Trauma, Addiction, and the Twelve Steps – Part 2 with Ian Morgan Cron

What if your first addiction wasn’t to a substance, but to someone’s approval?

In part two of our conversation with Ian Morgan Cron, we go deeper into the cycle of addiction, codependency, and the hope of recovery. Whether you’re struggling with a relationship, a habit, a performance-driven mindset, or just the weight of trying to “be good,” this episode offers a profound invitation: transformation doesn’t come from trying harder—it comes from surrender.

You’ll hear stories about the power of the 12 Steps, why spiritual awakening matters more than willpower, and how our early longings for love and safety often become tangled in the behaviors we’re desperate to change. We talk about ministry, leadership, trauma, boundaries, and what it really means to carry your healing into the lives of others.

This isn’t a conversation about fixing people—it’s about engaging your own story so you can show up with greater freedom, compassion, and clarity.

Take a breath, take a listen. We hope you’ll hear something that helps you come home to yourself.

Missed Part 1 of this conversation? Go back to listen to it here!

Please Note: This episode contains some mature language; listener discretion is advised.

About Our Guest:

Ian Morgan Cron is a bestselling author, speaker, trained psychotherapist, songwriter, and Episcopal priest, but he may be best known for popularizing the Enneagram.

The Enneagram is a personality typing system identifying nine types of people and how they relate to one another and the world. His popular Enneagram primer, The Road Back to You gave fresh language and interest in this uncannily accurate tool. His book, The Story of You, helps readers go a step further, using Enneagram wisdom to uncover and rewrite their own false narratives so they can live more fully. Ian enjoys sharing about the Enneagram with audiences of all sizes because of its power for igniting personal growth, and how it can enrich their personal and professional lives. Ian and his wife, Anne, live in Nashville, Tennessee.

Be sure to pick up a copy of Ian’s latest 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.

Episode Transcript:

Dan: We have, again, the privilege of really, it’s like being at a really good restaurant. I tried to use that metaphor before, but also felt like I get to be on the playground with you, Ian. So welcome back, Ian Cron to a second conversation on the 12 Steps in this fabulous new book, The Fix, and as we address the reality of how the 12 steps open the door to a way of thinking about the human heart and our own proclivity to not just addictions i.e. the typical categories, but the broad range of how we drink from cisterns that will not provide for us. So thank you again for joining us.

Ian: It’s my pleasure. I just, I’ve loved love, love talking to you guys.

Dan: Thank you. Well, I want to just say I’ve had the privilege of knowing Rachael for about five or six decades. Is that not true, Rachael?

Rachael: I am an old soul. But it has been two decades, surprisingly enough.

Dan: Well, again, at the Allender Center, the way we address one another every year really is a dog year. So it’s been a lifetime with you and it’s been delightful. But you are a highly addicted woman. So I thought it would be really helpful to begin with the reality that your addictions historically have been significantly different than mine. Mine have been chemical, process. Process meaning things like writing another book, doing another conference to start another school, and every potential chemical that I think at least was available in the sixties and seventies and early eighties and nineties and two thousands, et cetera. So step in to something of what the book has brought you, Rachael, and I’d love to have you, Ian, kind of not counsel, but just kind of think with Rachael about her world. And let me again say what we’re hoping for here. We want you not only to engage this book with regard to your life, but we also want in the process of you dealing with the log in your own eye, seeing that this is a profound entry into dealing with the specks in another’s eye. Rachael?

Rachael: Yeah, I mean, one thing I would say, I just feel really grateful, Ian, that your engagement with the 12 steps reminded me… I did have a season where I dabbled in Al-Anon, I step in, but I was researching all of the Al-Anon and learning more about myself, which I’ll talk about in a second. But I think it really captures in some ways the kind of mutual cyclical reality of this work. And I love how you talk about it as really it’s a spiritual framework because it really does have this sense of living into what does it mean to love God and to love neighbor, and to love ourselves, and the undulating movement between those things. I also think it captures well the paradox and really irony of addiction. I would say I was one of those. I was a really good kid, and if anything, my parents were like, if you dabble in substances, we’re sending you to military school. And I really believed that even though I didn’t even have an imagination for breaking the rules, also witnessed a lot of my friends in spiritually abusive context turned to substances, and it actually did take their lives. There’s a lot of trauma and tragedy I held. So there was both a, I want to be good and also seeing the impact in really real ways that brought a lot of fear. So when I got into early adulthood, I would’ve said, oh no, I’m not an addict, and actually I’m someone who can help addicts.

Ian: Yes.

Rachael: I’m really helpful. I love people. I’m really helpful. And actually went to the Seattle School because I would not have said I’m addicted, but I was working as a youth pastor. I was starting to turn to certain substances behaviors that really amped up dopamine because I was not well, and I was resentful and I was exhausted, but I was also in a cycle that I could not get out of. So I went to school, I got to figure out to help people better so that I could stay in this for the long haul, and very quickly realized I had massive codependent realities, but I still would not have seen that. It was like, oh, yeah, I’m kind of codependent, but that’s a good thing, right? Because at least I’m trying to help people. It wasn’t until I actually dated an addict, chemically dependent addict, that all of a sudden this part of me that I would not have said was addicted was it was like, yeah, someone had given me crack cocaine. I mean the fusion of romance with full fledge addiction. I can save you if I just keep showing up. But actually we’re just a hot mess of addiction. And actually the work to untangle from that toxicity that I wasn’t just receiving, I was participating in was my really first kind of honest engagement, my first sense of honesty to be like, I actually don’t know how to get out of this. And funnily enough, funnily, it’s not a word, but it feels right. I was actually stepping into my internship as a part of my MDiv program in the midst of all of this. And I remember talking to the pastor I was going to be working with and being like, I’m a hot mess. You should probably not receive me as an intern, but I’m trying. And thankfully, she just had a lot of humanity and understanding and wisdom and was like, welcome to being human. And also if six months from now you are still fully functioning in this addiction, we will have to talk about boundaries and taking a step back, not because you’re bad, but because that would be, you would become more unwell and it would actually just not be a kind situation. I was always so grateful for that. So yeah, I mean, again, I’m a postpartum, post-pandemic, stepmother to teenagers, mother to a toddler. So certainly would say in this season of life, I’m awakened to many realities that trigger all my trauma. I’m much more turning towards chemicals and behaviors that increase dopamine, so that feels more familiar right now. But my first real sense of, wow, I am powerless over this. I am insane. I need help, and I actually do think I’m going to need a higher power. The help of a higher power to untangle from this was very palpable for me in my late twenties. So yeah, very humbling, in a really embodied way. I’m actually really grateful for that season what it exposed and revealed to me that I think if I had not engaged at least head on, then as I continue to engage it now, it’s not like it just went away. It’s not like those tendencies have just disappeared, and in fact, they are showing up in massive ways, as I try to parent a toddler, I’ll be a recovering codependent for the rest of my life.

Ian: I have a friend of mine likes to say that he’s an Al-Anon, and for people who are listening, Al-Anon is a support group. It was actually birthed out of Alcoholics Anonymous, but it’s for codependents, right? People in the beginning who were in relationship with addicts or alcoholics and who had become as sick as the identified patient in the way that they related to them. But he likes to say that codependency is lighting yourself on fire to keep other people warm.

Dan: Oh, that’s agonizing. That is just agonizing.

Ian: Yeah, that’s kind of what it is. But thank you, Rachael for sharing that. I wish everybody, I mean everybody’s somewhere on that codependent continuum and would really benefit from a program like Al-Anon and the 12 Steps to learn this kind of healthy detachment. I was watching the day, a documentary on the life of Quincy Jones, and Quincy Jones had this great line. He said, not one ounce of my self worth depends on your approval of me. And I thought when spoken, not from a heart of defensiveness, but from a place of just intelligent boundary setting, that’s actually pretty great to be able to live with that. Not one ounce of my self worth depends on your approval and acceptance of me. Now, that’s a pretty tall order, but I would aspire in some ways to that in my own codependency where, I mean, I always tell people, my initial addiction was really your approval. As a boy that was my first addiction. That was the biggest dopamine hit in the world for me.

Rachael: That’s right.

Ian: Was an adult looking at me with the eyes of admiration and love that I didn’t get at home. And so we carry this stuff in our little red flyer wagons, our little radio wagons, and we take ’em into adulthood with us, and we go through this journey of having to identify these patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving in the world, and by the power of grace, and this is very important by the power of the spirit, not on your own unaided willpower, that is a dead project. That’s a dead project. The only way out is through a spiritual awakening of sufficient force that it renders unnecessary your need for codependent relationships to satisfy the deepest longings of your heart.

Dan: Brilliantly put the reality of how many of us in the context particularly of ministry, how often our loyalty to others is really bound up in a kind of loyalty to those young parts that are desperate. And yet so far from our own conscious awareness that we don’t even know we’re desperate, we simply know that we have to keep being loyal to whomever or whatever institution we serve, and then end up chewed up often feeling betrayed, often feeling some of the effects of trauma. And again, not to mitigate or minimize the reality that a lot of institutions do a great deal of harm. The work that Rachael has done on spiritual abuse, by no means are we attempting to say it’s your fault. But yet to say that often we end up in relationships that feel like we are doing well when there is this servicing of something that we don’t know. So as you address particularly what you’ve done in The Fix with people in ministry, people who are good hearted people like Rachael, what do you find yourself having to address in order to engage their hearts?

Ian: Wow, that’s a great question, Dan. And it’s so dependent on the individual person. I think one of the things that I’m often having to do with people of faith is trying to have them understand the difference between reformation and transformation. So reformation is a project of self-improvement. I’m going to stop being more as codependent as I am. I’m going to have more boundaries this week, more boundaries people, or I’m not going to do this, or I’m going to start doing this, right? And I’m like, self-help is kind of a contradiction in terms, right? If yourself could have helped yourself by now, wouldn’t yourself have done it?

Dan: I think so.

Ian: Right? And why are you shopping in the part of the bookstore that’s called self-help? Because you’re actually looking for advice from somebody else, and that’s not self-help anyway, this is just the way my little brain thinks in Barnes and Noble. But the point I’m trying to make is reformation is you on your own unaided, willpower, trying to institute deep change in your heart. That is not what the gospel makes available to us. What the gospel talks about is transformation, and transformation is what happens when you give God consent to do for you what you cannot do for yourself. Now, that’s an entirely different animal. I think Christianity is quite simple. It’s so simple. We make it hard, we complexify it. And again, I’m not being reductive here. I appreciate deep theological conversations about different things at times, but really it’s about giving God permission to bring about changes in our hearts that we cannot and have not been able to do through a misuse, a misunderstanding, and a misuse of our own willpower. And once people can kind of get that, what it does is it releases them from this crushing burden. Let me… listen. The biggest mystery, Rachael, you have to face every day is you. Next to God, you’re the biggest mystery you know. So the idea that you could actually parse yourself and figure out in what order of things need to be addressed in your life for you to experience wholeness is ridiculous. But if you can actually just even learn to sit for 15 or 20 minutes a day in the presence of God without saying a word, simply presenting yourself and saying, almighty God, here I am, even in the most imperceptible of ways, I present myself to you to fix this mess inside, and I’m going to start there recognizing that I have very limited abilities. And so it gets you out of the whole performance thing. It gets you out of the whole trying so hard. When I meet Christians who tell me they’re trying to be good Christians, I just tell them, you don’t understand the gospel.

Dan: Yeah. Yes. Well, one of the things that Becky said to me not long ago was, could you spend 15 minutes just quietly taking in the goodness of God? And I said to her, yeah, I think so. I did so. I lasted maybe 90 seconds before my mind moved to, oh yeah, I get that email out now. Oh yeah, okay, Jesus. Yeah, I’m back with you. I mean, within five minutes, I bet I had been distracted 20 times. And being able then to say, okay, I don’t think at the moment there is fluoride addictions in the way that would’ve been true for me many decades ago. Yet the reality of you can’t spend 15 minutes just taking in the goodness of God is an indication of that madness, that drinking from a cistern that can’t satisfy. So I still want to ask, how are you seeing this book, this lovely book, The Fix. How’s it working into not just a person’s life, but in that process of helping us engage other lives? Again, I don’t want to make the assumption that people are going to read this and figure out how to fix people. There has to be that first heart of you engage yourself, but yet, this is such a crucial movement as we know that in some sense, the 12 step is almost a sense of go out. You are meant to bring something of the goodness of God that you have known into the lives of others. So assuming that folks are going to grapple with their own life, how do you see this moving into the lives of others?

Ian: I love it. You referenced step 12. It’s such an important step. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, workaholics, codependents, fellow sufferers, idolaters, sinners, what do you want to say? And to practice these principles in all our affairs. Now, when you look at the steps, really, there’s this beautiful movement, steps one to three, mend and deepen your relationship with God, four through seven, mend and deep your relationship with yourself. Eight and nine, mend and deepen your relationship with other people. And then steps 10 through 12, develop a lifestyle that cultivates health and wellness in each of those three domains moving forward. Okay? Pretty simple, not easy and beautifully deep in each of the steps, but still, that’s it, right? Three domains of relationship and how to put them together and heal them and deepen them and make them flourish in all kinds of ways. My hope is that others would see this path, this spiritual technology if you will, as a kind of rule of life. Like, okay. This is a good way to live my life. It is salutary. It is beneficial to myself and to others. It brings life to me. It is a gospel way of being in the world. Now, more specific to your question is, my hope was when I wrote it was that somebody sitting in treatment on day three of treatment would be able to read it and benefit. And a soccer mom or soccer dad could be sitting at the kitchen counter doing it with their own issues and everybody in between. And I’ve got a lot of experience. I have permission to talk about this. I have a son in recovery. He’s two and a half years sober. He’s doing fantastic. We had the most beautiful time in Los Angeles two weekends ago. It was so healing and so beautiful. Gosh, I can’t even tell you what a gift. What a gift. When you’re bringing this kind of stuff to other people who are struggling, it’s such a counterintuitive journey because I know that with my own son, when you’re dealing with somebody who’s lost in the trance of addiction, there’s a lot of judo involved. It’s like, Hey, listen, there is a way out here and I can no longer co-sign the bullshit of your addiction, and I am going to, with all love and detachment, simply say to you, you no longer can live in my home as long as you continue to use. And we had a crisis moment with my son, it’s like, pack your bags. Hours notice. You need to be out in an hour. And three days on the street was enough to convince him that going back to treatment for the third time was the best thing for him. Addictions are powerful. The big book of AA says powerful, baffling and cunning, they are very, our idols are, it’s the only disease that will tell you that you don’t have a disease, and you will believe it, and your idols will tell you the same thing. Any idol will tell you that. You don’t have a problem here, even though there is a yard sale of wreckage in your wake. There is not a problem here. It’s everybody else’s problem. It’s other people. Or you drink too. If you have my life, whatever your excuse is, right? It’s just denial is so powerful in the spiritual life. And it’s not just for addicts. I’ve got a friend of mine that defines denial like this, the refusal to know what you know. You already know, but it’s the refusal to know it at the same time. And we do that in our marriages. We do that in our relationship with our children, with our relationship with work. We deny knowing what we actually know. Now, maybe that knowing is on the margins of awareness where we’ve been keeping it out of sight, but we know it at some level that we have a problem and the steps. What a beautiful gracious way out of the problem. But you’re going to have to understand that. I think all addictions are a problem of relationships. So I don’t know how I feel, but if you have broken relationships in childhood with key people, you will later on in life form a relationship with a person of substance or a behavior to repair the damage.

Dan: I just want to say amen to that. Absolutely. It’s a whole notion of trauma.

Ian: Yes. To repair the damage and to find soothing, to find security, to find safety, to feel seen. You’re just going to form a relationship with something to compensate or to make up for those lost, broken, unattended sorrows from the past. So therefore, the steps are all about fixing relationships so that misguided relationship with the person of substance or behavior isn’t necessary anymore.

Rachael: Well, it makes me think of two things. One, just that even your mention of treatment, I would want people to hear we’re not meant to do these 12 steps alone, and yes, in relationship with God, but also sometimes we do need medical interventions or a treatment center is going to offer you medical interventions, emotional interventions, spiritual interventions, because sometimes addiction has messed up our brain chemicals in a way and wired our body. You talked about you went cold Turkey on Xanax and it had a massive impact on your body. There are more kind, gracious ways, especially when we’re dealing with substances, but especially when we’re dealing with relational addictions to have steps out of those. That’s one thought, because I think sometimes when we’re talking about a framework, it’s like, especially as Christians, we’re so used to spiritual bypassing. And I think your book does such a great job of pushing against that. That’s why I think you should go and you should read it. My second thought is when we’re talking about trauma and the reenactment later in life with other things, it’s like pain is so powerful. Pain is so scary. And that we would turn to things that actually intensify the pain or keep us in a cycle of pain. But it makes me think of my birthing class because I took a mindfulness birthing class as if I was… Somehow if I took that class I would just be able to practice mindfulness.

Ian: Mindfulness. Yeah, I want to have a baby as if I were Thich Nhat Hanh. Is that where we’re going here?

Rachael: It was great. And I was like, I’m going to be able to do it. No, nothing with the way… And thankfully that was part of the mindfulness class. Nothing will go the way you think, in permanence, whatever. But the one thing that was actually really helpful was talking about birthing pain is transformational pain. And I think so much of working this process in this and living it to this framework, and you talked about transformation, transformational pain, because my instructor talked about how transformational pain you’re birthing life. This is actually a transformative pain, but it’s going to trigger all the same pain receptors in your body that tell you you’re on fire. This is bad. But it’s actually all the pain is toward a good end in the most ideal situation. And it makes me think of just the groaning that Paul talks about in Romans 8, this sense of that we could have an experience of pain that feels very similar to the pain we’re trying to escape, but is that giving up your life to find it, that it could birth something beautiful and resurrected, not shiny and new, or returning back to what was before the pain came, but just a deeper, more beautiful, more human, like Jesus is human, kind of transformation that has such a beautiful return on investment when we begin to give that away to other people and then get parts of ourself given back to us without even knowing that we needed that.

Dan: Rachael, as you put words to that and the reality of Ian, I can’t imagine a greater grief, a greater fear than having to ask your son to depart your home and not knowing what the next steps would be. So when you said that it requires judo, jujitsu, it requires a level of, again, wisdom of that paradox of wiser than a serpent, innocent as a dove. If you can just put a few more words, if you would, how did you engage this precious, beloved?

Ian: Yeah. Well, I mean, remember we had a lot leading up to that, there was a lot of mistakes that we made. All the typical ones, embarrassingly enough. And despite the fact that I’m a therapist and a priest, I mean, I just did all the codependent stuff leading up to it. And so it took a minute for us to dial it in. And my son, so I’m in LA and we were in the back of a Waymo cab, so it’s a driverless cab, alright? And we’re going from Santa Monica to West Hollywood. So it’s about a 25, 30 minute ride through the city. And we are in the backseat of the car. He’s working this program, I’m working my program, and we are just so happy to be with each other. We have all this pressured speech, that feeling like you’re just talking, talking, talking, talking, talking. And as I’m talking to him in the back of this car without a driver, I suddenly realized that what was coming up for me was a need to make an amends to him. Step eight to nine. I just suddenly was like, oh, I’ve been carrying this regret. I need to mention this to him. So I look at my 27-year-old and I said, Aiden, what’s coming up for me right now is I feel like I need to make an amend to you for something. And he looks at me, go on, continue. So I made an amend to him. Some regrets I had about some decisions I had made when he was younger and that affected him negatively, I thought. And he just so very graciously, because we have this program, we know this language, we know the language of healing relationships. And he’s like, dad, I forgive you. And he said, I want you to know that I am right on time. I could not have gotten here any other way. So don’t take on the responsibility of the decisions I made. I could not have gotten here any other way. And I thought this is one of the gifts of having these 12 steps. He and I both know healing relationships is what this is about with God, with self and others. And we needed a moment to address a point of rupture in our relationship and we were able to do it with grace and making it was a very normal thing. And so I’m not sure I answered your question, but I did tell a story I love telling about this. What I think about is now I look back, it’s like this, and by the way, I’m in this cab and I keep looking in the front seat to see how the driver is responding to this very tender conversation in the backseat. And there’s no driver in the front seat. And then I started to ask myself, is there no driver in the front seat? I think maybe there is a driver in the front seat that we can’t see. And I began to think to myself, we were like this little altar moving through downtown LA just en route together to some other destination and en route. It was actually very, very profound for me, that experience and a sight of the fruit of working the steps, this is available to people this way of life. 

Dan: Yeah, I think that’s part of what I would most want my own heart to hear. And that is in doing and working the steps. There’s so much potential for your own return to life. But because there is a different fragrance, different just taste to your life, then there is an invitation to others that you indeed can come back to a banquet that you’re both meant to be able to enjoy together. That altar actually freaks me out thinking about driving in a car like that. But nonetheless, there’s something so stunning about the playfulness of God. Like, well, there is a higher power at work. I don’t know how the engineering works on that, but there is a higher power playing out in the context of your relationship.

Ian: Yeah, yeah. you know, this is available to people, this way of life, you know. I’ve oftentimes thought that, you know, one of the greatest gifts we can give our children is these moments where we tell them we’re sorry for how we, for what we did and what we didn’t do. And that we can save them a lot of time and money and heartache by simply owning our stuff at the appropriate time in the appropriate way. And to look forward to that as they move into adolescence, know, like this ability to say, you know, back then when I did that, boy, I was growing up at the same time you were and I blew that one. You know what I mean? And, and again, the steps have given me that language and I actually, think it would be great for every family to have a copy of the steps actually on their refrigerator. And, so that they were always being reminded of these three domains of their lives, the relationship with God, self and others. How am I doing? Which one of these steps do I need to draw wisdom from today? how do I use these steps in my life? And that’s how they work, right? Like you don’t just do them once. Like you don’t just, you don’t graduate after step 12 after step 12, you keep working them so long that the numbers fall away. And then suddenly you’re just drawing instinctively from different steps throughout the day and taking advantage of what they have to offer.

Dan: But the phenomena of being able to have the capacity to grieve your own harm without shame and the ability to hold grief on behalf of others without false responsibility. So on one side, not incurring shame. On the other, not requiring others to, in one sense, respond. I think some of the brilliance of the book shows itself particularly in how amends can actually create even more harm and how to do so in a way that doesn’t require the other to respond to the typical notion of, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, even if it’s said with grief, I’m sorry. It’s so much richer and so much deeper than that. So the invitation in some sense of where I think we’ve moved to is one of the great gifts you can give to others with regard to this book is not only going through the steps, but entering into a dealing with restoration of owning your part without, again, shame or false responsibility. There’s nothing more inviting to others than seeing the work that this process, the work of the gospel, has brought to you. Well, Rachel, any final thoughts before we let this good man serve in other worlds?

Rachael: No, just another expression of gratitude and encouraging those listening to check out The Fix.

Dan: Ian, always, always a delight. someday I might just find myself in a driverless car with you. That would be a good moment.

Ian: Yeah. That would be a good moment. Rachel, Dan, thank you so much for having me.