Shadow Work
Being Restored to Sanity
Recovery is not something you do to fix yourself. It's something you do to reveal who you are already.
Some years ago, our good friend, Al C, observed that the restoration promised in the 2nd Step is in fact a progressive idea. In other words, being restored to sanity may at first be purely a matter of being clean and sober. However, if we continue to advance more deeply in recovery and in the Twelve Steps, the restoration extends into every aspect of our lives. Over time, we can increasingly become healed and made whole. It may be we are returned to that state of being like little children again, or perhaps the wholeness we find will be entirely new to our experience. Regardless, the long period of reconstruction the Big Book anticipates is not just fixing what is wrong in our past and within us, but finding what is right about us and even what has been right all along.
Carl Jung, the great psychologist who was instrumental in Bill W’s exploration of the psychic change that recovery demands, called this restorative process “shadow work.” Interestingly enough in 1957, Bill pointed us toward it with a provocative idea in one of his letters. After two decades in recovery and building AA, he commented that the 4th Step was much more than an inventory of wrongs:
“The moral inventory is a cool examination of the damages that occurred to us during life and a sincere effort to look at them in a true perspective.
This has the effect of taking the ground glass out of us, the emotional substance that still cuts and inhibits."
Imagine that! The co-founder of AA is telling us we must look beyond the so-called “sins of omission and commission” to understand who we are and how we arrived at our damaged emotional, psychological, spiritual selves. All for the purposes of being restored to wholeness. In yet another provocative nudge, Bill suggested in the 8th Step in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions that we may be able to see patterns that underlie the entirety of our lives.
This then is the idea of Progressive Recovery: that we seek to be made whole, which takes the notion of restoration of sanity to a profound level that may be far beyond our ability to comprehend.
Here are a few questions we’ve identified that may be useful in beginning this process of exploration:
What evidence do I have of what I have done right, even during the years of drinking and drugging?
What strengths or assets have I demonstrated, both in addiction and in recovery?
How much do I still identify as being inadequate, or being sick?
Who would I be if I moved beyond these stories?
What might I do with myself and my life if I were restored in all the ways that might be possible?
A few years ago, we came across another provocative statement:
I am a resurrected man, or woman.
To which our friend, Michelle P, responded:
The only way out is through.
