Step 2: Came to Believe

Step Two reads, "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity" (page 59). Notice how gently that is worded. It does not say we believed, and it does not set a deadline for faith. It says we came to believe, the way we come to a place after walking toward it for a while. Step One left us with a real problem: we admitted we were powerless over alcohol. Step Two points to the only solution the Big Book offers, and it asks nothing up front except a little willingness.

What Step Two Means in Big Book Terms

The book names our situation plainly: "Lack of power, that was our dilemma. We had to find a power by which we could live, and it had to be a Power greater than ourselves" (page 45). The same page says the whole book's main object is to enable us to find that Power. So Step Two is not a side road for religious people. It is the hinge of the entire program. If willpower could have fixed us, Step One would never have been true.

The word sanity bothers many of us. But the Big Book means something specific. It says the main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind rather than in his body (page 23). Then it tells the story of Jim, a man who reasoned that whiskey could not hurt him if he mixed it with milk, and concludes, "Whatever the precise definition of the word may be, we call this plain insanity" (page 37). The insanity of alcoholism is the strange failure of our defense against the first drink, the trivial excuse that sounds reasonable in the moment. To be restored to sanity is to get back the ability to see that first drink truthfully.

Where Step Two Lives in the Text

The Step appears in the list on page 59, in the chapter How It Works, but its home is We Agnostics, pages 44 through 57, a chapter written to the doubter by people who had been doubters themselves. The groundwork comes earlier. In Bill's Story, a sober friend at the kitchen table suggests Bill choose his own conception of God (page 12), and More About Alcoholism, pages 30 through 43, builds the case for the mental blank spot that needs restoring. Appendix II, Spiritual Experience, completes the picture on pages 567 and 568.

How the Big Book Says to Work It

The instruction is surprisingly small. We ask ourselves one question: "Do I now believe, or am I even willing to believe, that there is a Power greater than myself?" (page 47). The moment we can say yes, even to the willingness alone, the book emphatically assures us we are on our way, and it says an effective spiritual structure can be built on that simple cornerstone (page 47). We do not have to adopt anyone else's conception of God. Our own conception, however inadequate, is sufficient to make a beginning (page 46). Bill found exactly that: "It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning" (page 12).

Working the Step means laying aside prejudice long enough to express that willingness (page 46). It means facing the choice the book states so bluntly: "God either is, or He isn't. What was our choice to be?" (page 53). And it means weighing the evidence in the rooms around us. Page 52 describes the life we could not fix on our own, the broken relationships, the emotions we could not control, the misery and depression and fear. Then it delivers the verdict: "Our ideas did not work. But the God idea did" (page 52).

What Changes, and the Fear That Stops Us

The first thing that changes is hope. When we become willing, the argument inside us quiets, and the energy we spent fighting starts going into recovery. Appendix II says most of us tap an unsuspected inner resource which we presently identify with our own conception of a Power greater than ourselves (page 568), and it names the price of admission: "Willingness, honesty and open mindedness are the essentials of recovery" (page 568). For most of us this change is educational and gradual. We come to believe by watching sanity return, one clear-headed morning at a time.

Now the honest part. Many of us feared this Step because religion had hurt us, or bored us, or been used against us, and we assumed we were being asked to swallow somebody else's God whole. We were not. About half of AA's original fellowship were exactly that doubting type (page 44), and they recovered without surrendering their honesty. Nobody hands us a required God. We start with whatever we can honestly accept, a Power greater than ourselves, and we let experience do the convincing. The fear says believe or else. The book only says be willing, and watch.

Once we can answer yes, or even an honest I am willing, we are ready for what follows. Step Three turns belief into a decision: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him" (page 59). Coming to believe is the turn toward the light. Step Three is the first step into it.