So far, I haven't discussed this on this channel. I've been extremely reticent about discussing the part of my recovery that I was concerned might polarize some viewers on a new channel. However, in the interest of transparency, I believe the discussion is paramount to my interest in merely building a channel.
One, because it helped me and I was fatally helpless. And two, even if it helps one person, my goal is achieved. Well, maybe two. This is a discussion of the impact that the 12-step process can have on someone who's truly seeking recovery and how faith is such an important part of the process.
My Background With Faith
Now, let me make this clear. I am not a Bible thumper. I'm Jewish, not Orthodox, in fact, very reformed. I don't eat kosher, I drive and work on Saturdays, and I'm sure you know, Jews don't have much of a recruiting process.
When I was 13, I did have a bar mitzvah. Then, that was the end of it. My mother was Jewish, and so is my dad, but only because he converted to Judaism in defiance of my grandfather, who forbade my mother from marrying him because he wasn't Jewish. I don't think my grandfather really cared if he was Jewish or not, because that was his second choice of exercising control after offering my dad $150,000 to walk away and not marry his daughter. An offer which my dad declined. He saw right through my dad's bullshit but that's another story in another video. Years later, he said that he only did it for the food and he should have taken the money, damn it.
But, after my bar mitzvah, the only Jewish holidays I celebrated, and only until my mother died when I was in my 20s, was Hanukkah, of course. Who would turn down 8 days of presents? Passover, at my sister's house with my nephew and my nieces and old family. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, rarely, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, rarely. That's it.
Then my mom died and I bifurcated myself from that entire side of the family. Nothing. I went completely spiritually silent. Lots of drugs though, making as much money as I could, and an overly abundant appetite for sex and drugs to go over for the next 40 years until I was almost 60 years old when I went to federal prison at the age of 59.
Finding Faith in Prison
Like so often is the case, that's when I revisited my faith. Often because there's nowhere else to turn and all the other distractions are gone. In my case, I began working in the chapel, leading the Jewish services program for the 14 or so Jews that were there. 14 out of 1,500 or so inmates. I guess most of us don't get caught. I did.
There was a clerk heading every religion. Wicca, J Dubs, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic, Protestant, Jews for Jesus or Messianic Jews. My buddy Dulle Knife ran the Native American program. They even got to smoke during their weekly sweat lodge ceremonies. One week I was craving a cigarette so bad I almost converted.
I was in charge of ordering the matzah and grape juice for the weekly Shabbos meetings on Friday nights, made sure anybody who maintained a kosher diet were accommodated, and set up monthly visits with the rabbi. I started on a kosher diet though. We had to sign an agreement not to purchase non-kosher items from commissary. The chaplain decided to randomly check everybody's commissary purchases and kick me off the program for buying chicharrones, fried pork skins. In my defense, I told him, "Hey, I thought they were kosher." He didn't believe me, though. I thought he was going to fire me, but he didn't. Not enough Jews.
From Agnostic to Spiritual Awakening
While running the program, I began to go spiritually. Before prison, I wasn't really an atheist. I was agnostic. My best friend at the time, let's call her Melina, was pure atheist. We usually inherit the ideology of our friends, those whom we surround ourselves with. Well, so did I. This is why it's so crucial to carefully select those who we spend most of our time with.
She was a hardcore atheist, but as I said, I was more agnostic. Atheist means I don't believe. Agnostic means I don't know. I wasn't against God. I just wasn't connected to anything. I had gone spiritually dead until prison took away every distraction and forced me to start looking inward.
My late friend Suzy, who literally saved my life after I OD'd on GHB and was in a coma for 3 weeks. That story's in my book, too, The High Cost. She passed away while I was in prison. She got arrested and was kicking heroin while in LA County Jail 3 months before my release. We were friends for over 25 years and would send me books based on our shared faith while I was in prison.
God of Our Understanding
One of them was written by a rabbi named Shais Taub. It's called God of Our Understanding. It's based on the spiritual principles behind the 12 steps. But he explains them through a Jewish lens in a way that applies to addicts of any faith or even people who aren't sure what they believe.
The basic idea is that recovery requires humility, admitting that my own thinking, my own willpower, and my own ego weren't enough to save me. It leads to emotional chaos.
Addiction Is Not a Chemical Dependency
Absolutely. Addiction is not a chemical dependency. That's a physical thing. And the most obvious proof of that is you can have somebody who had a chemical dependency and they detoxified from it and maybe even has years of sobriety. And then even though everything seems to be going perfectly fine in their life, they go back to the addiction.
The underlying reason why an addict gravitates toward the addiction is for distraction. Distraction from the pain of existence. We're talking about sensitive souls who never really acclimate to their embodiment and so existence itself is very awkward. The addiction provides the distraction from that. Even though it seems completely illogical, a person will actually go look for a distraction that's causing all types of damage and craziness in their life, but at least it takes their mind off of their existential pain.
The solution, obviously, is to make peace with existence, to become comfortable in your own skin, to embrace the fact that yes, you are a soul in a body. And that making peace with existence is what we call a spiritual awakening — discovering essential meaning in the fact that you are a soul in a body here in this world.
The Doorknob Problem
Taub explains that a higher power doesn't have to mean someone else's religious version of God. It can mean any power greater than yourself. Because addiction is basically what happens when self-will becomes the only authority in your life.
But he also makes the point that your higher power can't just be a doorknob. That joke is thrown around in recovery rooms, but a doorknob can't restore you to sanity. It has no wisdom, no direction, no moral force, and no ability to help you change. The point isn't to worship an object, the point is to stop worshipping yourself, your cravings, your impulses, and your own broken thinking.
That's why the book hit me. It didn't ask me to become a religious fanatic, it asked me to consider the possibility that maybe I wasn't the highest authority in the universe. And for someone in recovery, that realization can be the beginning of getting well.
My Brother-In-Law
I have to tell you a story. My brother-in-law, who's 18 years my senior, who I hadn't spoken to for at least 10 years before beginning my prison sentence, located and reached out to me 4 months prior to my release during RDAP. This came at the exact same time that I was trying to reach out to him, but I wasn't able to find him.
He was born Jewish, of course, our mother was Jewish, and converted to Jehovah's Witness when he was in high school. When I was a kid, he was very zealous about his religion, and I felt like he was always trying to convert me by giving me gratuitous issues of the Awake! and Watchtower magazine, publication of the J-Dubs.
He was instrumental in expediting my release after RDAP. They slapped me with a medical hold. The halfway house I was assigned to was full until months out, and it was just moving really slow. He contacted rabbis from the Aleph Institute on my behalf. It's an organization that has a lot of stroke with the BOP. Contacted the BOP administrators, and even my RDAP DTS, my drug treatment specialist.
So, while discussing this episode with him, he literally sent me this text. Those J-Dubs do have a much stronger recruiting process than us. Not doing it, Lon.
First of all, I'm not plugging the rabbi's article. No shameless plugs for anything, except for maybe my book.
A Secular Approach to Recovery
Plus, regarding giving Christianity equal time, this isn't about any religion. It's a secular approach to recovery, meaning that you don't have to believe in God for the principles to work. You can look at recovery through psychology, honesty, accountability, community, therapy, service, routine, and surrendering the idea that your own thinking is always reliable.
In other words, the higher power doesn't have to be religious. It could be the universe, recovery group, or even the people that have stayed sober longer than you, or even the reality that your addiction is stronger than your willpower alone.
But to be fair to my brother, I did read it, and it made a good point that an addiction is not limited to drugs or alcohol. Addiction can attach itself to almost anything that gives you escape, relief, control, validation, or a rush. Sex, gambling, food, money, porn, even chaos. The substance or behavior may change, but the pattern is the same. You keep going back to something even after it starts costing you your peace, your relationships, your integrity, or your freedom. So, for any J-dubs watching, for anyone interested, I put a link to the article in the description below.
The Support Software Story
So, prayer, working at the chapel, RDAP, and staying connected to the good people in my life helped transform me. But staying that way after release is another thing. Remember, the recidivism rate for federal prison prisoners is almost 50% within 8 years. One in two are going back.
So, I truly believe this is how my faith worked. While I was at the halfway house, I got my first job at my friend's law firm. Again, I write about this miracle in The High Cost and it's a whole story in itself, but I was hired as the firm's administrator.
The client management software that we use was quite the challenge to learn. It's a very complex and left me feeling like a dummy and overwhelmed. So, the first week I spent many hours on Zoom with a certain member of that company's head support team who had the patience of a monk. For some reason, during one of our Zoom meetings, I felt compelled to share with her that I had just been released from federal prison for drugs.
This led to a discussion of how she's been struggling with addiction as well and attributed her success to having been clean several years with from her active participation in the 12-step process. She had a sponsor, was a sponsor, and urged me to find a program. She sent me listings of programs. We had Zoom meetings at length on weekends until I found one I liked.
Steps Two and Three
One thing she said that stuck with me, she said that at the beginning, when she first started her involvement with the 12-step program, she left out step two and three, which is the God part. She said that she was an atheist, so those steps couldn't apply without her feeling like a hypocrite. This went on for six to eight months, at which time she kept relapsing.
She said her sponsor told her the God part really starts in step two and three. Step two says that we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. Step three says we turned our will and our lives over to God as we understood him, and that last part matters — as we understood him.
It doesn't say that you have to believe exactly what someone else believes. It says you have to become willing to accept that your own thinking may not be enough to save you. She heeded her sponsor's advice and said things immediately changed. Not only did the urge to relapse disappear, it's been almost 8 years.
Rabbi Shais Taub explains that the God part of recovery is important because addiction isn't just a bad habit. It becomes a power over you. So, recovery requires connecting to a power greater than the addiction, greater than your ego, greater than your own broken thinking. That's why he pushes back the idea that your higher power can just be the doorknob. A doorknob may be outside of you, but it can't restore you to sanity. It can't guide you, challenge you, or remove character defects, or give you a moral direction.
The Serenity Prayer
My point isn't to be preachy or religious at all. My point is to stop pretending that the same mind that justified my addiction is powerful enough to save me from it. And that's why the Serenity Prayer is so important and powerful. Because addiction thrives in confusion. It makes you obsess over things that you can't control while avoiding the things that you actually can.
You can't control the past, you can't control other people, and you can't control every consequence, every court decision, every family member's reaction, or every mistake you already made. But, you can control what you do next. You can control whether you tell the truth, whether you ask for help, whether you go to a meeting, whether you pick up the phone before you pick up the dope, whether you make the next right decision.
That's where prayer matters to me. It's not just a religious language, it's a recovery tool and it taught me surrender without giving up, responsibility without panicking, and acceptance without making excuses. I used to think 12-step programs were too cultish, but now I know different.
The program isn't asking me to think like them, it's asking me to stop trusting the same thinking that kept destroying my life. It's asking me to stop confusing self-will with strength. It's asking me to accept help, tell the truth, listen to people who stayed clean longer than I have, and become willing to believe that maybe, just maybe, I'm not the highest authority in the universe, and that was hard for me.
Because addiction made me the center of everything. My needs, my pain, my cravings, my plans, my excuses, my survival. Everything became about me, even when I was destroying everybody around me.
Why Faith Matters in Recovery
That's why faith matters in recovery. Not because everybody has to believe the same thing, not because you have to walk into a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or kingdom hall and suddenly become someone you're not. Faith matters because recovery requires surrender, and surrender is not weakness. Surrender's finally admitting the life I built on my own thinking almost killed me.
For me, prayer, working at the chapel, RDAP, the 12 steps, my brother, Suzy, who sent me Taub's book right before she died, Ashley, my daughter for sure, my friends, even let's call her Melina, and the people that God put in my path all became part of something bigger than me. And I don't believe that's an accident.
Maybe you call it God, maybe you call it a higher power, maybe you call it truth, recovery, community. I'm not here to argue theology with anybody.
The People Who Test Your Soul
Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away that they were meant to be there. They serve some sort of purpose, teach you a lesson, or help you figure out who you are or who you want to become, even who you don't want to become. In fact, those people are probably the most poignant and important ones because they were the ones that taught me boundaries, what I'll no longer tolerate in my life.
They gave me red flags and taught me that if someone hurts you or breaks your heart, it helps you learn about trust and the importance of being cautious to whoever you open your heart to. You never know who these people may be, but when you lock eyes with them, you know from that moment that they'll affect your life in some profound way. And sometimes they'll cause you pain and it'll feel unfair, but in reflection, I realized that without overcoming those obstacles, I would never have reached my potential, strength, willpower, or heart.
Until recently, I regretted even having met some people that came into my life. Now, I realize that they all occurred to test the limits of my soul. And without those tests, life would be a smoothly paved straight path to nowhere.
The successes and downfalls that I've experienced created who I am now and learned from. In retrospect, I appreciate every moment and took from it everything I possibly could because I never may be able to experience it again. I talk to people now that I would have never talked to before and I actually listen. I can tell the truth today. I can stay clean today. I can help someone other than myself. I can make the right decisions, and sometimes that's all recovery is.
Not becoming perfect, not becoming religious, just becoming honest enough, humble enough, and willing enough to let something greater than my addiction lead me out of the life that my addiction built.
Hopeless Is Not Finished
And if you're watching this and you're feeling hopeless, I want you to hear me clearly. Hopeless is not the same thing as finished. I know because I've been there.
And let me leave you with one last thing. Addiction is not a crime. Being an addict is not a crime. Who we are or what we think is not a crime. Margaret Atwood once wrote that if we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.
When people introduce themselves at those 12-step meetings by saying, "My name is so-and-so, and I'm an addict," they're not talking about what they do, but who they are. There's no shame or blame in that. You see, we can be remorseful for our actions, but we really have no reason to ever be ashamed of who we are.
It's our choices that define us. And that we have to take responsibility for, not our identities. Thanks for letting me share this with you. It probably helped me as much or more than it helped you.