Complimentary Story
August 2026How much do you like the word “powerless?” Better yet, how much do you like the feeling of being powerless? I spent a great portion of my life trying to prove I wasn’t powerless, in any way or with anything. In my lifetime I have remodeled or built five personal homes and two restaurants. I can do plumbing, heating and electrical. At a very young age, growing up on a dairy farm, I learned to fix just about anything. Over my 30 years in business, I fixed most of the restaurant equipment breakdowns myself and my wife always finds me quite the handy fix-it-man about the house. It’s rare that I hire anyone to do anything, I just do it myself.
Self-sufficiency can be helpful in some things and yet destructive in others, like the interpersonal relationship of marriage. It took me a while to learn that you don’t fix relationships, you work on communication to bring about compromise, win-win solutions and deeper intimacy. Self-sufficiency doesn’t do well if you have compulsive and obsessive behavior that you cannot stop or control and your life becomes more and more unmanageable as a result, either. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t fix myself in my own personal experience with an addiction to pornography.
I have been writing to a man for quite a few years. I asked him several years ago how many years he had been in prison. He answered “two years.” Then, followed with, “I usually go in for 2, then I get out for a year or 2, then I go back in for 1 or 2.” I asked him to add up all the years he has spent in prison. He shocked himself to realize that at 47 years old, he had spent half of his life behind bars. He has been out and back in two more times. He is 51 now, a believer in Jesus and telling me that God has graciously given him one more chance to straighten out his life. He will go through drug and alcohol treatment in prison and possibly be released in February 2027. What needs to change for the in-and-out pattern to end?
Another man in prison states that because of confinement, he is drug-free but wonders what he can do when he hits the streets and his mouth will literally water with the desire to shoot up cocaine.
I knew another man, for many years, that battled with an out-of-control addiction, exposing himself in public park restrooms, that would occasionally land him in the county jail. He would come to weekly recovery meetings and inevitably announce that he had slipped in the past week. He lost the fellowship of all his four children, his wife, and his church. He wasn’t slipping, he was grinding his face into the gravel. He never hit that mysterious “bottom” that sometimes propels one to truly do what it takes, instead of continuing to do the same things, that don’t work, over and over, expecting a different result. The man died of old age, as a hermit, alone, with no family or friends. He had once been a deacon at his church, a successful farmer, heavily involved in the community, with a large family and many friends. He had lost everything and continued to blame others for his state. One of his sons described his father as Gollum, the handsome hobbit in the Lord of the Rings, but his obsession with his addiction to the ring turned him into a grotesque, ugly and evil creature. Compulsive and obsessive behavior did that to his father. It can do that to any of us.
There is nothing magical about the mysterious hitting bottom. It is the place of “I quit, I can’t do this anymore. I have proven, to myself and others, that I am totally powerless to stop or control my compulsion and obsession.” For me it was laying, face down, on the carpet, at the end of myself. I couldn’t try any harder, any more. I mumbled the words, “God, help me.” I didn’t know what those words meant, but I gave up, no more bargaining with God — “if you get me out of this, I’ll do that.” I gave up and let everything fall or rise with out my input. I did tell a pastor of my addiction and my unmanageable life as a result. I was put in contact with other people who had the same or similar addiction and I discovered that I was not alone and the process of recovery began.
One of the recovery slogans I refer to often is, “If nothing changes, then nothing changes.” Something has to change at the core of our being. Statements like, “I’m going to try harder, this time,” are worthless words of bargaining that change nothing. I know a counselor who once told the wife of an abusive husband, “If he says, ‘I’m going to try harder this time,’ one more time, file for divorce.”
The bottom has to include the realization of powerlessness. I am powerless to change my destructive behavior. The same as I would be powerless to stop an oncoming freight train by merely holding out my arm. And yet, it is a digging in — one more step in the same direction is going to result in my falling off the cliff in front of me, to my destruction. It is here, heals dug in, saying, “I’m not moving, I can do nothing to help myself,” that you are ready for foundational change and rebuilding that will save your life.
It is when we give up that we can then come to believe in the power greater than ourself, that can restore and rebuild our life, and bring us sanity and serenity. When we believe that, we are ready to begin turning our will and our life over to that power, who is our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. We quit the maneuvering, manipulating and controlling behaviors that we have always done to protect ourselves and get our personal needs met, even though those efforts have always failed for the most part.
As we seriously embark on the twelve anonymous steps, many changes will be in our future, but one very important starting factor is to change our playground. We cannot associate with the same people or in the same places we acted out our addictive behavior. Doing so will bring about all the behaviors that destroy our life in short order. Join a good recovery group. Find a Bible-believing and teaching church, join one of their small groups and make new friends. Your whole world will change for the better; mine sure did.
There are some examples of powerlessness that can help us understand the state of mind we are trying to achieve. One is surviving a fall into quicksand. Struggling and frantically maneuvering to escape will only make you sink faster. You have to give up, lean back, relax and let your body float to the top and then gently roll or crawl to the edge of the sand pool, and pull yourself out to solid ground.
The other is something I learned years ago as a survival strategy if you had to swim a great distance. In my case it was a mile. If I were to work hard at covering that distance doing the racing crawl or breaststroke, I could never survive. I had to give up, lean back, let my body float to the top of the water and on my back gently do the flutter kick and gently steering with my hands and arms. Now I could and did swim that mile.
Powerlessness with addiction is similar. We give up, relax, lean back and try something completely different from our past controlling, struggling and maneuvering.
Lynn Fredrick is the author of “Stand Firm, From the Darkness of Pornography and Sexual Sin into the Light of God’s Grace,” a Bible based recovery program for addiction and habitual sin.
LynnFredrick.com
