Right Size

The point is to offer all of the colours on the palette so you can decide how you want to paint them together into your own unique portrait of spirituality and recovery.

— Ingrid Mathieu, Recovering Spirituality (2011)

Ingrid Mathieu is a psychotherapist who brought the concept of spiritual bypass directly into the rooms. Her research revealed that two qualities were absolutely necessary to move through it. Humility and acceptance. These are not new concepts for anyone in recovery. But how we understand them matters, because both can be co-opted by the very pattern they are meant to dissolve.

The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions defines humility as “a clear recognition of what and who we really are, followed by a sincere attempt to become what we could be.” This is not about making ourselves small. It is about becoming right-sized, seeing ourselves accurately, neither inflated nor diminished.

Some of us spend years trying to be who we think we should be. We chase spiritual accomplishments, material success, or the approval of others, hoping these will finally make us feel “good enough.” It may work for a while. But when it stops, we double down on our spiritual tools, using them to avoid the pain of our inadequacy rather than face it. What often breaks through is not more effort but more honesty. When we see who we really are, we can find unconditional love for ourselves and our fellows. We become right size. We no longer need to run from our feelings because we are acknowledging our fullness, including the wounded parts that remain inside.

Being humble is not a one-time achievement. It shows up in the small moments, making a phone call when we would rather isolate, admitting we were wrong, asking for help. It means owning our gifts and our frailties alike. The paradox is that the more we practise it, the more we realize how much further we have to go. Far from failure, that is the practice working.

We hear the famous passage about acceptance being the answer to all our problems, and we may interpret this to mean we should feel good about everything. But believing that acceptance should always make us happy is itself a form of bypass. Mathieu offers a different view. “Acceptance simply means to acknowledge the entire truth about something,” she writes. “It is not related to how you feel about it all.” A positive perspective may come later, but it grows from seeing reality clearly, not from forcing gratitude before we are ready.

Sometimes people share in meetings that if they had known what long-term sobriety would actually look like, they might not have signed up. That kind of honesty takes courage. It also takes humility. This is not pretending everything is fine or performing positivity. It is telling the truth about our experience. And often, the willingness to admit unhappiness is exactly what allows us to realign our expectations and find a more sustainable path.

This is patient work. Years of self-centred thinking do not reverse overnight. We learn to stop expecting our spiritual practice to deliver us from the human condition and instead to accompany us through it. That shift, from escape hatch to companion, changes everything.

Rule 62 offers a useful reminder: Don’t take yourself too damn seriously. We are all just human beings stumbling along, doing our best. It is enough. It has always been enough.