So physical cravings are not the primary reason we slip. Well, if you’ve been in Celebrate Recovery or any 12-step program for a while you know that, for most people who are actively working the steps, over time the mental obsession dissipates. I remember my wife Deb coming home from her first Overeater’s Anonymous meeting. “They told me that I will actually lose my obsession with food.” Then she added, “I don’t believe them! ” But sure enough, she followed the program and within a month or two her mental obsession had dissipated.
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- A diagnosis often brings relief, but it can also come with as many questions as answers.
- The physical allergy is the concept that once a drink or a drug enters the body of an individual with alcohol use disorder (AUD) or substance use disorder (SUD), they cannot stop.
- When people become too self-reliant, they may stop working on their program entirely.
- This relationship is a vital part of finding serenity and healing, so let’s take a minute to look at the spiritual side of recovery and then we’ll talk about building what we call a “spiritual inventory”.
- The other safety phenotype is one of relative immobilization where we relax, repair, recovery, digest, defecate, contemplate, daydream, sleep, dream, and experience spiritual connections.
In sobriety, if we are self-reliant we usually end up using anything that will make us feel good externally excessively. We become so fixated on it that almost everything we do leads us to think about getting intoxicated. The mind and alcoholism are so cunning, baffling, and powerful that we often cannot fathom how we ended up intoxicated when relying on our strong willpower to stay sober. You may suspect that you have a spiritual malady if you are struggling with feelings of discontentment, disconnection from others, or a sense of purposelessness in life.
A Spiritual Inventory
Not just emotionally, but invite us over for Christmas, cook us a nice meal. But seriously, that’s the kind of deep relationships you can build spiritual malady here in CR; as deep as family. An inventory is just a list—in our case a list of people and events that have contributed to our issue.
Practice Makes Perfect
- When these physical, mental, and spiritual components come together, an individual with alcohol use disorder will be rendered powerless to arrest a vicious cycle of obsessions, cravings, and alcohol abuse.
- It’s really not my mind – the mental obsession – that is the underlying root of what will take me back to drinking.
- One of the most important things in AA is finding a sponsor – someone who has been through the program and can help guide you through it.
- Fortunately, it was caught early enough that I had a chance to try and manage it with lifestyle changes.
- Practicing prayer and meditation helps us be mindful of our surroundings and gain consciousness of our spirituality by bringing us closer to our higher power.
Also, threats come from physical traumas—attacks, assaults, accidents, or abuse—lions, tigers, bears, oh my! We have to watch out for motor vehicles, knives, and guns. Also, tornados, hurricanes, droughts, fires, global warming, and war threaten us physically. Lack of clean soil, water, air, and lack of nutritious food are a threat to us. There are a lot of physical threats that can flip our physiology into a defense state.
Apart from dissecting the Big Book so as to have a firmer grasp on the 12 Steps and program and in general, it also is designed to help us decipher the intricate language and wording used from a different time period. Old timers and recovering people with more experience can explain in layman’s terms just what the author Bill W. Was trying to relay in a far more easily digestible fashion. Now, many people find the idea of spirituality in recovery offputting. This is because many people have had negative experiences with various religions or religious concepts in their youth. The good news is that spirituality and religion do not have to overlap in recovery.
Why is it so dangerous to be self-reliant when suffering from an addiction?
To conclude, it’s not my body – my allergic reaction to alcohol – that’s going to take me back to drinking. It’s really not my mind – the mental obsession – that is the underlying root of what will take me back to drinking. It’s the “spiritual malady”, as manifested by my EGO (selfishness—self-centeredness), that can eventually lead me back to drinking or sometimes even suicide.
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Many of us say that we have the right to do whatever we want to our own bodies. We somehow think this is freedom, but we’re really becoming a slave to our own desires. And—as many of us here in this room know—it’s not long until those desires are running our lives. Here we’re talking about movies, music, websites… Are we on a mental diet of junk food or health food? This isn’t about a legalistic set of religious rules we are required to follow. The great psychiatrist Carl Jung called this a ‘low level thirst for wholeness – for union with God’.
When these physical, mental, and spiritual components come together, an individual with alcohol use disorder will be rendered powerless to arrest a vicious cycle of obsessions, cravings, and alcohol abuse. In these times personal threat load is extremely high and is being reflected in systemic dysfunction. In fact, the world’s threat load is extremely high and it, too, is being reflected in systemic dysfunction. We are in a time where we need to proactively decrease threat and increase safety in the world.
And unless this malady is recognized, and a course of action (the Twelve Steps) is taken to enable God to remove it, the root of our alcoholic illness can lie dormant and burn us when we least expect it. To conclude, it’s not my body — my allergic reaction to alcohol — that’s going to take me back to drinking. It’s really not my mind — the mental obsession — that is the underlying root of what will take me back to drinking.
Also, they cannot fathom how other people manage to deal with crises in life – even when they have it worse. Addiction is a spiritual disease because it represents an individual’s attempt to disconnect from reality and any sense of spirituality. Simply put, they feel a terrible loneliness at their very soul or center of being.