I mentioned Carl Jung in a conversation yesterday and the person I was talking to stopped me.
“You know he had a huge influence on AA, right?”
I didn’t know that. I’ve been sober over thirty years and I didn’t know that. So I went looking.
Here’s what I found.
In the early 1930s, a man named Rowland Hazard sought treatment from Jung in Zurich. He got sober under Jung’s care. Then he relapsed. When he came back, he asked the question that anyone in that position asks — is there any hope for me?
Jung told him the truth: medically and psychiatrically, his case was essentially hopeless. Unless — and here Jung said something that would travel across decades and continents and eventually reach me — unless he could have a genuine spiritual experience. The transforming kind. Jung had seen it happen. He believed it was the only thing powerful enough to reach what alcohol was reaching.
Rowland came back to the States. He connected with the Oxford Group, a Christian evangelical movement. Through that he helped a man named Ebby Thacher get sober. Ebby went to visit Bill Wilson. Bill had his spiritual experience. And the rest is the Steps.
One psychiatrist’s honest answer to a hopeless man. That’s the thread.
Years later, near the end of his life, Bill Wilson wrote to Jung to tell him this story. Jung wrote back. His response contained a phrase that I haven’t been able to stop turning over:
Spiritus contra spiritum. The spirit against spirits.
What Jung was saying was that the alcoholic’s craving — that bottomless, irrational, life-destroying hunger — was not simply a physical compulsion or a moral failure. It was, on a lower level, the same thing as a spiritual thirst for wholeness. The person drinking themselves to death is looking for the same thing the mystic is looking for. They just found the wrong door.
I sat with that for a long time.
Because if that’s true — if addiction is a misdirected search for transcendence — then the question opens up. Is it only the alcoholic? Or is this the human condition wearing different costumes?
The Big Book says the untreated alcoholic is restless, irritable, and discontented. Not at ease. Dis-eased. And the more I look at that, the more I think: yes, but — everyone. The workaholic, the people-pleaser, the person who controls everything because they cannot tolerate uncertainty, the one who cannot be alone with themselves for ten minutes without reaching for something. We are all, in some sense, medicating the same wound.
Augustine said it in the fourth century: our heart is restless until it rests in Thee. Same diagnosis. Different words.
Paul said it even more bluntly in Romans 7: the good I want to do, I don’t do. The thing I hate, I keep doing. That’s not a confession from an addict. That’s a letter to everyone.
So maybe the disease is simply human. Maybe dis-ease — the rupture, the restlessness, the sense that something is missing and we cannot name it — is just what it is to be a person separated from the thing we were made for. And we will fill that space with something. The only question is what.
Then I hit something that reordered the whole frame.
If the disease is human, what does that mean about suffering? We tend to think of suffering as the interruption — the thing that gets in the way of a real life, the evidence that something has gone wrong. But what if it’s the other way around?
The most broken people I know carry the most love. Not despite what they’ve been through. Because of it. There’s something that happens in sustained suffering — when a person doesn’t escape it but somehow endures it — that produces a depth of compassion that ease simply cannot manufacture. Paul says it in Romans 5: suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, character produces hope. Not a detour around the suffering. Through it. The sequence is the point.
I spent years romancing suicide. That’s not a metaphor. There was a long season where I kept that door cracked as a kind of insurance policy — if it gets bad enough, there’s a way out. I’m not ashamed to say it here because I think someone reading this needs to know they are not alone in it, and also because of what I’ve come to understand about those years.
Something was marinating.
The intensity of the pain was not evidence of permanent damage. It was evidence of the depth of the capacity. You cannot suffer that acutely without being built for something that large. All those years of endurance — the white-knuckled, bewildered, sometimes-just-barely survival — were not wasted. They were preparation. The long suffering was not a character flaw. It was, it turns out, the very definition of love. Agape. The love that doesn’t quit when it stops feeling good.
It was not for nothing.
I don’t know who needs to hear that today. Maybe you’re in the middle of something that looks like wreckage with no discernible purpose. Maybe you’ve been enduring so long that endurance itself feels like failure.
I’m not preaching. I’m just telling you what I found when I went looking.
Jung told a hopeless man: the only cure is spiritual. That message traveled through three people before it became the Steps. The Steps traveled through thirty years before they reached the place in me where they could do their work. And somewhere in that long transit, the thing I thought was killing me turned out to be making me.
Spiritus contra spiritum. The spirit against spirits.
The thirst was always for the right thing. We just had to find our way to the right door.