My Top 3 Tools for Life: Part 2 - Embracing the Power of Reaching Out

[Barb Nangle]

Photo Credit: Nini form Paris

This is part two of my series about the top three tools for managing life that I gained from 12-step recovery. If you missed part one of “Mastering the Art of Pausing” you can read that here. 

Today’s topic is reaching out for help and support. For me, that means both reaching out to other humans as well as reaching out to my Higher Power. I was incapable of reaching asking for help and support, even from God, before I got into recovery. This is despite the fact that by then, I identified as a very spiritual woman. 

Reaching out to other people

I somehow internalized the notion that I had to do everything myself. I wasn't “allowed” or not supposed to reach out to others to ask for help. It just wasn’t an option for me. I was the helper, the fixer, the rescuer. Recovery taught me the absolute necessity of reaching out and accepting help from others and my HP. 

We are wired for connection, and we’re pack animals. We need each other. I recently heard someone say that there are many ways to build a community, but there’s one way to annihilate a community: be self-sufficient. If everyone is self-sufficient, we don’t need each other. And that’s simply not the truth. 

This business of learning to reach out for help can be crippling. I remember feeling like I was gonna die when I first started entertaining the idea of asking for help. It felt threatening. I came to see that I believed it was somehow “weak” to reach out to others when that could not be further from the truth. It’s courageous and strong to allow people to see us, especially in our most vulnerable states.

One of the many ways that 12-step recovery programs are helpful to us in our journeys to heal and grow is that they’re group programs. As we say in recovery, they’re “WE programs, not I programs.” We recover together. We’re protected when we’re connected.

My first overtures to seek support were at times when I was really upset. I remember thinking, “What are they gonna do for me?” when I thought about reaching out to other women in recovery for support. What I learned is that what they’re going to do is witness me. They’re going to see me. And that is unbelievably powerful – to be seen at our most vulnerable, and accepted, and soothed and comforted.

Don’t get me wrong, the process of getting to the point where I actually reached out for help was extremely difficult. But lucky for me, I had hit a codependent bottom and was so desperate for healing that I was willing to try things I’d never tried, and to do what others in recovery told me worked for them. I became willing to feel the discomfort of trying new things that scared me, instead of the discomfort of suffering alone that was oh-so-familiar. The first time I sobbed on the shoulders of another woman in recovery was monumental for me. It was as if my sorrow was cut in half, shared by her. What a gift!

One thing that helped tremendously in my ability to reach out for help was to talk about how difficult it was with others in recovery. They had the same experience too. And to reach out to them just to stay connected, not because I needed help. That meant when the shit hit the fan, it was so much easier to reach out because I already had a connection, a relationship with these people.

Reaching out to my Higher Power

Then there’s reaching out to my Higher Power, which I choose to call God. I grew up agnostic until my mid-thirties when I read the book Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsh. When I finished that book over a weekend, I believed in my own conception of God. I began to identify myself as a very spiritual person. 

By the time I got into recovery about 15 years later, my spirituality had evolved enormously. Yet I’d never once reached out to God to ask for help, or to ask for guidance. What I mainly did before recovery was express gratitude to God. Which I still do, all the time (in fact, this month is my 24-year anniversary of keeping a nightly gratitude journal). But recovery taught me to use God.

What I mean by that is I “use” God for guidance and support. I didn’t used to do that. I didn’t really see God as a resource, which BTW – God is the ultimate resource! Now I turn my will and my life over to God multiple times a day. I ask God to show me what to do. I turn things over to God when I don’t know what to do. That was a revelation to me. 

Previously, I felt like I had to know how to handle everything¸ at all times, in all circumstances. Learning to hand things over to God and ask for guidance has relieved so much tension and anxiety in my life. I thought I was a woman of faith before recovery, but not like this!

I love what my friend Melissa Pearson says, “Fear and faith are the same in that you’re putting trust in something that hasn’t happened yet. Which will you choose?” Well, I choose faith! The fear thing wasn’t working for me.

I say that like I never have fear anymore, which isn’t so. But what’s different now is that as soon as I realize I’m in fear, I reach out to God, and/or I “change the channel” and think of good things instead of catastrophizing. But that’s a whole other article!

What’s helped enormously in reminding me to reach out to God more frequently is my consistent conscious contact with God. I say certain prayers in the morning, afternoon, and evening (and often in between), I meditate, say affirmations, do mindset journaling, and do spiritual readings daily. This routine didn’t happen all at once, mind you. I built up this practice over many years. Because of this consistent conscious contact with God, it’s much easier to remember, “Oh yeah, I don’t have to do this alone.” I’m much more likely to seek God’s help or support when I don’t know what to do or say, or when something feels too big. Words can’t express the enormous relief that brings me.

What's also really different is that I now ask God to use me. That’s not something I ever did before recovery. I ask God to help me be of use to God and to my fellows. I ask, “What can I do, who can I be, what can I say, what are the thoughts you want me to think so that I can help heal the world?” The places that has taken me in recovery and in my business are absolutely astonishing!

My life is profoundly better than it was when I was trying to run the show with no support from others or from God. I don't have to figure things out on my own anymore. In fact, when I hear myself say the phrase “figure it out” I know I'm screwed. Because “figuring it out” landed me in a 12-step recovery for codependence and compulsive overeating. 

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