Admitted We Are Powerless Over Alcohol: Al-Anon Step One and the Recover Your Soul Process

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The most downloaded Recover Your Soul episodes continue to be the ones connected to Al-Anon — and today I'm going back to the roots.

I'm reflecting from How Al-Anon Works for Family and Friends of Alcoholics — specifically Al-Anon's First Step — and on how this profound, foundational step lives inside the Recover Your Soul process.

Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — and that our lives had become unmanageable.

In this episode we explore the First Step of Al-Anon alongside the Recover Your Soul Nine Step Process, including the 3 C's of Al-Anon — you didn't cause it, you can't control it, and you can't cure it — and why these truths are the gateway to real healing.

Admitting powerlessness is not defeat. It is the beginning of your freedom.

Take what resonates. Leave what doesn't. You are not alone — your soul remembers the way.

The NEW book is here! Recover Your Soul- A Spiritual Journey of Healing from Addiction, Codependency and People Pleasing Get Your Copy !!!!! 🧡

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not allied or representative of any organizations or religions, but is based on the opinions and experience of Rev. Rachel Harrison or guests. The host claims no responsibility to any person or entity for any liability, loss, or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly as a result of the use, application, or interpretation of the information presented herein. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Transcript

The Unwinnable Battle Of Control

Rev Rachel Harrison 0:30

Trying to manage someone else's addiction is a battle that we can never win. When we step into the rooms of Al-Anon, one of the most beautiful pieces is step one, to admit that we're powerless over alcohol and that our life has become unmanageable by our attempt to try to save, help, fix, change anybody. One of the most powerful lessons is the three C's in Al-Anon. We didn't cause it, we can't control it, and we can't cure it. Stepping into this place of powerlessness is actually freedom. It's a place where you recognize that you can do your work, that you can step into your healing journey, and we can begin to let go of the desire to control, fix, change anyone around us, but to love them with compassion, to be there for their soul journey, and to allow our hearts to lead the way. Welcome to the Recover Your Soul Podcast and Community, a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. My name is Reverend Rachel Harrison. I started Recover Your Soul after having profound changes in my life from my recovery of alcoholism, codependency, people pleasing, and to control addiction. I was guided to share the tools and principles of spirituality and the recovery soul process to help others transform their lives as mine was transformed. For us to overcome external circumstances, we need to turn the attention to ourselves, focusing on our interchange and healing. Positive results in our lives will follow. Welcome to the Recovery Soul Podcast and community. I'm Rev Rachel. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I'm so grateful that you're here. The most downloaded episodes in Recover Your Soul continue to be ones that relate to Al-Anon because Al-Anon was such a foundational part of the beginning of my healing from codependency and people pleasing. AA was where I got sober. That's where I learned how to deal with my alcoholism. Became clear as day that I am an alcoholic, that it wasn't just my husband, who is also an alcoholic, but it was Al-Anon where I really started to take the deeper emotional dive into my codependency and recognizing how deeply I was trying to control the world and fix the world. And the two number one downloaded podcasts. The first one is from my first season, the eighth episode, and it was the detachments in Al-Anon. That continues to be the number one downloaded one. And the second one is the three C's of Al-Anon. Didn't cause it, can't control it, and can't cure it. And those foundational pieces of Al-Anon, I think, are so huge. And on the bonus podcast, I do a lot more talking about Al-Anon through the lens of Recover Your Soul. But today in this, in this podcast, in this episode together, I wanted to go back to step one out of how Al-Anon works for family and friends of alcoholics and read directly out of the book and then to reflect on how this profound step, step one, admitted we are powerless over alcohol and that our lives have become unmanageable, was a foundational piece in the recovery soul step two, which is to recognize and identify that we have attachments to recognize that your pain and suffering comes from the attachment to control and the illusion of power over external circumstances, embracing powerlessness, accept that you're powerless over everything outside of yourself and your true strength and peace come from within. When I initially created the nine steps, step one was letting go of control because it was founded on step one in AA and in Al-Anon, which is admitted that we're powerless. We'll see what the universe has for us, as usual, to just open it up. But as I was reading over this, I had a memory. When I was getting sober, there was a meeting called the Double Winners. And it was a women's meeting, and it was for women who were both in AA and in Al-Anon. And because we were doing in the rooms of AA, the 12 steps, there was something really beautiful about coming in, and we would read this book together every week. And that's what we would do. And we would read sections of it, and then we would discuss and use that as our foundation of working on our own recovery in both of the places. And I think that if if we're really honest, most of us are double winners on some degree, whether you are an active alcoholic or you are a recovered alcoholic. We all have some level of addiction that we're using to try to soothe ourselves. We have some sort of compulsive behavior. And one of the things that I think is interesting about codependency is it's often an addiction to somebody else, that we are addicted, we are compulsively attracted, needing somebody else for our well-being emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially, whatever that is, that we get addicted to somebody else. So, in a way, we're all double winners. And in Al-Anon, what we're really learning is about being powerless over someone else's addiction. And we also are learning and talking a lot about in Recover Your Soul and in our healing process around how addiction and alcoholism in particular has been such a long-lasting and painful experience for many of you who grew up in alcoholic homes. And then that alcoholism and being drawn to people who make that choice was a natural choice. And so then you're dealing with it in your adult life too. And when I was reading this, I had even more tenderness around what I work with a lot of people in terms of really looking at their relationship with alcohol and how it has caused a lot of pain and suffering in their life. And that relationship with that substance, and how then we project how we have fear, how we are creating stories around the people in our life who are using. And sometimes those people in our life are using a lot, right? And they're they're definitely in trouble. And sometimes those people in our lives are just they just drink. Maybe they're in heavy drinkers, but they're not alcoholics. And all of the pain that we have from having alcohol in our lives that caused so much turmoil and pain, and parents who weren't present for you, and all the things that happened, there's this energy around alcohol. So when I was reading this step again in preparation to read it to you, I had this really intense feeling around this way of looking at this step from this perspective of seeing alcohol almost as its own unique player, its own unique element of experience, of relationship, of interruption of relationships, rupture, inability to be in relationships. I just wanted to say that as a caveat or as a prelude into um reading it. I'm not gonna read the whole part of what is in the book of how Al-Anon works for family and friends. I'm just gonna read part of it, but I'm just gonna go ahead and start and we'll we'll go from there. Step one in Al-Anon. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable. I got to stop already. What I think is so interesting is we haven't even gotten to the part that's like we're powerless over the people. We're really looking at we're powerless over alcohol. And as an alcoholic, I had to admit I was powerless over alcohol in a way that I didn't ever do before. When I first went to the rooms of AA over 15 years ago, I said my name's Rachel, an alcoholic, but I really thought my husband was the alcoholic. So I didn't actually think I was powerless over alcohol. I was pretty sure I was a heavy drinker, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I wasn't powerless over alcohol. As an alcoholic, I now understand purely, cleanly, 100%. I am powerless over alcohol. If I ever decide, you know, I've got it, I'm good, I can drink now. I've had eight years of sobriety. I'm I'm so spiritually fit, you know, I could have a glass of wine, I can have champagne, I can have whatever. No, mm-mm. No, I am powerless over alcohol. But as somebody who loves people who have an addiction and alcohol in particular, but you know, put in whatever works for you in this, whatever is the thing in your life, we are looking at it as the codependent, that we're powerless over alcohol. We're not even powerless over them yet. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable. Each of our lives has been devastated by someone else's drinking. We cannot change that fact. We've been profoundly affected by the disease of alcoholism. Its effects continue to permeate our lives, nor can we change the behaviors or attitudes of those around us. We can't even put a stop to the drinking. We are powerless over alcohol. I want you to really think about this. And one of the things that I think about, the more that I step into the spiritual world and the more I open to the intuitive nature that we all have. And I hope that when you listen to me and recover your soul, which you're getting is less of me giving you the information, but you recognizing the information that's already within you. And that I'm reminding you of your wholeness. I'm not fixing you because you do not need fixing, but I'm reminding you of what is innately already whole and true in you. And sometimes it takes somebody saying something in a little bit different way or with a little bit different tone, or maybe it's the energy or the vibration in which I am that reminds you of that energy and vibration in you. And so that you begin to hear words and concepts outside of what you've been tracking around in your head, trying to make sense of all of it, and you let go of that and you start moving into your heart, into a knowing within yourself that is around healing, that's around awakening, that's around the soul journey, that has curiosity, that starts to hear these words and see these words from a completely different angle. And it's not about figuring anything out. It's about feeling into yourself and recognizing truths that are already there, that you are just getting opened up to the truth of what they are. So this has so many good things in it already that alcoholism, the disease of alcoholism, we've all been profoundly affected by it, whether you were raised with it, whether it was in your family of origin before, maybe your parents didn't, but your grandparents did. Maybe you had siblings, maybe you married into it, maybe um you have friends. I mean, if we're honest, everybody has been affected by alcoholism in particular, but by addiction on some level, pretty right close. And even in countries where there's no drinking, there's other behaviors, there's other addictive qualities that can be equally destructive. But we're talking about alcohol in the United States, prevalent, long-lasting, generational, everyone's been affected by it. It says its effects continue to permeate our lives. Nor can we change the behavior or attitudes of those around us. That line is just thrown out there. We can't change the attitudes or behaviors of those around us. That is a foundational truth. We cannot change the behaviors or attitudes of those around us. That's a fact, no matter how hard you try. You can't. You can want to, you can have desire to help fix, heal. But we personally do not have any ability to do that. We can't even put a stop to the drinking. I was at a concert last night with my husband, and it's some new band members and band members' wife, and we're trying to, you know, see if we can kind of be friends. And he leaned over and said, Rich says you do something with drinking or Al Anon or something. But um, yeah, my sister, my sister's been an alcoholic her whole life. It's really bad. It's really hard. I don't really know what to do about it. And I thought that's so open of him to share that with me. What a vulnerable thing to share. And he said, you know, it's gotten to the point he she's been in a hundred detoxes, a hundred hospital rooms over the years. And um, I don't know what to do. Yeah, I know that's who we are. So many of us have been in that situation, are in that situation currently with someone that we love so much that we wish that they could just see an opening for something different. Can't put a stop to the drinking. You can wish that that would happen, but we can't. And that's why this step one to admit that we're powerless over alcohol. We are literally powerless over the effects of alcohol and how it affects other people and what it does to their mind and what choices they make from it, and how it can disturb and disrupt who they are and how the disease can take them over. We are powerless over that. It doesn't mean that you don't feel your feelings. It doesn't mean that you don't have sadness. It doesn't mean that there isn't grief or despair or anger. It means that you start really understanding the power of this step to admit that you're powerless and the step and recover your soul, step two and recover your soul, to release control, to understand that we are powerless over everything outside of us, that this constant gripping, the attachment to wanting it to be different, wishing it was different, being resentful around it, that is the suffering. Suffering is the concept that you want. You want something else so much that that that it's almost like um the obsession that happens, the compulsive behaviors that happen in addiction. We're compulsively having that same behavior, that compulsion that hurts to wish that was different for them. And they're in their compulsion of addiction. That's what I'm saying. We get addicted to the person and what they're doing. So we haven't even gotten into even the first paragraph, right? We're powerless over alcohol. As long as we persist in the delusion that we can control or cure alcoholism, its symptoms or its effects, we continue to fight a battle that we cannot win. Our self-esteem suffers, our relationships suffer, our ability to enjoy life suffers. All of our energy is wasted on hopeless endeavor until there is nothing left over for attending to our own needs. Our life becomes unmanageable. I remember sitting in that Devil Winner's room and reading this because I had been doing the 12 steps in AA. And when I read this, and it made me think about my husband, and it made me think about at that time, that is exactly when we are going through our deepest, darkest times with our oldest son, Alex. He had already been in residential rehab. When I got sober in 2018, his life was had had completely fallen apart. And the other day when I was visiting him in California, and he was like, Oh, remember when I lived in the town 45 minutes away with that girl, and we were, you know, doing all these drugs. And I said, I have on purpose forgotten all of those things because it was so dark and I was so powerless over him, and I was so powerless over the life that we had, and I was so desperate for healing makes me cry. These words in that meeting, and so many of us are really stumbling in in the complexity of our relationships and the people around us and the world around us. And we've been trying so hard to keep it together, and we've been trying so desperately to help and to fix and to cure and to control and to change. And when you hear such truth that says you can stop fighting, you cannot win. It is a battle you cannot win. And we've been on the battlefield for so long, we don't even know that we just keep waking up every day and gathering up all of our weapons and all of our tools and all of our things. We're going to keep battling it. It's a battle you cannot win. And this next line: all of our energy is wasted on a hopeless endeavor until there is nothing left over for attending to your own needs and your life becomes unmanageable. It reminds me of a quote that I put on the private Facebook page from this Buddhist meditation book that I have. And it's a quote from Buddha, which, you know, has been probably switched a little bit, but it says, You are the source of all purity and impurity. No one purifies another. Never neglect your work for another's, however great his need. Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it. I saw that and it just so spoke to me about this work that we're doing in Recover Your Soul. There is very real things happening in our loved ones' lives. You are watching your children, you are watching your spouse, you are watching your sisters, your parents, your friends go through incredibly difficult situations that there becomes a point. What I said to this friend last night, his sister is 66 years old, and she has been highly actively in her alcoholic addiction for her entire adult life. And she's been to, he said, a hundred hospitals and detox over the years. It gets pretty hard to make a different decision once it gets to that point. Having been an addict myself and having been in the place where I was actively trying to drink myself to death, that moment of grace that came eight years ago. I am so lucky that I walked through the door. But I had to work my ass off to walk through that door. And every day I had to make a decision to continue to walk through the door. Because those first years are brutal. Because you are so habituated to using alcohol or drugs or whatever it is. And your system is so screwed. And so that physical system that gets screwed and gets completely derailed in addiction is really tough. And so we think that we want to help them. We think if you could just get them to that place, yes, you want to give them that opportunity. And it's not about not giving them that opportunity because if they're reaching out for help, absolutely help them walk through the door. But they are the ones who have to wake up every single day and make that decision. You were powerless over alcohol, you were powerless over their situation and their body and their mind and their upbringing and their chemical structure makeup. You're powerless over their soul and the soul's journey that they had already made a contract with themselves to have, and the darkness in which they feel. This is the piece where we take in the spiritual part of recover your soul and you start really detaching even more from their human experience and recognizing that they too have their soul's journey. And this concept that Buddha says, no one purifies another. You are the source of purity and impurity in yourself. So we're learning more and more about turning the attention to ourselves, to turn the attention to ourselves and our own healing. Never neglect your work for another's, no matter how great his need. I just continue to love this quote. Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart, give yourself to it. Your work is to discover your own soul. It's to discover the part of you that is awakening, that's opening your eyes, that's looking around with a different perception, that's taking in these words that we've been reading for a long time, that we've been putting in our head, that we've been mulling over and trying to figure it out. And we're going to stop trying to figure it out, and we're going to move into our heart space, and we're going to begin to. Know. We're going to begin to trust and have faith in our soul's journey, in our intuitive awakening and our intuitive knowing, releasing all of this old patterning that does not align with us any longer. And we're going to start to see the world and our friends and our loved ones in a way that is completely different. And from that, there is power because we're going to get off the battlefield of a battle that we will never win. And then it goes on to say: whether or not we live with active drinking, life is unmanageable. Whenever we lose perspective about what is and is not our responsibility, we take offense at actions that have nothing to do with us, or we intervene where it's inappropriate and neglect our legitimate obligations to ourselves and others. Our misplaced concern for others becomes intrusive, meddling, resented, and doomed for failure. All of this help that we think that we're doing, I'm helping them, I'm trying to do for them, I'm helping. It is doomed for failure because part of it on the soul level is we continue to interrupt someone else's soul journey. And again, it doesn't mean that you're not um showing up in your best self. It doesn't mean that you're not providing your most healed, awakened, whole, compassionate, strong being to be in presence with people. And if there are moments where it's to say something or do something, you do and say those things not out of trying to control the outcome, but because it is the truth in the and the essence of who you are as being. And we are here to be light in love. And light in love sometimes means that you're helping somebody figure out the next steps for them. And light in love sometimes means that you have a no contact or you draw a strict line around what help looks like anymore, because you've you've learned over time what their level is of how much they're willing to help themselves. How much are they stepping in to help themselves? Are we being an assist or are we actually doing it for them? And those lines can be very fuzzy, but this is exactly what we're talking about, which is when we are meddling, when we are intrusive, it's doomed for failure. Instead of helping those we care about, we demonstrate a lack of respect for them and create discord in our relationships. Sometimes respect means that you respect them enough, allow them, accepting acceptance is a path to peace is our theme for this year. You accept and respect them enough to let them have whatever experience they are choosing. And that even means thinking again about this friend from last night, a sister who probably, by the grace of God, maybe she'll make a different choice at some point, probably is not ever going to choose sobriety. Some people don't. Neverybody has to. It's a judgment that we have that that's the only choice for their soul. And I think that without discounting the experience that people are having, it's important for us to respect people enough, let them have their experiences so that we don't create discord in the relationships. It goes on to say when our preoccupation with others distracts us from our responsibility to attend to our own physical, emotional, and spiritual health, we suffer. That's the quote from Buddha. To attend to yourself, to your work, to your needs, that that is your number one job. Our health and self-esteem decline. We become incapable of accepting reality, coping with change, and finding happiness. Our lives fly out of control. It's so interesting. The more that we feel out of control, what do we do? We control. We try to get in there and help and fix and make it happen. But ultimately, the more that we're investing our life into somebody else's life and trying to fix and make that be different, the more we're losing control of ourselves and the more unhappy we are, the more we're suffering. This is the first step. We admit that we did not cause, cannot control, and cannot cure the alcoholic, the disease of alcoholism, or the fact that we've been affected by this disease. Just to admit that you're powerless over how this has affected your life and how it came in and how long it's been there is a really big deal. But you can allow yourself to experience the grief and the deep feelings and the awarenesses that come from really seeing how um how deep the layers are that it has been in your experience, which goes back to the beginning of what I was talking about. That for those of you who have had addiction or alcoholism as part of your life, starting in growing up, it's understandable why there's such a visceral hate of alcohol. So that even if somebody's just having a beer, you know, it's like you have all this attachment to that because it was a fundamental piece of the wounding and the experience that you had. So this line of to admit that we did not cause, cannot control, and cannot cure the alcoholic or the disease of alcoholism and the fact that we've been affected by this disease. We are powerless over alcohol and its effects on us. By ourselves, we can do nothing to overcome the effects of the disease. In fact, our attempts to exert power over alcohol have made our lives unmanageable. We're taking our power back, and we're taking our power back by using all the tools. So if you love Al-Anon, go to Al-Anon meetings. Keep going to Al-Anon meetings. If you are getting stuff out of Recover Your Soul as well, or in addition to, or instead of, I would love for you to work the Recover Your Soul nine-step process. It's powerful. It takes these concepts and it opens it up to the whole part of our lives. It expands it even wider. And it's a spiritual path to a happy and healthy life. It takes our soul journey into consideration and it takes their soul journey into consideration. It looks at metaphysics, it looks at the concept around we came here to have this wild ride, this wild ride. And this wild ride includes all of the bumps and all of the difficulties and the complications and the challenges that our souls came here to experience to learn and to grow and to awaken and eventually maybe even become enlightened. And addiction is a fundamental part of a broken heart. Addiction is an attempt to soothe what doesn't feel good. And there's a lot of different reasons that we don't feel good. But when we begin to awaken, we begin to recognize that we don't ever want to treat ourselves in a way that isn't aligned with our wholeness. And so even though it is so much easier sometimes to be asleep, there is more and more of a call for us to awaken and to see ourselves in this new divine light. But it doesn't mean that there's judgment about anybody else and their experiences. And as a matter of fact, the more that we turn to what is our work to do and then dedicate ourselves fully to it, the more that we see that there is this opportunity for us to love and respect and allow everybody else to have their own experience in a way that takes our attention off of places that we're powerless and moves it to ourselves so that we can step in our most whole, authentic, strong place. And in that, you can be present for those people in your life who are really suffering and struggling. And even if they don't make any decisions to do anything different, whether you have a relationship with them physically, emotionally, or whether you have made a decision to not, you're not in your mind filled with resentment and anger and frustration that harms you. You can have compassion and gentleness and ultimately spiritual forgiveness, which recognizes that it's all just part of our soul's journeys, which are very complicated. And we quit being harmed by others in the way that we were before. Being here is a big deal. And this lifetime is really important. You only get to be you one time. I believe we have eternal souls that choose to come again and again in different forms, but you only get to be this one this time. So instead of putting all of our energy into somebody else's experience, and now we can look at addiction straightforward and say, we're powerless over alcohol. But we're not powerless over stepping into our soul's journey and our soul's experience and beginning to choose and make a decision to live from a different way of being that allows us to be fully healed and to release the past, just like me, not attending to or remembering all that really complicated, difficult stuff with Alex. It doesn't mean that that didn't happen or it doesn't mean it's not important. I get to choose what I'm gonna keep inside of my heart and what I'm rolling around in my mind. And I want to continue to remember all the beautiful parts, and I want to continue just to be more in tune with myself. So admitting we're powerless is actually freedom. It's a letting go of what we really can't change and getting off of this suffering wheel of resentment and anger and frustration, wanting it to be different, and tuning into the feelings that are underneath that that are valid and important and have something to share with us. I might continue doing some more Al-Anon steps through the lens of Recover Your Soul here, but I always have more stuff like that over on the Recover Your Soul bonus podcast that's on Patreon and Apple Podcasts. And now I just added it to YouTube as well. I want to be of service to you, and I hope that you get something out of this that reminds you that the wholeness within you is profound. And anything that you hear from anywhere that reminds you of your innate knowing, that is the place to move forward to because you have everything that you need already within you. It's just time to awaken. Until next time, Namaste. Thank you for trusting me to be part of your journey to recover your soul and being part of this incredible community. There's so much going on, and I hope that you'll get involved. First, I want to invite you to our free first Monday of every month support group from 6 to 7 p.m. Mount Time on Zoom. This is where we come together in community, meet in small groups, and connect on our Recover Your Soul journey. I'm so excited to announce that on April 13th, the long-awaited Recover Your Soul memoir around my walking the steps that created the Recover Your Soul process and how it profoundly changed my life from codependence, addiction, people pleasing, an unhappy marriage, an unhappy life to what I am living today, peaceful, happy, and free. I also would love to invite you to join me for the Friday Recover Your Soul Bonus Podcast, where you get an additional episode taking a deeper dive into this amazing restorative process. You can become a Patreon member or an Apple Podcast subscriber to receive over 200 past episodes and get a new episode every Friday. Free members on Patreon have access to listen to new episodes for the first week. And of course, I'm on social media and I'd love to have you follow Recover Your Soul on Instagram and Facebook and even join the private Recover Your Soul Facebook community. If you enjoy Rev Rachel's meditations, I encourage you to follow me on Insight Tiber for an entire catalog of guided spiritual meditations. All of this, along with ways that you too can work the Recover Your Soul nine-step process to healing and awakening, can be found on the website recoveryoursoul.net. And lastly, thank you for sharing this podcast and community with any friends or family that you think it would support their spiritual journey to healing and awakening. And those five stars and great reviews help us spread the word and increase the algorithm so we can reach even more people. Together, we can do the work that will recover your soul.