I may have had good intentions, but my mind would direct my behavior. Now, my mind is something I can watch without compulsion; it is a tool that I work with to align my intentions with my behavior. Yes, I need my practices – indeed I feel commanded to perform them – for without them my mind narrows. As I began to heal, the practices of Judaism, such as prayer, study, and teshuvah , began to take on new meaning. When I began to learn AA’s 12-Steps as a suggested program of spiritual healing, renewal, and change (i.e., recovery), I began to realize that I could explicitly understand Jewish practice from the same perspective.

We should be able to just put the plug in the jug and move on with our lives. They oversimplify our problem and solution and can send the wrong information. Basically, the alcoholic, once they start they cannot control the amount they take.

Why is it so dangerous to be self-reliant when suffering from an addiction?

From our time spent feeding our addictions, we feel that the opposite begins to happen. Rather than providing a feeling of relief, we find ourselves in a perpetual “dark night of the soul,” cut off from any sense of spiritual comfort. Leads to various inner turmoil which leads to outer turmoil if I don’t practice the principles…. I have sought refuge from my negative emotions in alcohol, drugs and other addictive behaviours. It is this that propelled my addictions, this inability to deal with my negative emotions. I dealt with them externally via addictive behaviours, not internally via emotion processing.

• If we can admit our powerlessness, then logically we can admit that we need power.
• I knew I wanted to grow into becoming a better and more whole person, but did not know how to talk about it.
• Moreover, it assumes that we need help in the form of practices, community, and guidance.
• Viewing Jewish practices as a program of healing, renewal, and change inherently assumes that human beings are imperfect, pained, and broken.
• I have found over the last decade in recovery that when I turn my Will over to the care of the God of my understanding that I am restored to sanity and my thoughts are sound, they are on a higher plane as the Big Book tells me.
• Millions of lives have been saved not to mention the lasting benefits it has brought to families, and societies once harmed by alcoholism.

Some say “Clean house, trust God, work with others.” Whatever you call it, it works. We can go to an old friend’s wedding and not even notice the open bar.

Sponsorship

As overwhelming as I’m sure this all may seem for someone who’s either never had a spiritual connection, or been disconnected for years, I’d like to assure you it’s not as formidable as it may seem. But first, it’s crucial that you understand the difference between a spiritual experience and a religious one. While I could go on forever on the differences between these two ideas, I’ll keep it as simple as possible. The practice of Christian Meditation offers a remedy to the spiritual malady. When we enter the silence with discipline and perseverance, we make space for the living presence of God to heal us from the inside out. The great psychiatrist Carl Jung called this a ‘low level thirst for wholeness – for union with God’.

Once you’ve found something that you can believe in, it’s important to remember that your Higher Power is there for you when you need it. When things get tough, take a moment to pray, meditate, or just sit quietly and think about your Higher Power and what it means to you.

The Missing Piece: The Spiritual Malady

Convicted of our new way of life, we dove headlong into meetings, moral inventories, sponsorship, and service, overlooking the quiet pursuit of conscious contact with our creator. I am aware that there are many paths https://ecosoberhouse.com/ to recovery- my path has been the 12-Steps. While this may not be for everybody, the principles contained within the steps and the program are applicable and useful to anyone seeking sobriety and recovery.

• One of the earliest studies on AA members concluded that they were linked in commonality by two variables, emotional immaturity and grandiosity!
• Just remember, even if you don’t share the same beliefs, everyone in AA are united by their shared experience with addiction and their desire to stay sober.
• I have sought refuge from my negative emotions in alcohol, drugs and other addictive behaviours.
• This same obsessive nature causes those with a substance use disorder to instinctively seek other things for relief from their thoughts.
• I got as far as deciding it was an inherent problem with processing negative emotions, which it is.
• Sometimes the shame persists for some time and I try to relieve it by behavioral addictions, too much shopping, too much eating, too much objectification of the opposite sex.

The buried shame is expressed through defense mechanisms that shield negative unconscious material from surfacing. It was a list of the negative emotions which appear always when I felt anger and resentment against someone for hurting me and my feelings. He “had to” react with arrogance, dismissiveness, impatience and intolerance, because his shame, which is a fear based emotion, made him fearful of his own recovery and fear makes one strangely spiritual malady dishonest , This is my experience. For me he was seeing the root of this spiritual malady, this emotional disease. This is how a mental health disorder manifests itself as distorted fear based thinking which appear, if acted upon, to make one’s situation a whole lot worse. If we start by trying to recover from alcoholism and addiction and find we still have other issues then obviously address these with outside professional and specialist help.