I always hated the word “surrender”.  To me, it meant defeat, giving up, giving in, losing, raising the white flag, cowardice, weakness. I was brought up with the idea that I had to fight, I had to win, I had to be independent, I had to be strong.   Until I came to AA, I never knew that there was victory in surrender.

For all my independence in other aspects of my life, I became dependent on alcohol.  At first, it was an emotional dependence, helping me through bad times and good times, and then it became a physical dependence, such that I was not able to function without it.

Like most alcoholics, I thought “I can beat this on my own”… but every attempt to stop drinking was short-lived.  My independent spirit didn’t work.  My toughness, my willpower, my desire to fight wasn’t enough.  Then my “bottom” happened.

Some alcoholics hit bottom, others have their “bottoms” come up and hit them.  I was one of the latter. I blithely continued drinking until my physical health was so endangered that I was slowly dying.  It wasn’t until I found myself in a psychiatric ward, hallucinating and with DTs that it hit me – and only then because a doctor told me so. Faced with a future without alcohol, I came to AA beaten, demoralized, and totally at a loss as to how to live.  It took me about a month of going to meetings before I actually “surrendered”.

I realized I WAS powerless over alcohol – whatever power I may have had over it had been drained completely and thoroughly.  Even in the condition I was in and what I had just been through, if someone had made alcohol available to me, I would have drunk it; only to wind up right back where I was.  From that point, “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” wasn’t a great leap -- the way I thought of it was that I had given all my power to a stupid #$%%## bottle of vodka – what’s the harm in giving it to a different Higher Power? One that would help me rather than hurt  me.

Today, I see victory and triumph in surrender.  I didn’t surrender to the bottle – I simply stopped fighting something I was powerless over – I stopped jousting with windmills.  The bottle could have killed me, but my surrender to the concept of my own powerlessness saved me.  As a result, I have regained more power and independence than I thought possible.  Today, I admit and accept my powerlessness, and though some may view it as weakness, I see it as humble strength.