This book follows Andrew Dettman’s own writing, chapter by chapter.
The ideas are his.
Where he speaks, his exact words are on a quote card. Everything else is a plain guide to what he means.
None of this is therapy, or a diagnosis.
Here is the whole book in one question.
With what, or with whom, are you aligned?
Hold onto that.
We’ll keep coming back to it.
Prologue: The First Step
Andrew starts with a feeling, not a theory.
Something is wrong.
Not because people are bad.
Because something in how we live, think and organise ourselves has stopped holding.
This is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of structure.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Prologue
That changes the question.
Not: what is wrong with people who struggle?
But: why are our ways of understanding struggle no longer enough?
So he looks at addiction differently.
Not as something that happens to a few unlucky people.
As a signal. A flare going up from the place where something has got stuck.
He uses two words for this.
STUCK: the system is still holding, but going round in circles. It has met a contradiction and can’t get through it yet.
Think of a record skipping on the same groove.
BROKEN: the system collapses into repeating the same thing.
It might be a substance. A behaviour. A relationship. An ideology. A whole institution.
Think of the record cracking.
You will see the word “disease” a lot in this book.
Andrew does not use it to mean a moral failing.
He means a bellwether: the lead sheep with the bell, the one that shows where the whole flock is heading.
An early warning.
addiction has been treated neither as moral failure nor as isolated pathology, but as a bellwether disease, an early warning signal of a deeper disorder unfolding within individuals, systems, and cultures.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Twelve
As you start to walk on the Way, the Way appears.
Rumi
Andrew says the road never shows itself in advance.
If we saw the whole road at once, the mind would grab it and imagine itself in charge.
So it appears one stone at a time, once you step.
The soul will not walk a journey owned by the will.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Prologue
That is why turning points rarely arrive as clarity.
They arrive as collapse. As addiction. As bewilderment.
Andrew calls them invitations, not punishments.
A descent that felt like ruin but became the door of return.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Prologue
Diction Resolution Therapy (DRT) steps in at the stuck point.
Andrew’s word for this is interdiction: working right at the contradiction point, either to stop a stuck pattern collapsing completely, or to help a broken one get its movement back.
Think of a time you were stuck going round the same loop.
What was it like just before it moved, or just before it broke?
The Way will appear because we have begun to walk.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Prologue
Chapter One: The Two Ways of With
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
Rumi
A small word, and it is the key to the book: con.
We hear it as a trick. A scam.
Andrew says that is not what it ever meant.
But the word con never meant deception. Its root is the Latin cum, meaning with.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter One
So “the Holy Con” means, roughly, “the Holy With.”
Not a trick. A question:
what are you with?
With what, or with whom, are we aligned?
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter One
There is a small con and a great Con.
The small con is being with the wrong thing: the stuck habit, the ego trying to run what it can’t heal, repetition instead of revelation.
The great Con is being With the right thing.
Andrew gives the two sides names.
Left-hand side: Mankind. Being with the wrong thing.
Right-hand side: Humankind. Being With something bigger than your own willpower. The Twelve Steps call it a Greater Power.
Same letters. One circle changes. On the left, I-hav(e)-i-our. On the right, Be-hav(e)-i-our.
Look at the two columns of circles.
The only thing that changes is the top one.
I becomes BE.
Andrew will show you what that means as the chapters go on.
This is not moralism. This is alignment. This is orientation.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter One
So this is not about being a good or a bad person.
Think of a compass, not a rulebook.
It just tells you which way you are facing.
And the two sides are not enemies.
He calls them two poles of one paradox, like the two ends of one magnet.
You need both ends for it to work.
Wrong leans toward right. Right redeems wrong.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter One
The brokenness becomes the place of belonging. The collapse becomes the first clarity. The wound becomes the aperture for Light.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter One
A person recovers not by becoming stronger, but by becoming With. Not by reinforcing the ego, but by returning to Humankind.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter One
He thinks the same is true for a whole culture.
In his view, our institutions are collapsing because they stayed too long with themselves, cut off from their source.
And collapse, he says, is not the end.
Collapse is the small con exhausting itself. Collapse is the threshold of the great Con, the return of Humankind.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter One
What are you With, right now?
And what might you come With next?
Chapter Two: The Circle of Birth and Bearing
Humankind is born of Mankind, then Mankind is borne by Humankind.
A.J. Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Two
Read that slowly. Two halves.
First: Humankind is born OF Mankind.
The wiser self grows out of the wounded self, the way a plant grows out of soil you’d have called dirt.
The raw material of Humankind is always Mankind.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Two
That means no failure is wasted.
Andrew says no collapse is irrelevant, and no addiction is outside the curriculum of awakening.
Everything you went through is material.
Second half: Mankind is BORNE by Humankind.
Once the wiser self arrives, it starts carrying the old one.
Like a mother carrying a child. Then, years later, the grown child carrying the ageing mother. Same bond. The carrying reverses.
Humankind is not another species. It is Mankind transfigured.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Two
Humankind remembers what Mankind forgets: that every fall is formative, every collapse is instructive, every darkness is a womb.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Two
What part of yourself have you been trying to get rid of
that might need carrying instead?
Chapter Three: The Few Who Carry the Many
A stranger chapter, so go gently.
Andrew points to something that shows up in many old traditions: the idea that a very small number of fully awake people hold the world steady, without anyone noticing.
Different cultures give them different names.
The Sufis call such a being al-Qutb, the Pole: the axis the world turns around.
The Qur’an has Khidr, the Green One. English folklore has Robin Hood. Tibet has its High Lamas.
They are not rulers. They are not prophets. They are not public figures. They are poles of stability, silent axes upon which the visible world unwittingly turns.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Three
Andrew calls this the Unseen Government.
He is careful to say what he does not mean.
not a conspiracy, not a shadow elite, but a spiritual architecture that predates nations, institutions, and religions.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Three
Why does it matter for recovery?
He says the Twelve Steps tap into the same thing. Not through doctrine, but through alignment. Not through belief, but through withness.
the difference between those who merely live, and those who have become alive.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Three
Have you ever felt properly alive, even for a moment, not just awake?
What were you With then?
Chapter Four: The Repair of the Pair
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
St John 1:1
Notice the small word again. With.
Andrew opens this chapter with a different word: despair.
Despair is de-pair. It is the loss of pairing.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Four
Look at how life is built.
Two lungs. Two eyes. Two ears. Two hands meeting in prayer.
Even the Ark, in the old story, carries life through the flood two by two.
Nothing grows from the singular. Nothing heals from the one-sided.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Four
Andrew uses the two halves of the brain as a picture.
The left half: narrow, sharp. It grabs, sorts and controls.
The right half: wide, receptive. It senses the whole scene.
His worry is the world we live in. He calls it the Addictive System, a phrase he credits to Anne Wilson Schaef.
It drains life faster than it gives it, scatters our attention and hollows out meaning.
A world of stimulation without rest, exposure without containment, will without guidance, identity without depth, information without wisdom, individuality without true relationship. A world of Mankind without Humankind.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Four
DRT does not ask the left to die; it invites the left to bow. To return to service instead of pretending to be the king.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Four
You are not mad. You are not weak. You have been asked to live in a way no human being was designed to live. Let us rebuild the pair together.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Four
The Ark does not remove the storm. It carries life through it.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Four
Where are you running on one half only?
All effort and no rest? All thinking and no feeling?
What would the other half add?
Chapter Five: The Practical Spiritual
If it’s not practical, it’s not spiritual.
Narcotics Anonymous
Spiritual bypassing is what happens when comfort replaces courage, when insight substitutes for honesty, when abstraction avoids the wound instead of meeting it.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Five
So Andrew offers something very small:
three moves, each small enough to try even in despair.
He calls the idea the next stone.
Move one: the pause
Before you react, take one breath.
It says: I am not alone inside this moment.
Move two: name the column
Am I in the left-hand place or the right-hand place right now?
No judgement. No shame. Just naming.
In DRT, naming restores orientation; orientation restores agency.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Five
Move three: the tiniest turn toward help
A text to someone safe. A line in a journal. A whispered “Help.”
One breath of believing you do not have to carry this alone.
They do not need escape. They need re-pairing. They do not need metaphysics. They need Withness. They do not need perfection. They need participation.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Five
Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all Power. That One is God. May you find Him now.
Alcoholics Anonymous, p.59
Not later. Not when you feel better. Not when the despair has lifted. Now, with the life you actually have, and the breath that is already yours.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Five
What is the smallest possible next stone for you today?
Chapter Six: The Tactical Spiritual
They plan, and Allah plans, and Allah is the best of planners.
Qur’an 3:54
Practical spirituality teaches a person how to stand. Tactical spirituality teaches a person how to move.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Six
Practical: how to stand. Tactical: how to move.
Because life, and healing, don’t run in straight lines.
Andrew gives the two sides of the page a voice.
Left: “If I plan enough, I will be safe.”
Right: “I attend, I listen, I adjust. I am being led.”
He says this is not scheming.
It’s tact: knowing when to advance, when to retreat, when to pause, when to speak, when to stay silent, when to ask, when to wait, and when to drop the tactic completely.
The powerful confuse strategy with sovereignty.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Six
Where does it hurt, and how can I help you?
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Six
Andrew says this is the one question that opens a heart.
It is the question a healer asks. A sponsor. A true friend.
The Addictive System never asks it. It asks for performance.
He also plays with the letters D, S and M: Death, Sex and Money.
His claim is that these are three forces that run every life, and that stuck addiction grows from a broken relationship with them.
That is his view, offered for you to weigh.
In this daily tact, the seeker discovers that service is strategy, that presence is protection, and that each repeated “today” becomes a step back into Humankind.
Andrew Dettman, The Holy Con, Chapter Six
What is one thing you could do today to help someone else have a good day?
None of this is therapy, or a diagnosis.
It is orientation.
The words in the quotes are Andrew Dettman’s own.
If you are in crisis please reach out to your GP, a trusted person, or the Samaritans on 116 123.