Recovery from any addiction is a difficult and challenging process. Many people say that spirituality is an important part of recovery. But what makes spirituality an important aspect of this process? In this video, I discuss three ways in which spirituality can support a person’s recovery and enable someone to live a healthy and full life.
The following is a written version of the blog on this topic.
Addictions, whether they be an addiction to a substance like alcohol or drugs or an addiction to something like gambling or even things like sex or food, are complex problems for people. There are physical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. Addictions can change our brain chemistry. Addictions can change our sense of self and our emotional status. Addictions interfere with our relationships. When a person is addicted to something, that person slowly loses a sense of purpose in life. That’s because the only meaningful thing is the object of the addiction, the drinking, the gambling, or whatever it may be.
There are several ways people recover from addictions. It’s never easy. Some stop on their own. Some go to 12-step programs like AA. Others participate in other programs like Rational Recovery or the Red Road to Sobriety. Some work individually with a therapist. I’m not critiquing any one program or saying one path to recovery is better than another. What I am saying is that recovery is difficult. No one program has a greater success rate for recovery than about 25 or 30%. That in itself is evidence as to why many people try to recover more than once. But when a recovery program works, a recovered addict is likely to be very loyal to that program. After all, it worked for them.
Before all else, recovery programs begin by focusing on stopping the addictive behavior. That’s often a process of trying, relapsing, and trying again. An addict shouldn’t be blamed for a relapse. In real addiction, there is a physiological dependency. The body does crave the substance or behavior. Ordinary behaviors and habits are difficult enough to change. But when a person’s body has been altered in ways that it craves a substance, change is even more difficult.
Part of successful recovery is addressing what led to the addiction. For many people, what became an addiction started as a way to cope with some pain in life. Perhaps that was a serious pain like abuse or neglect. But the pain may have been a sense of boredom or lack of fulfillment in life or feeling trapped with no control. How an individual may have coped with these experiences included something like drinking, drugs, gambling, sex, or some other thing that became an addiction. Sometimes the pain of life was physical and coping included prescription pain killers. For many addicts, addiction began as a way to cope with physical, psychological, or spiritual pain. The use of something that became an addiction initially helped to ease the pain. But then it led to more serious and complex problems.
I can never blame someone who has an addiction. I may not like the addiction, but I tend to think that they did the best they could with something they didn’t know how to deal with.
What role does spirituality play in recovery? I think in terms of recovery, three things are important to remember about spirituality.
1. Spirituality leads us to an awareness of hope. When we’re in pain, we need to remember that there’s something more to life than our current situation. That’s where hope comes into play. Hope leads us to look toward something good happening in our lives. It may be something small, like experiencing a day without using. Or it may be the connection we experience in the recovery group we attend. Or perhaps it’s the hope that, in time, life will be good again.
2. Spirituality also leads us to understand a sense of meaning and purpose in life. When people are caught in an addictive cycle, they are caught in a kind of self-preoccupation that’s usually self-defeating. In coming to realize that hope is a possibility in life, we begin to experience that there are things that matter. By discovering that there are things that matter, we realize that we have something to live for. That’s the kernel that can grow into a sense of meaning and purpose in life. That meaning may be in doing something new with our lives. Or that purpose may be reflected in our need to reconcile with those we hurt or to make amends. But essential to living fully as a human being is to have a sense of meaning in our lives. That’s the essential task of spirituality.
3. As I’ve written about in other postings and discussed in videos on the YouTube channel, Spirituality Beyond Borders, spiritual practice, particularly practices like meditation, enables us to release the pain and hurt we’ve experienced in life. Further, meditation helps to better balance our brain chemicals so that our we function in healthier ways and feel much better.
Spirituality can be a vital part of recovery from any addiction. Recovery is difficult because addiction impacts a person physiologically, psychologically, and spiritually. Recovery is more than just stopping addictive behavior but healing oneself in each dimension of life.