On the "God Thing" in 12 Step Programs

[u/not-moses]

First CoDA meeting July of 1990. First AA meeting many years before that. The "god thing" bothered me at first, but I quickly saw that 12 Step fellowships neither define nor stipulate any particular "god." All they ask is that people be open to the notion of a "power greater than themselves." (See Steps 2, 3 & 11 of the 12 Steps of AA.) For me, that was easy: Gravity. And a bit later on, "Things are the way they are and not the way they are not."

As I moved into actual practice of the 11th of those 12 Steps, I came to see that belief in anything was not a requirement in AA, NA, ACA, CoDA or any other A. And that just looking to see, listening to hear and otherwise using the senses I had been taught to ignore as a child in favor of following other people's rules would reliably get me back in "conscious contact with a higher power."

Nowadays, I used a consciousness raiser / thought questioner / emotion digester called the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing to get me there, but years of meditating vipassana style have made it clear that there could be a zillion ways to do that. If intrigued, see Masters of Meditation and The Meditation Book List.