The Autonomous Heart

The Autonomous Heart is one man’s return from the bottom of a story most of us are living without noticing: that we are separate, self-sufficient, and on our own to manufacture meaning. Tim Gorman — a writer in recovery who, in his own words, “read too much” — discovered that the addiction he was working through and the oldest questions in philosophy and theology were, on close inspection, the same problem.Part recovery memoir, part practical philosophy, part theology that won’t apologize for itself, the book moves from diagnosis — what kind of creature you actually are — through the working machinery of change: the witness, the grace space, honesty, forgiveness, service, solitude, and community. It does not promise to fix you. It offers something better: language for what you’ve been trying to say to yourself for years, and a single durable claim — that the difference between the reaction that frees you and the one that buries you was never the reaction, but the intention behind it.