From Courage to Change of Jul 26:
I am learning to identify illusions that make my life unmanageable. For example, I wanted to stop controlling people and situations, but the harder I tried, the more I felt as if I were knocking my head against a wall. Then someone mentioned that I couldn’t give up something I didn’t have. Perhaps I could try giving up the illusion of control. Once I saw that my attempts to exercise power were based on illusions, it was easier to let go and let God.
Another illusion is that I have a big hole inside and I must fill it with something from outside myself. Compulsively shopping, obsessing about relationships, trying to fix everyone else’s problems – these are some of the ways I’ve tried to fill this hole. Yet the problem is spiritual emptiness and must be filled from within. It wasn’t until I saw through the illusion that I was deficient and needed to look outside myself for wholeness, that I began to heal.
Today’s Reminder
Today, if I hear myself thinking that I am not good enough or that I need something outside myself to make me whole, I’ll know that I am listening to illusions. Today I can call an Al-Anon friend and come back to reality.
“. . . human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” ~ William James
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My work in recovery is not just a story of struggle—but a series of quiet turning points, points where I take a breath between battles. I take time to recognize the significance of genuine expression. I realized that any of us, myself especially, when subjected to prolonged periods of internal abuse, like the alcoholic written about in The Doctor’s Opinion, soon find that they “cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false.”
There’s a sacred power in beginning to name illusions. In early recovery, the lines between illusion and reality often blur, and the pain feels real enough to confuse the two. That’s why this moment—this realization—is profound: I couldn’t give up control because I never truly had it. That kind of truth doesn’t just land in the mind—it softens the fists we’ve kept clenched for years.
And then there’s the hole—the aching, familiar void we all try to outrun or out-buy or out-fix. I know that urge, to chase wholeness in others, in things, in saving or seducing or pleasing. But this realization reminds me that spiritual emptiness is not a flaw—it’s a calling. A whisper that we are ready to return to ourselves. Not to fill the hole with something else, but to meet the space within with light, attention, and care.
When I hear the old voices whisper: You’re not enough. You need more. Fix it fast.—I will pause. I will know this is illusion speaking. And I will return to what is real: connection. Friendship. God. And the quiet truth that I am already whole, even as I heal.
This is not the end of the work. But it is the end of the lie.
Daily Reprieve 
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