my sponsor um early in the days when I came into the um recovery rooms, and I think she was my higher power for a really long time because I turned my life over to her. And because I could not look after myself, I could not think straight, I could not do anything, I was that messed up when I first came in that that she was the only person that I trusted to do the right thing by me and to know what to do in this situation. And as my recovery grew and I had the capacity to think about a higher power, then my brain tried as hard as it could to think about what a higher power was for me. And today, three years and three months along, my higher power is with me every step of the way. Um, I pray often and I connect with my God. And he is not again, he, whatever it is, she, it's not the man in the white fluffy clouds either, but it's it's it's a it's a feeling and it's a comfort that is with me, that's inside of my heart, if that makes sense. Um, and I know that everything will be okay. And I need to be reminded of that though, because I get I can get caught up in life still, you know, and that's that's natural, that's human, that we, you know, we we get anxiety about how things are gonna turn out. But I think what we're lucky to have in recovery is a God there. You know, we have we have been given this opportunity to find a new way of living, and that's turning our life over. And and whatever the outcome is, it'll be okay. And tell you what, I didn't bloody believe that at all. Absolutely. Yeah, and still to this day, I still say, Oh my god, you're never gonna believe it is my is my line to my sponsor. And she'll say, Well, I am gonna believe it because I can't I can never believe that these amazing things keep happening. And and and like you know, Rach has said, it's we're just miracles. And I feel like these continual miracles keep happening happening in my life. And I hope that people that get into recovery have the same experience that if we do the right thing and and and try our best to stay well in the way that we've been taught to stay well, then our higher power is gonna have our back and they're gonna do whatever they can to you know have this incredible life. Um, and it is always gonna be an element of unknown. How how are we to know? Yeah, but we, you know, you can't argue with the miracles that we see in our life. You just you can't argue with it.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Absolutely not. And you know, I've said, you know, if I get to the pearly gates and there's somebody there and they go sucker, yeah, yeah, who cares? Who cares? Because if it gets me, you know, it keeps me clean and sober, who cares?

SPEAKER_01 11:42

Exactly. And I think um, you know, we've we we're having a short one today, but just to finish on this from me is I think whenever I'm going to react, you know, say my son has, you know, yelled at me or said something or whatever, I might like Rach said, my first reaction would be, well, I get all hoity-toity, and that's not the right way to behave. But if you pause and I think about what would my higher power say, and this happened to me this morning, no word of a lie. My son was in a tushy mood and he wouldn't get dressed for school or anything. And I had that moment where I paused, and I if I had reacted, it wouldn't have been gone like this. But I reacted in the way that my higher power would have reacted, and that was to sit down, to embrace him, to cuddle him, to give him a kiss, to tell him that I hear that you feel frustrated and I love you, and that changed the whole entire trajectory of my day and his day. Absolutely, and that's my higher power.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Yeah, and the other good thing that I like to tell people about with higher power is that a higher power is higher, it's above you. So it's always above looking down. So how does he what does he see looking down, you know? And if you look at a situation, if you remove yourself and look above the situation, so you're looking directly over it, you can see that situation in a different light completely, you know, and what you think was going on probably isn't going on at all. Yeah. Um, so yeah, when I think about my higher power, I go above, I come out of myself, I go above and I look down, you know, like if I'm in a um in a queue, in not not like standing in a queue, but if I'm in a queue of traffic or whatever, because like there's this little old um family driving up the road, you know, we're all like, oh my god, oh my god, you know, but actually, if you go above that and look in that car, it's probably two really beautiful grandparents of somebody, you know, possibly talking about their grandchildren. Probably what's going on in that car is something really beautiful, you know, and behind them is us all going, beep beep, beep beep, come on, get out of the way. Um so yeah, remove yourself, look above it, look down and see what's really going on in that situation, just like your higher power would.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

And you know, if you're still curious and you've got questions about the God, you know, God issue or the God question being in the space of recovery, reach out to us. Um, you know, we're happily pick up the phone and chat through it or come and see us. The other thing is there's heaps of literature if you want to look at the 12-step program literature as well. Um, and again, you know, we're always happy to talk to anybody, anybody further. So yeah. Yeah, and it is only dog backwards. That's right. You could look in the line of that as well. Well, thank you so much to everyone who's been listening in, and we look forward to chatting to you um on our next podcast.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

Take care, talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.