Recovery: Spirituality is Key

Recovery draws on the spiritual dimension of your life. Twelve-step programs describe themselves as spiritual programs. All recovery processes are built on a spiritual foundation. The process of finding meaning, purpose, and value in life is key to spirituality as well as for the movement from recovery to well-being.

The following is a text version of this posting.

Many people have experienced great pain in life.  Often, the pain and trauma they’ve experienced shattered their well-being.  The shattered sense of well-being can take different forms of traumatic responses like panic attacks or PTSD.  The shattered sense of well-being may be part of the spiral that leads to addiction.  When trauma happens at a young age, it can be the basis for attachment disorders that lead to failed adult relationships.  These deep wounds result in harm in many different ways.  Yet it’s also true that each of us can rebuild our lives and find wholeness again.  That’s what recovery is all about.  Spirituality is an important part of the process of recovery and finding wholeness.

There’s already a great deal of information available on what leads people into a recovery process.  Whether the recovery is from an addiction, childhood abuse, the tragedy of violence, or some other reason, my focus here is the importance of spirituality in the recovery process.  Spirituality is important enough in recovery that the US National Institutes of Health has published research on spirituality’s role in recovery.  Yet, many people don’t know how to approach spirituality in their own recovery process.

Because events in life have led to a person having lost a sense of well-being, two things happen simultaneously.  First, a person loses a sense of meaning in life.  The person’s purpose of living is gone, or maybe it was never clear.  The person is devalued by themself and often by others.  This may be reflected in feelings of being worthless, having been used, of life making no sense because unthinkable, traumatic events can happen again.  Second, at the same time, a person wants to ease the deep ache inside and isn’t sure what to do.  There’s a searching and grasping for solutions.  This is why people may start using substances to dull the pain, join strict religious groups with clear rules on behavior to provide structure for their lives or gravitate to people who are strong-willed and authoritarian. 

I need to be clear that I’m making large generalizations for the sake of brevity.  But the basic pattern before recovery is that well-being has been shattered and in recovery, there’s a search for solutions, sometimes a very frantic search.

In the recovery process, spirituality and spiritual practice help to provide a context for a person’s life.  Little by little, a person comes to understand that there’s something in life larger than themselves.  Think of it this way.  The shattering of well-being causes a person to focus on themselves, looking inward at their pain.  Spirituality empowers the person to look up and see more of life, to experience something beyond themselves.  Twelve-step programs talk about believing in something greater than oneself.  That’s key.  It’s not simply about believing in a deity.  It’s broader than that and includes acknowledging the possibility of love, kindness, beauty, and hope in the world.

It’s by beginning to look up and encounter something beautiful, hopeful, or inspiring that a person in recovery finds the possibility of discovering something beautiful, hopeful, or inspiring about themselves.  Sometimes that’s the recognition of being a survivor, of having made it through hell and having come out on the other side.  Other times, it’s born out of the experience of another person finding value in you as a person or your abilities. 

It’s from these kinds of experiences in recovery that a person begins to understand that there’s something more to life than the pain from past experiences.  Instead, a person can begin to experience value and purpose in their own life.  That brings us to the last of the twelve steps where a person brings their recovery and sobriety, their wholeness, to others in daily life. 

Spirituality is key in recovery.  Spirituality enables us to understand that there’s something more to our lives than we may have imagined.  Spirituality is the dimension of our lives that empowers us to create or discover meaning, purpose, and value.  That’s key to recovery from any trauma or tragedy in life.