Rebuking the obsession

When I got back into the program, my obsession was riding high. I would have the urge to act out or do some bad behavior very consistently. Before, I hadn’t known what to do about that. I had heard many times about “surrendering”, but I didn’t like that word, because it seemed like a defeatist word to me at the time. I did discover the power of giving the temptation to God, though. I let it go, and somehow, God seemed to take it from me. This had to happen quite a lot at first.

Here’s what worked for me. I used the story in the White Book of rebuking the obsession in the name of the author’s Higher Power. It’s not the only thing that works. Ask other people for their experience with rejecting temptation. Warning: this gets a little religious. You may want to modify as needed:

“I rebuke, refuse, reject, and deny that in the name of Jesus. I don’t accept that. It is not part of me. I am not secretly fantasizing about that, harboring it, or wishing it would come true.”

I chanted that probably 10-20 times a day for a while when I first got sober. Sometimes I said it repeatedly. I got the psychological distraction of having to remember it and the spiritual practice of giving it to God and rejecting it. I also seemed to burning out the remaining bit of obsession that previously I had allowed to linger. I think that in my previous, brief, stint of sobriety, I had allowed myself to fantasize in the back of my mind. I would reject temptation, but not completely. I would mentally walk away from it, but somehow also be saving it for some time in the future. I think killing that was one of the major advances that made lasting sobriety possible.