In our American culture surrender is viewed as a sign of weakness.
Last Dec. 20, the Chicago Bears were trailing the Green Bay Packers 16-6 with two minutes left in the game, but apparently the word “surrender” was not in the Bears’ vocabulary because they came from behind in overtime to defeat the Cheeseheads 22-16.
Gen. George Custer is viewed as a hero by many because he died fighting at the Battle of Little Big Horn. President Trump called John McCain a loser because he surrendered to the North Vietnamese when his plane was shot down.
In contrast, the Betty Ford Foundation says this about surrendering: “We Surrender to Win.”
People who enter treatment for their substance abuse are often told to surrender.
To clarify, surrender means to stop fighting, to stop resisting everything in life. Within the context of the Twelve Steps, a person has to tear down all the emotional and philosophical walls they built up: No more fighting the program. No more fighting to do everything alone. And no more fighting Higher Powers and past resentments. Just let things be and let things flourish within.
Surrender makes room for other things to grow and allows room for other systems of belief. Surrender is to accept that life has been messy and perhaps miserable because of addiction. Surrender is to accept that the solution exists outside a person’s own mind because “My best thinking got me here.”
Then a person can make room for the Steps, and let go of selfish and self-defeating behavior, and they can start to live in the solution.
We Are Reborn in Death.
The deconstruction of the addicted identity is never an easy task. In fact, it was an early member of Alcoholics Anonymous who said that the Steps are an exercise of uncovering, discovering and discarding that takes place over the entirety of life. In treatment centers and Twelve Step meetings all across the country, people are quick to repeat that they “leave claw marks” on everything they have let go of.
Anne Wilson Schaef in When Society Becomes an Addict argues that “We live in an addiction-prone culture filled with many invitations to become addicted.”
In a summary of the book, Patricia Morgan wrote, “Schaef explores how addiction is not just an individual issue but a cultural condition. She proposes that we live in a system that normalizes avoidance of pain, truth, and emotional experience, and promises quick fixes. In this environment, addictive patterns go beyond substances into work, consumption of stuff, and even relationships, making dysfunction behavior appear ordinary and even rewarded.”
She wrote about two main addiction categories:
Process Addictions include activities such as computer use, sex, shopping, chasing money, gambling, hoarding objects, religion, and television viewing.
Consumption Addictions include food, sugar, nicotine, alcohol, prescription drugs, and illegal drugs.
At the same time, Wilson Schaef emphasizes that healing begins with awareness [i.e. surrender]. By recognizing how we participate in these systems, we can begin to reconnect with our emotions, face reality more honestly, and move toward authentic well-being. Wilson Schaef calls for bringing unconscious patterns into consciousness, choosing compassion over criticism, and creating a deeper sense of spirituality and connection as ways to move out of an addictive culture.
She said, “Our work as human beings in this life is to bring as much as we can of our unconscious so that we know what we’re dealing with and we have the opportunity to heal it.”
Richard Rohr wrote, “Death and life are two sides of the same coin. Each time you surrender, each time you trust the dying, your faith is led to a deeper level and you discover a Larger Self underneath. You decide not to push yourself to the front of the line, and something much better happens in the back of the line. You let go of your narcissistic anger. You surrender your need to control your partner, and each time it is a kind of dying. It seems we only know what life is when we know what death is.”
Author John Keller writes that at the root of addictive behavior is an infantile sense of omnipotence and egocentricity. Another term which has been applied to a current politician is narcissism.
Keller reported that recovering alcoholics often use the term surrender to explain what set them on the path to recovery. What was surrendered was the omnipotent ego. “She accepted the reality of powerlessness and human limitation. Human reality includes finiteness, the inability to attain perfection, invulnerability, or omnipotence.”
In the campaign ads we are watching in the run up to the November election we will hear blaming of opponents as limited and claims of perfection for preferred candidates. Keller calls it “moralistic shouldism.”
“Inherent in such a need is the preservation of its own self-delusion, self-justification, self-comfort, and self-security. Moralism seeks and points to scapegoats. Moralism is blaming behavior.”
Check out Tom’s ongoing Substack posts about the fictional life of Pastor Walter Mitty at https://tomholmes10.substack.com/