The Search for a Higher Power
By Kimberly Cooper
kimberlycooperstudio@gmail.com
The word God almost kept me out of Alcoholics Anonymous. Like many people, I heard the word God and immediately recoiled. I was thrown out of Catholic school in seventh grade. I imagined judgment, rigid religion, patriarchy, dogma, and a cosmic authority figure keeping score from the clouds. I thought recovery required me to subscribe to someone else’s theology before I was allowed to heal. And honestly, I wasn’t interested.
But over time I began to realize AA was asking a much deeper question entirely: What if the real problem was not that I didn’t believe in God but that I had spent years worshiping my own destruction? That question changed everything for me.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, the concept of a Higher Power appears most prominently in Steps Two and Three: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, and, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. For many people, these are the hardest steps in the entire program. Some people have experienced deep religious trauma. Others are atheists or agnostics. Some simply reject the image of a traditional God entirely. The language of the Big Book can feel old-fashioned, exclusionary, or loaded with painful associations.
But the Big Book was written by specific people in a specific era, using the spiritual vocabulary available to the mainstream majority at the time. Underneath that language, I believe the real invitation is far less rigid and far more human. The invitation is humility: the recognition that the isolated ego, especially the addicted ego, cannot heal itself alone.
Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung understood this deeply. Jung had a profound and surprisingly compassionate view of alcoholism. He did not see addiction simply as a moral failure or lack of willpower. He believed alcoholism was often connected to a deep spiritual and psychological crisis.
One of Jung’s most famous ideas about alcoholism comes from a 1961 letter he wrote to Bill W., co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung described one of his alcoholic patients as someone who had been unable to recover through conventional psychiatric treatment alone. He believed the man’s craving for alcohol was, at a deeper level, a distorted spiritual longing. He used the famous phrase: “Spiritus contra spiritum.” In Latin, spiritus means both alcohol and spirit. Jung believed alcohol often functions as a counterfeit spiritual experience, an artificial attempt to access transcendence, relief, connection, wholeness, ecstasy, or escape from unbearable psychic pain. That insight hit me hard when I first encountered it because it rang painfully true.
Many alcoholics are not simply seeking pleasure. They are seeking relief. Relief from trauma. Relief from alienation. Relief from shame. Relief from emotional repression. Relief from the unbearable feeling of being disconnected from themselves, from others, from meaning, and from life itself. Alcohol can temporarily create the illusion of reunion. The illusion of warmth. The illusion of safety. The illusion of transcendence. Until it begins destroying everything.
Jung did not romanticize addiction. He understood alcoholism as destructive and potentially fatal. But he also believed that underneath compulsive behavior there is often a desperate search for psychic relief, belonging, meaning, or contact with something larger than oneself. That idea became enormously influential in AA culture, especially the emphasis on surrender, spiritual awakening, humility, connection, honesty, and Higher Power.
And this is where I think many people misunderstand recovery. Recovery is not simply about removing alcohol. It is about rebuilding a relationship with meaning, truth, community, the soul, the unconscious self, and reality itself. This is also where many people get stuck. They stop drinking but never build a life that nourishes the part of them that was starving in the first place. Jung would likely say the psyche always tries to fill a vacuum somehow, through alcohol, compulsions, chaos, fantasy, workaholism, obsession, relationships, dissociation, or transformation.
The question becomes: what are you feeding yourself with instead?
For me, the concept of Higher Power began to make sense only when I stopped trying to define it intellectually and started observing it experientially. My Higher Power has never arrived as a booming cosmic voice telling me exactly what to do. It has appeared much more quietly than that. More like a current underneath my life that I can either move with or resist.
When I look honestly at the themes that keep surfacing in my life: recovery, dreams, art, truth-telling, beauty, healing, transformation, service, and the longing to protect the abandoned child inside me, I realize my understanding of Higher Power is not rooted in rigid doctrine. It is rooted in aliveness.
Early in my sobriety journey, I noticed that certain things consistently moved me toward life: creating art, telling the truth, helping others, cleaning and organizing my environment, simplifying my life, staying sober long enough to hear myself think, protecting myself instead of abandoning myself, and allowing myself to feel instead of numbing out. I also noticed the things that consistently moved me toward fragmentation: alcohol, dishonesty, dissociation, chaos, fantasy, grandiosity, avoidance, self-neglect, and escape.
That distinction became more useful to me than theology ever had. Over time, I stopped asking: “What is my Higher Power?” And started asking: “What way of living makes me feel accompanied instead of abandoned?” That question brought me closer to God, or whatever word one chooses to use, than any argument ever could.
I think many people resist the concept of Higher Power because they imagine it must mean subscribing to a rigid religious identity. But in practice, many recovering people understand Higher Power in deeply personal ways. For some, it truly is God in the traditional sense. For others, it may be nature, truth, love, consciousness, the AA fellowship, collective wisdom, service, the universe, the moral conscience, or simply the force that moves them toward wholeness instead of destruction.
I do not know why the Higher Power concept was initially so uncomfortable for me because I had already been devoted to a higher power for years, and that higher power was alcohol. I was already in a relationship with a certain kind of worship. Alcohol asked for my obedience, my health, my relationships, my creativity, my integrity, my future, my self-respect, my nervous system, and my peace. And if I had not stopped, it eventually would have asked for my life.
Once I reoriented my sense of devotion away from the bottle and toward the quiet internal compass that emerged when I sat with myself instead of self-medicating, I began to understand my own personal experience of God: a place to come home, simplify, awaken, be present, and heal. Maybe that is what a Higher Power sounds like sometimes. Not a command from the heavens. But a deep internal movement toward truth.
And here is something I wish more people understood about recovery: You do not have to fully define your Higher Power before you begin trusting it. Many people wait for certainty and stay trapped. But recovery often begins much more simply than certainty. It begins with willingness. With following what consistently makes you more awake, more honest, more connected, more sober, more compassionate, and more alive. And learning to distrust what consistently makes you smaller, more fragmented, more ashamed, more unconscious, and more disconnected from yourself.
Over time, the shape of your Higher Power becomes clearer through action not theory, performance, or dogma. Just action.
For me, my Higher Power today is less about a supernatural figure in the sky and more about a relationship to reality itself. A relationship to truth. To creativity. To conscience. To love. To the quiet force inside me that keeps trying, despite everything, to pull me back toward life. Maybe that is all spirituality really is. Learning, slowly and imperfectly, not to abandon yourself anymore. And remembering the benevolent, loving, mysterious source we all stem from, the thing that makes us human, vulnerable, and connected to one another.