It had been a rough road through drugs, alcohol and bulimia. Susan hit bottom in 1983 and she joined Alcoholics Anonymous. “Without alcohol in me, I felt so totally alone,” she says. “I felt like I was in a black hole in life and that I was just going to die. And I was glad, because I couldn't figure out how I was going to live.” She was fearful and depressed. “I was so full of fear, I could hardly relate to people or talk to people,” she says.
She began decreeing again. (She had started, then stopped, three years before.) She saw the decrees as an adjunct to the 12-step work she was doing in Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the goals of the 12 Step program is to put your trust in a higher power. She felt that the decrees were helping her accomplish that goal. She began decreeing two to two and a half hours every night to help overcome the fear that had swept in once she had removed the artificial high of alcoholism. “Nighttime was the worst time,” she recalls. “I'd be scared to death of anything.” But she soon found that the decrees “helped lift my consciousness out of the human realm.”
“I would just stand there and decree and feel a part of the light,” she says. “Little by little, the levels of fear that had been plaguing me were replaced with the love and security of the I AM Presence.”
By reconnecting her to the I Am Presence, the decrees helped her overcome the sense of separation from God that had led to her drinking in the first place. She found that in her communion with her I AM Presence, she was able to enter a state that she calls “total joy and love and understanding of others.” This helped her get over feelings of hurt from past problems in relationships. And it helped her accept one of the principles of the 12-step program: Don't rely on other people, because they will always let you down. Instead, rely on your higher power.
“People are not going to give me what I want,” Susan says. “What I want I can get from the ascended masters and my I AM Presence. My satisfaction comes from God.”
Today Susan is happily married with two daughters and a fulfilling career as a social worker. She believes she overcame her alcoholism by using the 12-step program and her decrees. She needed the systematic approach of the 12-step program, but she also needed the light she invoked in her decrees to get her through. The two systems “correlate perfectly with each other,” she says. The decrees helped her stick to her program and find “true wholeness,” a feeling of oneness with God that replaced the “false wholeness” she got from alcohol.
