Ian Morgan Cron: I think for all addicts, it’s this search for an external solution to an internal problem. We’re trying to find some relief from the anxiety and the difficulties that we face internally. So I have a lot of empathy for it, but I also see it as a spiritual search. I see it as a longing for God. It’s a disorganized plan that we come up with for ourselves to achieve happiness apart from God’s grace, power, and love. 

Empowering Recovery Through Belief and Self-Discovery: Ian Morgan Cron & Alicia Michelle – Episode #450

Narrator: Welcome to the Jesus Calling Podcast. This week, we’re joined by Ian Morgan Cron, who shares his deeply personal journey with the Enneagram, addiction, and faith. Ian recounts how a chance encounter with a book on the Enneagram during a retreat sparked a life-changing path of self-awareness, ultimately inspiring his book, The Road Back to You. Through his story, Ian challenges us to see addiction not simply as a problem to be solved, but as an opportunity to draw closer to God and experience true healing, which he shares about in his latest book, The Fix. 

Later in the episode, we’ll hear from Alicia Michelle, a certified neurocoach, podcaster, and author. Alicia shares how a health crisis led her to reevaluate her life and seek healing through the integration of neuroscience and biblical truth. Now, she helps others break free from limiting patterns, renewing their minds, and building emotional resilience.

Let’s begin with Ian’s story.

Ian: Many years ago when I was doing a masters in Counseling Psychology in Colorado, I took a retreat up to the mountains one weekend. While there, they had a library in this monastery and I happened upon a book about the Enneagram. I was intrigued by the name, so I picked it up. I started reading it and I’m like, Wow, I have been studying personality development and psychology for the past year. Where has this been? This is an amazing tool among many for helping people develop self-knowledge, self-awareness, and also an awareness of what God is up to in their lives. 

I had to put it down for a while because I was in graduate school, I was a dad of little kids, and I was running around. Fast forward twenty years and I had gone to a week-long Enneagram workshop that was fantastic, but I still hadn’t had the opportunity to do a deep dive. That happened in around 2014 or something, and as is the case with all my books, when I happen upon something that is life-changing for me, oftentimes a moment comes along where I go, Oh, I really want to share this with other people. That gave birth to The Road Back to You and to the amazing adventure that I went on for the next bunch of years with that book’s success. So yeah, that’s my Enneagram story. 

The Complicated Nature of Addiction 

I grew up in both a troubled and a culturally privileged environment. I grew up thirty-five miles from downtown Manhattan in Greenwich, Connecticut, a very wealthy suburb. I attended a little Ivy [League] college in Maine. I had a lot of the privileges that come with growing up in that kind of world, but my home life was a strange place to be formed. My dad was a chronic alcoholic and prescription pill addict and a very, very troubled… I would say mentally ill man. There was a lot of chaos, uncertainty, and a lot of sorrow in that relationship with him. 

At the same time, I’ve lived long enough now and done enough personal work that I see that experience through a different lens than I did as a younger man. What I once saw as an irretrievable loss, I now see as kind of a gift. That experience gave me a level of empathy and concern for others that I would not otherwise have had. It carved out a place in me that I’d like to think is increasingly deepening as a result, and I’ve sworn many times in my adult life that I will never repeat those mistakes. And then I’ve repeated them. The difference is how I manage them with God’s help. 

Addictions are very complicated. I see them principally as a spiritual problem, but they are not exclusively a spiritual problem. They are psychological. They are emotional. They are trauma-based. They are, in many cases, socioeconomically influenced, culturally influenced, genetically and biologically influenced. 

“Addictions are very complicated. I see them principally as a spiritual problem, but they are not exclusively a spiritual problem.” – Ian Morgan Cron

Nobody early in life says, “Hey, where’s the line I can stand in to become an alcoholic?” Nobody ever says to themselves, “Gee, that’s something I aspire to.” I was raised in a household where people coped with the normal distress and disease of life through self-soothing behaviors and substances, so it was just modeled for me. There was a cultural piece—I grew up in a very strong Irish Catholic home where drinking and carousing was just part of the warp and wolf of life. My drinking escalated to being problematic probably beginning in college probably. Addictions come up on us a little bit like the way the tide comes up on the beach, right? It’s imperceptible. You’re going along and then the tide is coming in. It’s up to your ankles. It’s up to your knees. It’s up to your hips. It’s up to your chest. And then it’s over your head. That’s when you figure it out, if you’re lucky. 

I would also say that I just think human beings are wired for addiction. It’s the way the brain is set up, right? Do certain people have more proclivity toward it? I don’t really know the answer to that question, but I suspect so. I believe everybody is an addict in some shape or form. How many people out there have problems with workaholism? How many people have problems with their addiction to people pleasing? The list goes on and on.

And I get it. We’re trying to find some comfort in what is a difficult thing called life. We’re trying to find some relief from the anxiety and the difficulties that we face internally. So I have a lot of empathy for it, but I also see it as a spiritual search. I see it as a longing for God. It’s a disorganized plan that we come up with for ourselves to achieve happiness apart from God’s grace, power, and love. For me, the solution has been found in the spiritual program of the twelve steps of recovery.

Twelve Steps to Finding Our Way Back to Ourselves—And God

I was first introduced to the twelve steps many years ago when I first got sober in my late twenties. At the time, I came into a program of recovery for drinking. The twelve steps derive, literally derive, from the Oxford Group, which was a Christian movement in the early twentieth century. The steps are the gospel in miniature. That’s what they are. There is not one idea or one instruction in the twelve steps that cannot be directly correlated to an idea that’s essential to the gospel. 

I think one of the beauties of the twelve step program is that we’re going to just start by admitting that we’re powerless and that our lives are unmanageable. When you finally can say to God, “I’m out of ammo,” with all the self prescribed treatment plans that I’ve tried to come up with, I’ve tried everything in my power to make life more livable, but it’s just not working and actually it’s causing more problems than it’s solving. So then, turning our will and our life over to the care of God. 

Steps 1-3

This is what steps one to three are about—making peace with God. Most people will say, “Well, I gave my life to Jesus and I’ve already done that.” And I’m like, “Really?” Because for me, that’s a minute by minute equation—it is not a one and done deal. People become so disillusioned because it’s not like that. So they come to faith and they’re like, Where’s the big solution here? 

It’s when you hit bottom that you finally become available to the wooing of God—that’s when you finally become available. The spiritual life is so loaded with paradoxes that it’s frustrating at times. But here is one—powerlessness actually is a superpower, because the moment that you declare your own powerlessness, like Paul, you finally say, “I can’t stop doing the things I don’t want to do, and the things I do want to do, I can’t start doing.”

“It’s when you hit bottom that you finally become available to the wooing of God—that’s when you finally become available. The spiritual life is so loaded with paradoxes that it’s frustrating at times. But here is one—powerlessness actually is a superpower, because the moment that you declare your own powerlessness, like Paul, you finally say, ‘I can’t stop doing the things I don’t want to do, and the things I do want to do, I can’t start doing.’” – Ian Morgan Cron

STEPS 4-7

Four through seven [are about], I’m going to make peace with myself. And that’s where we turn our gaze inward. So if you think about steps one to three, you’re gazing upward, and when you’re starting to do four through seven, you’re going to turn your gaze inward. 

And by the way, now you have the knowledge of God’s love so imprinted on yourself that when you go to four through seven and begin to look inward at the things going on in your life—those things that have brought you to your knees—you have the courage and the knowledge of God’s love supporting you. 

STEPS 8-9

Eight and nine are when you turn your gaze outward to your relationships with others, and there we make amends to people for the ways that we’ve hurt them.

STEPS 10-12

Ten through twelve is about how I cultivate a lifestyle that supports health and growth in each of those domains of my life—my relationship with God, my relationship with myself, and my relationship with others. And then we start again. 

Addiction As an Invitation to Seek God

If you read the same Bible I’m reading, everybody has that sense deep in the precincts of their soul that, I am a fraction yearning to become a whole number. I feel this fundamental buzz of inquietude, of anxiety, of concern, of self-doubt, and the list goes on and on. 

I sometimes see addictions as invitations from God. Are you ready to come back to the source, to the fountain? And are you also willing to accept that on this side of whatever divide we’re on here, that you will never perhaps fully quench the thirst? 

“I sometimes see addictions as invitations from God. Are you ready to come back to the source, to the fountain? And are you also willing to accept that on this side of whatever divide we’re on here, that you will never perhaps fully quench the thirst?” – Ian Morgan Cron 

The book that I’m reading is saying that you can’t do it, you need help. So many people of faith are trapped in what I would call this theology of reformation rather than transformation. So reformation is, I’m going to try really hard to be a good Christian. The gospel speaks about transformation, and transformation happens not when you try to be a good Christian, but when you actually give God consent to do in you what you cannot do for yourself, namely change. The gospel is actually so simple. We make it hard. We complexify it in a way that is like, Why are you taking something so simple and making it so complicated? 

“The gospel speaks about transformation, and transformation happens not when you try to be a good Christian, but when you actually give God consent to do in you what you cannot do for yourself, namely change.” – Ian Morgan Cron

That’s not what grace does. So we just try really hard to do all the right things, and we’re afraid to be ourselves because of fear of being judged by ourselves or others in our communities. It’s like there is a gift when you hit the desperate moment, where you say, “Yeah, I need help.” I think those are three of the most brave words in the world, “I need help.”

When you say it, what relief comes over you. It’s like, “Okay, the game is done. I’m done.” I do see it as this wonderful invitation from God to say, “Alright, now we can put down all the little prescribed treatment plans that we came up with for happiness. We can put those down now and get to the source.” 

I wonder if you could understand your seeming failures more as an invitation from God to a deeper intimacy with Him, rather than labeling them as failures or irredeemable misadventures. I think that lens has helped me to understand the peaks and valleys of my own life experience. 

“I wonder if you could understand your seeming failures more as an invitation from God to a deeper intimacy with Him, rather than labeling them as failures or irredeemable misadventures. I think that lens has helped me to understand the peaks and valleys of my own life experience.” – Ian Morgan Cron 

Narrator: To learn more about Ian Morgan Cron visit www.ianmorgancron.com and be sure to check out his new book, The Fix: How the Twelve Steps Offer a Surprising Path of Transformation for the Well-Adjusted, the Down-and-Out, and Everyone In Between, wherever you buy books.

Stay tuned to Alicia Michelle’s story after a brief message.

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Celebrate the Season with Jesus Listens for Lent & Easter

Walk through the season of Lent with an intentional focus on your Savior, and prepare for the joy and victory of His resurrection with Jesus Listens for Lent & Easter. This book offers seasonally-themed devotions from Sarah Young’s New York Times bestseller Jesus Listens. Inside, you’ll find prayers, reflections, and Bible verses based on Jesus’ life and sacrifice, plus stunning spring and Easter illustrations, making this a holiday treasure to cherish for years to come. 

This book makes the perfect gift for anyone longing to draw closer to Jesus during the Lenten and Easter seasons, for families who want to cultivate a tradition of seasonal prayers and devotions together, and for those looking for peace, forgiveness, and a deeper experience of trusting God. 

As you pray Scripture throughout this season of remembering Christ’s death and resurrection, you’ll experience how prayer connects you to God, helps you seek forgiveness, and brings you the inexpressible joy and freedom of knowing that Christ has risen.

Find Jesus Listens for Lent & Easter today at your favorite retailer. 

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Our next guest is certified neurocoach, podcaster, and author Alicia Michelle. Alicia delves into the reality that people face who are chronic perfectionists or people-pleasers. She invites us to reflect on her thought patterns that began in her youth and culminated in a life-altering health crisis in 2017—a moment that forced her to confront her root beliefs about worthiness and identity.

Alicia Michelle: I am Alicia Michelle. I am a coach, a podcaster, and an author. I love being able to help Christian women understand what’s going on in their inner life so that they can better align themselves with God’s truth and live fully for His purposes. I do that through coaching, I do that through a membership group I have called the Emotional Confidence Club, and through the podcast. 

Setting An Unsustainable Standard

Perfectionism and people-pleasing are some of the biggest issues that I see with the women that I coach. The thing that’s frustrating for a lot of us who struggle with this is we recognize God does not call us to have this level of perfection in order to be accepted by Him. He doesn’t ask these demands of us, yet we still stay stuck in these patterns.  

For me, that started between the ages of nine to thirteen, when these key patterns of, Am I loved, am I worthy, and am I enough? were formed. But for me, that sort of language was developed around schoolwork, and needing to be good enough in sports, and having certain accomplishments. I found that I could get approval from adults in my life, I could get affection, and could feel good about myself by doing these things. And it seemed to work just fine for a really long time.

In 2017, I was a mom of four kids. I was getting ready to go on a missions trip with my kids down to Mexico and everything I thought was fine. I felt like I would always be stressed. I certainly wasn’t sleeping. I slept maybe four hours a night—I know that because I went to bed at 12:30 and woke up at 4:30, that was just my habit. And there had been bigger stressors in our life, like my husband at that time had been out of work for eighteen months, I also had a child with special needs, I was homeschooling and working full-time. But I was like, Okay, you know, I’m fine. I got this, right? Because I had that whole mantra inside of me that I can do this, all I needed to do is keep showing up and working hard.

At this specific point in time, I started getting a really bad headache. This headache did not go away and I thought, Just take an aspirin and move forward. We got down to Mexico and this headache would not go away. It just kept getting worse and worse, and one night about 2:00 AM  I woke up and I was in so much pain. We were staying at this camp in the middle of the desert in Mexico. I left the RV and just sat outside in the cool air and I will never forget what I heard from God. It was not an audible voice, but it was the strongest impression that I’ve ever had from God. It was, You need to go home and you need to go home now. There is no other option. 

I went to the ER, and they said, “Ma’am, you’re having a vertebral artery dissection and it is so severe that we can’t even treat you at this hospital. We have to not only send you to this teaching hospital, but we’re sending you to the ICU at this teaching hospital, because you’re lucky you’re not dead at this point.” And I was like, “Wait, what? What are you talking about? I just have a headache.” In a minute, my entire world was taken away. I was having these little mini strokes. They kept asking me, “Were you bungee jumping while you were in Mexico?”  “Were you in a car accident? Because these are the kind of injuries we’re seeing inside of your neck.” So to give a little bit more detail around what that is—inside of our neck are four main arteries. The ones that run through the back part, through the spine, are the vertebral arteries. If we’re all more familiar with the idea of an aneurysm—where a vessel will blow outward—a dissection is where the artery splits inward and collapses upon itself. Blood clots form on the inside part of that and there is no blood flow. 

So it was nine months of being on my back. I had to stop homeschooling. I had to stop working online. My husband took care of everything. We had people bringing us meals. Being flat on my back during that time really caused me to ask deeper questions because I knew it was more than just, Oh, I need to sleep more. It was like, What is the patterning that has been built over all these years that you have allowed to now create this reality? How do I believe that? How do I understand how my mind got to this place? And what am I going to do moving forward?  

Diagnosing the Disconnect

There was this core, broken soundtrack inside of me that had associated achievement, making others happy, and being enough by doing things, by producing, and by trying harder. It was not associated with what I knew to be true logically with God’s Word. And I saw that there were a lot of other women who also had that same disconnect, who had loved Jesus, known Jesus, were in Bible studies, did their morning devotions every day, but still, they struggled in these patterns. So as I began learning about where that came from, and how the brain forms these things, I learned that the subconscious mind can create these patterns—and it’s made for that. It’s a supercomputer. It can create patterns of all kinds, but it can create—specifically around identity—patterns that are going to really drive the show, no matter what our logical mind says to be true. That can be very helpful, but if those patterns are in contrast with what God’s Word says, logically, there is this fighting that’s continually happening. 

“There was this core, broken soundtrack inside of me that had associated achievement, making others happy, and being enough by doing things, by producing, and by trying harder. It was not associated with what I knew to be true logically with God’s Word.” – Alicia Michelle

As I became certified as a neurocoach, I learned about certain techniques. One of them being something called brain priming, where you are able to identify what that soundtrack is, what those words are inside, see where they came from, acknowledge why they’re there, why it makes sense that they’re there, and learn what are the things that I or this person, whoever, would specifically need to hear from God to get that freedom. We then do a process that takes about sixty to sixty-three days where we are removing the old neurological path, the old soundtrack, and building up a new one, almost like building a bridge. So if every time there’d been a certain stimulus that had happened, like, Okay, I need to sleep because I need rest—originally, the old soundtrack would have been like, No, you need to keep going, because you have to produce this, you need to be enough. It wasn’t always that obvious for me, but that was the underlying thing that I was operating from. But as I did that work, that bridge slowly got dismantled and a new bridge was being built, one that was in alignment with what God said.

And that’s what happened to me. I saw the power of that. It was more than just, I’m just going to believe this in the moment. It was addressed at the root of what was going on. Once I found that I was able to not only get that freedom for myself but to help others get that freedom as well, that led eventually to becoming a neurocoach and really shifted how I worked with women online. 

Integrating Scripture With Science – The A.D.D. Method

I love being able to take what we know about science and neuroscience and integrate it together with Biblical truth. Because when we as Christians can understand the beautiful ways that God has made our bodies and made our minds, it really helps us get in a place where we can choose to embrace those truths in a different way. Let me give you an example. A lot of us struggle with emotions throughout the day, up and down all the time, right? That’s normal, being a human. We sometimes get into these patterns where we beat ourselves up because we think, I got angry at them again. I know I shouldn’t. I always fall into this pattern. In the moment, we’re just reacting, but afterwards, we’re beating ourselves up about it. Well, in the moment, our entire body—when we’re in the middle of an emotion—the sympathetic nervous system is turned on, which that side of our body is—many of us have heard of the term “fight or flight.” That is the side of our body that is in its state. So the blood is being pumped to the extremities—we’re ready to run away, we’re ready to fight—versus the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest side of our body. This is when our logical mind is turned back on. It’s that whole kind of centered, calming, I can make a wise decision sort of thing. So when we are able to learn about our body and recognize that instead of trying to make ourselves have a different response, we can help our bodies get into a parasympathetic state so that we can make a logical response. We can walk through an emotion. 

“When we as Christians can understand the beautiful ways that God has made our bodies and made our minds, it really helps us get in a place where we can choose to embrace those truths in a different way. When we are able to learn about our body and recognize that instead of trying to make ourselves have a different response, we can help our bodies get into a parasympathetic state so that we can make a logical response.” – Alicia Michelle

I teach a three-step method to help walk through emotions called ADD—acknowledge, discern, and decide.  Acknowledge that it makes sense why I’m feeling this way and look at an emotion without necessarily judging it or saying it’s bad. And then I’m able to discern, Okay, that may be what I’m feeling, but what’s true? You know? What’s true and what’s not true in this moment? And then looking at both of those to then say, “Okay, God, what do You want me to do next? How do You want me to take what I’m feeling, which is real, but keep it in alignment with God’s Word? What is the next best step You want me to take with this? And also, where do You want me to emotionally dwell as a result of this?” If you’re in the middle of an emotion, we have to be able to get you to a place of calm so that your logical mind can turn on to work through this. So I think understanding both of those together really helps us to respond the way we want, because our intention is to respond for the Lord. It’s to honor Him with our words. What if we could take actions to understand our body, to help it align with God’s Word completely in the way that He intends?  

“What if we could take actions to understand our body, to help it align with God’s Word completely in the way that He intends?” – Alicia Michelle  

Managing Our Emotions with Discernment

Something I want to mention about this process of managing emotions is that it’s important to connect with God, not just on a Sunday morning or when we’re having these moments of dealing with a difficult emotion. The foundational truths of who we are in God, that’s established mainly through that everyday interaction with the Lord, with time in His Word. I love that devotionals like Jesus Calling give us that language of what we could be feeling and then give us scriptures to go through. So taking that time every day to spend with Him and letting Him fill our minds with truth, that makes that second step of ADD—that discern step—a lot easier to hear God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, because we are already filling our hearts with that and we’re  learning what that truth is. 

“This process of managing emotions is that it’s important to connect with God, not just on a Sunday morning or when we’re having these moments of dealing with a difficult emotion. The foundational truths of who we are in God, that’s established mainly through that everyday interaction with the Lord, with time in His Word.” – Alicia Michelle

I had a very honest relationship with God even from the beginning, just because I came to the Lord with a lot of questions. I was blessed to have a lot of other young people around me who were willing to answer those questions and go there with me. But I remember encountering Jesus Calling, and to me, it was just like this breath of fresh air because it was like how I thought, not glossing over the fact that we’re feeling some really hard things. I love how Sarah brings that out and says, “This is hard. I am in so much pain,” or “I’m experiencing this,” but always bringing it back to the reality of who He is. Just the transparency has always really appealed to me. 

We’re learning to trust God in big and little ways every day so that when a big emotion comes up, we’ve seen that the Lord has been faithful as we work through these things every day. I’m going to open this area of my life to You that’s a little more tender and I’m going to invite You in. So I think it’s an important part just to get the Word in, but it’s critical to that next level of trust and intimacy that we need to have in order to work through our emotions.  

I wanted to close our time by reading from Jesus Listens, December 27th: 

Steadfast Savior,

I want to encounter You in my difficult circumstances – believing that You are near me in my troubles. 

I need to unplug my emotions from all the problems and plug them into Your Presence. By connecting with You, my dark mood grows steadily lighter and brighter. Also, as I remain in You – plugged in to Your radiant Presence – You enable me to see things from Your perspective. I can be joyful even during adversity by staying connected to You. There is abundant Joy in Your Presence!

In Your joyous Name, Jesus, 

Amen

Narrator: To learn more about Alicia Michelle, visit www.AliciaMichelle.com, and be sure to check out her book, Emotional Confidence: 3 Simple Steps to Manage Emotions with Science and Scripture, at your favorite retailer.

If you’d like to hear more stories about forging a pathway to restoration, check out our video interview with Lecrae on the Jesus Calling YouTube channel.

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Next week: Jay Lowder

Next time on the Jesus Calling Podcast, we’ll hear from evangelist Jay Lowder, who shares the darkness he faced during battles with addiction, depression, and a suicide attempt, and how the message of a man speaking at a local church made him reconsider everything. 

Jay Lowder: And so the guy gets to the end of his message and he says this: “You’re religious, but you’re lost. You profess Christ, but you don’t possess Christ.” And it was at that moment that I realized, Man, I’m lost. I mean, yeah, I’ve been baptized. Yeah, I’ve gone to church, and all this other stuff, but man, I know about God, but I don’t know God.