To Kill an Illusion | By Tim Duxfield
A reflection on my journey to sobriety
BY TIM DUXFIELD
‘Lord, give me the serenity
to accept the people I cannot change,
the courage to change the people I can,
and the wisdom to know it is me!’[1]
13,944
As I write this, I have been sober for 13,944 hours. 581 days. Just over a year and a half. And I still hate saying that word - Alcoholic.
The first of AA’s twelve steps is often paraphrased as admitting one has a problem—being able to accept and state that ‘I am an alcoholic.’ [2] I’ve always been a bit rebellious, so it’s hardly surprising that I didn’t start my recovery journey at step one. I’d been sober for about three months before I began to accept that I was an alcoholic.
In truth, I quit drinking not because I acknowledged I was powerless to control my addiction, nor because of the harm it was causing my family and my professional life. It wasn’t even because I became convinced of God’s desire to restore me to full life.
No, I quit drinking to prove to God I didn’t need God’s help.
I look back on that moment now and laugh. It’s stuck in my mind as one of the most blindingly obvious signs that I was nowhere near as self-aware as I believed.
See, I’d been in professional church ministry since 2008, and, through spiritual direction, supervision and professional development, I’d spent significant time studying myself. Over time, I’d become a convert to Johari’s window, and was somewhat of a savant in minimising my blind spots.[3] Unsurprisingly, one can be blind to their blind spots.
I first skirted alcoholism before my life with Jesus, drinking away the fears and desires of a mediocre life, evaporating my past, present and future.
Fortunately, life circumstances knocked me off that trajectory. But I now knew there was a part of me that longed to escape from the noise and struggle into sweet numbness. I knew how close I had been to rampant addiction; how easy it would be to surrender—and I was afraid. However, that didn’t stop me from running headlong into alcoholism a decade later. It’s amazing how good at denial we can be!
During the more lucid and faith-filled moments of my functional alcoholism, I spent hours pleading with God to take this thorn from my soul skin. I would entreat God to save me from myself, promising all sorts of things, bearing my soul to the searing gaze of the divine, in the hopes that all the evil, guilt, shame and sin would be burnt out of me, leaving me free to be a husband, father, friend and priest… without the suffocating sense of imposter syndrome, the paralysing fear that at any moment, my inner darkness would be brought out into the light for everyone to see, and I would lose everything.[4]
When I finally chose sobriety, I felt like I’d spent years stalled on the second through sixth steps of AA’s programme. In my blindness, I felt that God had failed and abandoned me. So, in the most laughable act of rebellion, I stared God down and declared, ‘I don’t need you! I can quit on my own! Watch me!’ And, while I have been sober ever since, I was wrong about everything in that sentence.
My experience of sobriety is death: a little death each day. Not just in the sense of choosing each day to remove any fuel from the fires of addiction that still smoulder within, but more significantly, allowing my misconceptions and illusions of myself to die—sometimes forcefully holding them under the water.
The first illusion I had to kill was self-awareness.
I thought I had spent countless hours in fruitful self-reflection, in truth, I discovered I had wasted needless hours in destructive rumination. Rather than reflecting upon the roots of my addiction, my self-destructive behaviours and the concerns of my whānau, I was engaged in a toilet spiral of depression and anxiety that fed my sense of worthlessness and hopelessness: a hole where I was a victim, and God the perpetrator, refusing to rescue me from my suffering.[5]
It was a profoundly humbling experience to realise (with the invaluable guidance of my psychologist) that I was more broken than I believed, and the tools I had been using to protect myself were perpetuating my self-destruction.
In damming off vast swathes of my inner life through repressive self-preservation, I forced myself to live a tiny, hobbled life that only allowed for a tiny, hobbled God.
Again, it’s humbling to realise that the God you have been blaming for all your problems isn’t God at all, just a vandalised icon.
Socrates, that most frustrating of philosophers, is credited with the phrase, ‘True wisdom is knowing you know nothing.’[6] Having the humility to come to terms with my lack of self-knowledge, and its effect on all my relationships, has been the most pivotal step in my continued sobriety.
On my journey from rumination into reflection, the greatest assets (alongside ongoing therapy and amazing support people) have been stillness and silence. See, rumination occurs when my mind overfills with negative thoughts, damning visions, and circular thinking. It doesn’t lead to greater knowledge of self or God, but thrives on perpetuating deeply rooted lies.
Rumination is noisy, busy, and overwhelming.
Reflection is silent, still, and restorative.
Rumination is an act of judgment and rejection.
Reflection invokes curiosity and acceptance.
Rumination is humiliating.
Reflection is humbling.
Photo credit: Katrina Tulip
One of the shapes stillness and silence take for me is meditation.
Specifically, lying on the floor spread-eagled, eyes closed, either counting my breaths, or focusing on a word or phrase that steers me from rumination into reflection—currently that word is ‘soften’, which is a gentle reminder to unclench my body and mind, to relax, settling like a stone at the bottom of a river allowing the current of life to pass over me.
Over time, as I begin to view myself with humility rather than judgment, the self-loathing that precipitated my addiction is melting. As the hobbles of my self-acceptance are being removed, so are the hobbles limiting my experiences of God.
I no longer believe God loathes me—because I don’t loathe myself. I no longer fear that light shone on my darkness will bring humiliation—instead, having lived with everyone I love and respect seeing me at my absolute worst and still choosing to support me, I know that God’s light will bring healing and humility.[7]
In the stillness and silence of true reflection, I am learning that: I am bigger and smaller than I think I am.
I am full of an almost limitless potential for growth and change. And I am bound entirely by my own perception of myself. I am an alcoholic because I could not see nor believe in a life without alcohol. I am sober because (despite my assertions I could do it alone) God cracked the shell of my limited perception, allowing me a glimpse of my potential—beyond booze.
God is bigger and smaller than I think God is.
God is infinitely beyond any definition or understanding—newer, richer, more profound, and more mysterious than I can imagine. Yet, my experience of God is as small as the walls of my own mind. The tiny God I let in is the only God I can worship. That tiny God, whom I believed rejected and abandoned me to addiction and despair, has now been subsumed into my experience of an immeasurable God who is always present restoring life to its fullest.
In the silence and stillness, God is continually inviting me on a humbling journey, re-examining all the destructive coping mechanisms that fed my addiction: blaming others, playing the victim, wallowing in shame, seeking numbness, believing I am worthless…
And, slowly, very slowly, I am beginning to believe, and pray, the prayer I shared at the beginning of this article: in humility accepting that I can only change myself. And only I, with God's help, can change myself.
Editor’s note: If Tim’s story alerts you to your own struggles with alcohol addiction, please consider talking about it to your spiritual director or another safe, trusted person. Ring 0800 229 6757, or go to aa.org.nz where you can safely and easily connect with your local sober community, and read about other people's stories and experiences.
[1] https://www.daveandrews.com.au/pb. Dave coined this adaption of the serenity prayer, which is well known for its use in the AA program (https://www.12steps.nz/prayers/the-serenity-prayer/).
[2] Step 1: ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.’ Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism, Fourth edition. (New York City: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001), 59.
[3] ‘The Johari Window Model,’ Communication Theory: All About Theories for Communication, n.d., https://www.communicationtheory.org/the-johari-window-model/.
[4] Johnny Cash once sang, ‘What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light.’ (God’s Gonna Cut You Down, American V: A Hundred Highways, 2003). That song likely draws its inspiration from Luke 12:2-3. During my addiction, I was more afraid of the light than of the dark – the dark never judged. Addiction twists a message of hope – that everything will be redeemed in the loving life light of God – into a message of fear and shame.
[5] Stephen B. Karpman, M.D., ‘The New Drama Triangles,’ in USATAA/ITAA Conference Lecture, 2007, 10, https://karpmandramatriangle.com/diagrams_dt.html.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing
[7] Someone once said, ‘Everyone wants to be humble—but no one wants to be humbled.’ However, not even AI could help me find a source for this quote. Regardless, the sentiment is true—perhaps because we fear it will bring humiliation instead of humility.
Rev Tim Duxfield NatDip YouthWork, BTheol, PGDipTheol (Supervision).
Tim is husband to Kim and father of two amazing sons. They love words, nature, simplicity and music. You can read more of their work on their substack: https://substack.com/@timduxfield
This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of Refresh.
Refresh is SGM’s journal of contemplative spirituality in Aotearoa, New Zealand. You can view the current issue of Refresh or browse the archives in the Refresh section of this website.
