Step two of Alcoholics Anonymous rescued people entering recovery from the demoralizing hopelessness of step one’s admission of powerlessness over alcohol and other drugs’ destructive effects, but the hope offered by step two remained vague. Believing a “power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity” offers hope, but no blueprint for realizing this hope. The necessary action for making concrete changes begins with step three.

I have stressed in previous postings in this series on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, there are many ways to understand the meaning and implications of each step[i], and I am not speaking on behalf of A.A. What follows is only one person's perspective filtered through my own experience as an addiction psychiatrist. My goal is to offer thoughts on the psychological depth contained in the 12-step approach to recovery from addiction (see "A Meaningful Definition of Addiction Recovery").

Step three reads as follows:

“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

The founders of A.A. understood that making a conscious decision begins the more active phase of working the steps. Step three is an internal action, a deliberate, thoughtful choice, and a resolution to turn one’s life in a specific new direction. Up until this point, addiction had pushed people into more of a reactive mode. It was time now to take responsibility for a more proactive approach to life.

The specific decision indicated by step three is a difficult decision to make, and it must be made over and over. Turning one’s “will and life” over to something beyond the self is often seen as such an abject surrender and giving up trying to solve the problem of addiction on one’s own that many fight tooth and nail against the idea. The thought of surrender often feels irresponsible and a final blow to one’s pride. For this reason, the call to surrender one’s will further right-sizes a person’s sense of self.

Step three relies on, and expands, the belief that a power outside and greater than oneself could restore sanity. It suggests alcoholics and drug addicts surrender to the “care” of God. This final portion of the third step is a lot to wrap one’s mind around. To begin, the introduction of the word “God” is a pretty big mouthful for many people to swallow. But the unexpected element here is that surrender is to the “care” of God and not to the demands and judgments many anticipate would be dished out to them by God. Step three suggests surrendering to the benevolence and caring of God. For the shamed and self-castigating alcoholic, such benevolence and care provide a welcome balm.

What makes surrendering to the care of God so difficult

This God thing is usually encrusted with barnacles of childhood cultural, familial, and religious meanings that make it hard for many to trust in a forgiving God who will be caring about the drunken addicts they have become. It is precisely at this point that step three is most revolutionary. It encourages each newly recovering alcoholic and drug addict to develop their own personal understand of God.

For some, the traditional God of their youth may be comfortable. For others, the God of their limited understanding may simply be a vague notion of spirituality, the Force that Star Wars says can be with you, the A.A. community of recovering alcoholics, nature, or even a previously unseen depth of wisdom we all mysteriously have within. God is simply whatever can be relied on to guide one’s will in healthier directions than where addiction inevitably leads. Your “God” could even be the conscience that has been ignored until now—a conscience that, like Jiminy Cricket, taps on your shoulder when needed.

Step three encourages an active choice to abandon the willfulness that previously insisted on one more drink in favor of the willingness to be guided by advice that takes better care of yourself. It redirects people from a stubborn insistence on doing things their way, which step one clearly acknowledged has not been working so well, and points in a direction that the alcoholic or addicted mind could never have possibly imagined on its own.

Recovery is filled with paradox. Step one’s acknowledgement of powerlessness over alcohol and other drugs as the foundation for freeing oneself from chemical slavery is the initial paradox. The paradox in step three lies in surrendering one’s will and life to the care of a God for which alcoholics are responsible for developing a personal understanding.

Working the steps involves mentally turning each one over and over in search of ever deeper and more personal relevance. Taken as a triad, steps one, two, and three complete the foundation for recovery. They are often summarized in the simple, though gender-insensitive, form “I can’t. He can. Let Him.”

Once these three steps are firmly lodged in a person’s mind, step four sets more detailed work in motion to deepen healing further and to begin the next phase of recovery.