The What and Why of Higher Power Thinking

When the founders of AA of came to the language of a ”higher power”, why exactly was this concept so necessary for their group identity and healing from addiction to function?

When you’ve given your power to an entity such as alcohol or misdiagnosis that is fundamentally incapable of concerning itself with your best interests, and when this surrender of power becomes as habitual for you as eating and breathing, you tend to identify with some distorted views. You tend to identify with this views and, even if you know they are false, they can feel so much more solid than the truth of path life might be unfolding for you.

A higher power can be your concept of Life itself. Or if that sounds hokey for whatever reason, you higher power can be your concept of Nature. Your higher power can be God, a conscious or substance at the center of all creation. Or, maybe it sits easier with you to think of your high power as The Universe. The Buddha (literally the “awake one”) can be a higher power or concept that contains a higher self for some. There is perhaps no wrong way of a higher power for those beings who begin to seek, and concepts of a higher power are allowed to be as eclectic or as concrete, as traditional or as changing, as suits an individual. 

Misdiagnosis and the persons who misdiagnosed us may seem like they had a lot of power or us, and beyond seeming, from an analytical perspective, it is probably only accurate to say they did.

But we as human beings we have the right to take charge of our present and our future. 

In our recoveries, we don’t want to be bound to the mistake of diagnosis, pettily reenacting through a games counterdiagnosis that effect no real change, manifest only imaginary freedom, cultivate only passing pleasures.

In imagining our higher power and trusting it and surrendering over to it our usual or more pragmatic reasoning, we can begin to reimagine our world, or even countless worlds where misdiagnosis no longer reaches us, where we and those we love are safe and sane, where all of our lives and even our deepest sufferings have purpose, and where our journeys and our selves become more and more connected and whole.