Hot Topic: Surrender to a Power Greater than Ourselves [Season 10, Episode 16]Hot Topic: Surrender to a Power Greater than Ourselves [Season 10, Episode 16]
AA Grapevine's Podcast
AA members with very different beliefs talk about surrendering to a power greater than themselves and how this relates to working the 12 Steps. Stories, letters, and humour show multiple ways people approach God, or no God, while staying sober.
30:23•20 Apr 2026
Finding a Higher Power: Surrender, Skepticism and Staying Sober
Episode Overview
- A higher power can be understood in many ways, including the AA programme or the AA group, especially for those who struggle with the word God.
- Surrender may feel frightening, so some members rephrase it as learning to ‘relax’ and stop fighting everything and everyone.
- Working the 12 Steps repeatedly helps people stay open-minded and let go of old, unhelpful ideas about God and themselves.
- Atheists and believers alike share that willingness, honesty, and taking the suggested actions matter more than having a fixed religious belief.
- Experiences of desperation and failed self-effort can become a turning point where people finally ask for help and find relief from craving.
“There are only two things you need to know about God: there is one, and you’re not it.”
What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol? This conversation from AA Grapevine’s Half-Hour Variety Hour takes that question straight into the heart of surrendering to “a power greater than ourselves”. AA members Don and Sam chat with Carol S. and Alex M., whose experiences with faith, doubt, and sobriety could hardly be more different. Carol arrived with a religious background, heavy medication, and daily drinking, so unwell that one treatment centre told her, “You are too sick.
We cannot help you.” Yet she shares how kindness in AA and working the Steps helped her move from constant fear to gratitude, even joking that she was “a really hard dog to pet” in early sobriety. Alex, an atheist and physician, describes years of seemingly controlled drinking before “it was like a switch was lit” and he found himself drinking in the morning, at work, and spiralling after his wife’s death.
He explains how the programme worked for him despite having no belief in God, saying that “God is not a requirement” for building “a decent sober life”, as long as he leans on a higher power that makes sense to him. The group read and reflect on letters from Ian, Buddy and Jerry about surrender, the “gift of desperation”, and using AA itself as a higher power when the God idea is just too loaded.
Carol shares how she swapped the scary word surrender for a gentler one: “relax”, and how repeated Step work slowly shifted her understanding of a higher power. You’ll hear humour, honesty and a wide range of views, all within the AA framework of “God as we understood Him”. If the higher power question has ever made you hesitate about recovery, could these shared experiences open a door for you?
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