A friend of mine wrote:
'I love recovery more than anyone ... But there are some parts of recovery culture that have always rubbed me the wrong way. The most jarring of them all is this idea that there is someone else who knows you better than you do. That you are supposed to outsource your thinking to someone else and can never trust your own thinking because you are fundamentally flawed. This idea is completely inconsistent with the original message ... [is] not the message of freedom described in the original literature. We get restored to sanity around here.'
I agree in large part with this. Yes, we recover; yes, we are restored to sanity. Yes, we place our lives in the hands of God, not another human being.
We are restored to sanity, however, not to infallibility.
Fallibility also has a nasty habit of being unaware of itself.
I can be dead wrong and not know it. In fact, I can be dead wrong and think I'm dead right.
How much trouble have I gotten into by following my own thinking? How much trouble have I gotten into by following the advice of a wise person who knows me inside out?
These two rhetorical questions are no-brainers.
How many people in recovery drink after many years or get themselves into the most frightful pickles? How often is that based on the individual's own assessment of their situation and their course of action?
My own mind functions pretty well, and my connection with the Higher Power seems to work pretty well the whole time.
But no man is an island, and I function best as part of a network.
I'm not choosing here between Marlboro Man and dissolution.
I'm a jigsaw piece in a jigsaw puzzle.
My thinking is not the be-all and end-all, the alpha and the omega, the helm, the rudder, the Oracle of Delphi, the wise pot of knowing, the high altar of the god of self.
It's a tool, one of many, neither to be disregarded, nor to be lionised.