Sometimes people ask me (and frankly, sometimes I ask myself) how I went from being very vocal in my rejection of God to someone who now talks about God all the damn time. The short and simple answer is: 12 Step recovery (which is probably one of the reasons people like me — or at least like the me I used to be — find 12 Step scary). The long answer is, well, the accumulation of every tiny moment in a lifetime, which makes it both too long to tell and nothing to tell at all. But in all of the tiny moments that even the answer “12 Step” holds, there are the signposts along the way: the times when everything shifted and changed, in nearly as dramatic (but not as painful) a way as they did when I found out about my husband’s addiction. Sometimes I put those together for myself into some story of change…

When I was young and asked why I had to go to church when I didn’t believe, my mother said, “I didn’t used to like going either, but when things in my life got hard, I found the rituals comforting. I want you to have some foundation in religion, something you can go back to when you need it.” So, standing in the bedroom of our old home, the place we lived when I found out about my Mark’s sex addiction, I told Mark that I felt like God was trying to break me, like taming a wild horse. God was going to heap woes on me like some mirror Job, until I was so broken down from famines and locust plagues that I would have no choice but to go tamely back to the church, just as my mother had said I would. But I was not going to be broken by God.

Was it months later or a year? At some point, still weighed down with hurt, having been stung yet again by something Mark had said or done, I wept alone in our room and tried to meditate, when the faltering thought came to me that maybe this was it, maybe I should pray. And a voice inside me told me I didn’t believe in God, and I felt comforted by the higher power I couldn’t and wouldn’t call God.

The years passed, and although I didn’t quite lose my bitterness or resentment, I lost my fear that I might somehow end up back in the arms of the church that hurt me. I began to see that having spirituality in my life didn’t mean I had to have religion in my life if that didn’t help me. I began the search for something to call that spiritual connection, and with my fear of the church gone, my fear of the word God began to leave me too. Intellectually, I began to explore the idea that maybe it was a word I could use as a shorthand for something in my life that was beyond words.

By the time I started working the 12 Steps, I felt I had already come to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity and had lost my resistance to the word God. I don’t know that I expected much to change, and yet, Step 7 (in which we humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings) shattered me all over again. Prayer wasn’t something that fit well with my conception of what my God is and what my God is not and healthy humility wasn’t something that had been a part of my experience. And yet, kneeling down in my bedroom facing a wall, hung up on all of these ideas and unable to ask God for help, in a sudden flash like a ray of sunshine breaking through cloud, I was inspired to ask God for help asking for help. In that moment, as I cried and begged for help, I felt something melt away, something new form and my connection with what I called God strengthen beyond anything I ever felt or expected.

So, when I reached Step 12, I had to admit that I had had a spiritual awakening, just as that Step promised. And I went off to carry the message, and started talking about God all the damn time too.